Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO Janna2000, SelfCloak or RRabbit42. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.
The first three games mostly used covers as opposed to the original songs. Awesome, sometimes hard to distinguish from the original, but covers nonetheless. Outside bonus songs, every song in the original game is a cover. Outside "Stop" and "John the Fisherman" (plus "Dead!" and "Possum Kingdom", plus some DLC in the 360 version), every song but bonus songs in Guitar Hero II is a cover. Same for Rocks the 80s, where the originals were "I Ran (So Far Away)", "The Hellion/Electric Eye" (okay, they credit only "Electric Eye" in the game, but...), "I Wanna Rock and "The Warrior" (and that's without mentioning "Because It's Midnite" which, for what it's worth, was as close to a bonus song as this game got). The widespread use of masters didn't start until GH 3 and the first Rock Band.
Ironically, the cover of What I Like About You was apparently so good, The Romantics tried to sue Harmonix over it. Which is doubly ironic when you consider it's not even one of the games' best covers.
As for the originals present in Rocks the 80s, since both "I Wanna Rock" and "The Warrior" end in fade-outs, the in-game versions also end in fade-outs. Considering that later games by Harmonix (read the Rock Band series) and later games in the GH series that use masters bothered to raise the volume of the fade-out and create an ending (yes, those endings are made by the developers - compare "You Give Love a Bad Name" in Lego RB and GH5), it's safe to assume They Just Didn't Care. Then again, this was their last game before Activision hijacked their own series from them, and while not really bad, the final product did seem rushed for a summer release, so that's possibly the reason not much work was put in here.
Of all the on-disc bonus songs in all the GH games, there's the sum total of one cover; "She Bangs The Drums" in GH3.
The Sex Pistols actually reformed and recorded new versions of two of their songs ("Anarchy in the UK" for GH3 and "Pretty Vacant" for World Tour) specifically for the game (the original masters were probably unusable in the game for technical reasons). Well, for this and for the same reason bands always reform.
Technical reasons like not existing. The theory the band had was that the masters were stolen.
Hyperspeed was originally included as a joke, like the giant heads "cheat". Yeah, let's make the charts scroll twice as fast! Then people started using it, and noticing the faster speed makes them much better at the game than without.
Guitar Hero Smash Hits (Beenox) and Guitar Hero Van Halen (Underground Development) were handled by third parties, which would explain some of the chart discrepancies between those games and earlier appearances. In the case of Smash Hits, it's mostly because masters were used instead of covers, but for Guitar Hero Van Halen (which has Hot For Teacher, which appeared on World Tour but didn't export), there really isn't much of a reason to change the chart itself if you're using the same masters.
...and on the other hand, some of the charts were changed just to make the tracks more assholish. The five-note chord at the end of "Raining Blood", anyone?
For Smash Hits, it's worth bearing in mind that some note types were added in World Tour which weren't in previous games (tapped notes, extended sustains, open notes on bass). This meant that in songs which weren't covers in their initial appearance (such as Miss Murder), various parts could be represented more accurately. This also applies to One in Guitar Hero Metallica.
YMMV • 
Radar • 
Quotes • (
Funny • 
Heartwarming • 
Awesome) • 
Fridge • 
Characters • 
Fanfic Recs • 
Nightmare Fuel • 
Shout Out • 
Plot • 
Tear Jerker • 
Headscratchers • 
Trivia • WMG • 
Recap • 
Ho Yay • 
Image Links • 
Memes • 
Haiku • Laconic • 
Source • Setting