Crate Digging

Crate Digging is a recurring feature in which we take a deep dive into a genre and turn up several albums or bands that all music fans should know about. As classic gaming series Guitar Hero turns 15 this week, we look at 10 bands a generation of fans likely learned about through gaming rather than crate digging. In the mid-to-late 2000s, the Guitar Hero series was the party game to own. Initially a partnership between publisher/hardware manufacturer RedOctane and developer Harmonix, the brand built upon the latter’s prior music-based projects — such as Frequency, Karaoke Revolution, and Amplitude — and other genre titans like Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks, Gitaroo Man, and PaRappa the Rapper. Essentially, players had to match button combinations and rhythmic cues to the arrangement...