Oh dear oh dear oh dear. No matter how much encouragement Forbes was given last week by gamers across the world to get their facts right about games, they don’t seem intent on taking it back. Of course, by Forbes I mean their writer, Peter C. Beller, who last week called Rock Band a shameless ripoff of Guitar Hero, while remaining entirely oblivious to the thousand and one things that were wrong with that statement. It’s just easier to assume collective responsibility and just refer to Beller as Forbes because I’m not good at remembering names and his Forbes editor published that crap.

Anyway, an analysis of Beller’s response to gamers’ reactions, in that cynical drawl you all know and love, awaits after the jump.

The response to the original article appeared late last Thursday (early hours of Friday here in the UK) on GameDaily, where the Forbes writer attempted to defend his name-calling through what I’m regarding as nothing more than a convoluted, still-ill-informed mess of words.

My terming Rock Band a “shameless knockoff” of Guitar Hero was based on the fact that it came out after Guitar Hero and sported very obvious similarities with Guitar Hero, including color-coded prompts moving onscreen along a fret board. It even accepted the same Guitar Hero guitar controller, I believe.

Last time I checked Guitar Hero sported very obvious similarities to Guitarfreaks with all the things you mentioned above. Last time I checked, Activision credited the Konami patent in the game credits, allowing them to use the idea originally created by the Japanese developer. The fact that he’s having to check with himself if the two games are cross-compatible doesn’t bode well either.

If you define knockoff as “a copy or imitation of someone or something popular” the way Merriam-Webster does, then I think Rock Band fits the bill nicely.

I have no doubt that Merriam-Webster is correct in its definition of knockoff. How you managed to look it up and read the definition as “similar product created by the same people as the original”, I’m not sure. If that’s the case, you might as well call every James Bond film a knockoff of the others. They’ve all got different titles too! Woo!

…Hurrrrgh. The rest of Beller’s statement awaits over the page…

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