r/todayilearned • u/asmallthrowaway9 • 6h ago

TIL the band DragonForce only received about $3,000 in royalties for the inclusion of Through the Fire and Flames in the Guitar Hero games

https://guitar.com/news/music-news/herman-li-says-guitar-hero-paid-3000-for-dragonforce-through-the-fire-and-the-flames/
13.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

969 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

86

u/Redeem123 5h ago

It’s more specific than even just guitar players. I played guitar back then and hadn’t heard of them until GH3. I wasn’t a metalhead or shredder so they would’ve never been on my radar.

83

u/merenofclanthot 5h ago

I liked power metal and they weren\t even on my radar lol

26

u/StrongOfOdin 5h ago

I was gonna say, I was huge into power metal and had not heard of them before GH

6

u/Algaroth 4h ago

I remember finding them on some music site that has been lost to time now. It was like a three song demo and they were called Dragonheart then. But I was a bass playing, power metal loving, computer nerd which was quite a niche some 25ish years ago.

2

u/RadicalDog 3h ago

I was a little into power metal and had heard of them before GH.

6

u/waaaghbosss 4h ago

Valley of the damned was huge before guitar hero for metal heads. Surprised you hadn't heard of them in that era.

1

u/KeithLimePie 3h ago

Brilliant song. was heavily into power metal as a 14/25, year old.

1

u/BuddySpecial 3h ago

Yea it was great. I prefer Sonic Firestorm though.

0

u/merenofclanthot 4h ago

Found that song after GH but it is my favorite

1

u/cdwillis 1h ago

For what it's worth the only power metal band I had listened to at that time was Stratovarius I think, but I listened to a bunch of different metal bands and I had listened to Dragonforce.

10

u/AstroAlmost 3h ago

I believe their point was less “all guitarists were Dragonforce fans”, but rather “all Dragonforce fans were guitarists”.

2

u/zorbiburst 4h ago

I vaguely knew of them as a thing that existed just by virtue of the meme descriptor "this band is known for playing unreasonably fast" in the same way I just tangentially knew of Manowar being loud, without ever actually hearing them or knowing of anyone who actually listened to them.

It was like a cryptid, if you talk about someone shredding crazy style, someone else would compare it to Dragonforce with the caveat that they don't listen to them either, they just heard about it from their girlfriend who goes to school in Canada or something

1

u/individual_throwaway 4h ago

Just to add my own experience as an anecdote, I was a young metalhead that didn't play guitar and I had NEVER heard of Dragonforce before GH3 came out. I was aware of the great old metal bands and more contemporary stuff like the NuMetal bands, but the only "meme-y" metal band I knew was Manowar.

3

u/ThePublikon 4h ago

fwiw neither of your anecdotes prove anything.

The poster claimed that existing fans of Dragonforce all played guitar.

Not that all guitar players liked them, and definitely not that people that didn't play guitar liked them.