Wow, so wait, when these companies started making money Gibson than goes oh wait yea we thought of that already. This is ugly.

"I call it a Hawking Guitar... It was my idea." - S.Hawking Futurama

Wonder if Gibson is aware of the Japanese game Guitar Freaks by Konami which came out in the 90's!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuitarFreaks

Tommy

Is this just another Patent Troll situation?

To call this a patent troll situation gives too much credit to Gibson. Their patent doesn't even really apply to these games. From what I've read, the patent is for technology used to simulate a musical performance, but as any musician will tell you these products are games that do little if anything to actually simulate a musical performance. The user isn't playing music, but applying a given rhythm to colored keys on a guitar peripheral. These keys aren't mapped to any real musical instrument but to buttons on the game controller. The crowd's reaction, critical in a performance simulation (you can't perform with an audience to perform to), is based largely on game play elements and not the actual music being heard. Case in point, show me how star power was earned and used the last time you saw a real band perform and how the crowd was awed for a set time period directly related to the amount of star power gained simply because the guitar player tilted the neck up.

All in all, these games are as much a musical performance simulator as Frogger is a road crossing simulator. Add to that the issue that you now have lawyers from all the major retailers, MTV, Activision, and a prospective list of others (EA distributed Rock Band so if they are suing retailers, its not hard to believe that they will try to milk EA as well), all defining the difference between Gibson's patent and rhythm games, and Gibson is going to have a hard time selling their story if this makes it to the courts.

Gibson's move to include retailers seems like more of a play to pressure Activision into settling to mitigate damage to its relationships with its retailers; which would be a nasty precedent to start. Hopefully, all companies involved will see this through.

This should be interesting, because I seem to recall hearing that Harmonix had been working on guitar hero or a similar product long before the game was actually made. If that included a working prototype from before 1999, couldn't that invalidate the Gibson patent? Also, doesn't harmonix have some patents of their own from their days before entering the videogame industry?