How inventor Jack McCauley designed some of most unique video game controllers of all time.

If you were a teenager in the mid-2000s and saw a plastic guitar or set of drums at your friend’s house, you knew you were in for a good time. You were about to spend the next few hours jamming your heart out as a virtual rockstar in Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero, the multi-billion-dollar video game series, blurred the line between gamer and rockstar. While players could play with a standard controller, the real magic was in the custom-shaped toy guitar controller which required gamers to match button presses to popular rock melodies.

The creation of these plastic instruments can largely be credited to inventor Jack McCauley, the engineer who went on to co-found Oculus and now serves as an Innovator in Residence at UC Berkeley. But building accessories for the music-based video game franchise is what launched McCauley’s inventions into the living rooms of millions around the world.

Here’s how that era-defining piece of hardware was designed and created as told by McCauley himself.

Reverse engineering a guitar

Guitar Hero wasn’t the first game of its type. It took heavy inspiration from Guitar Freaks, an arcade game with a wooden cabinet and two white plastic guitars with buttons on their necks that focused on J Pop (Japanese pop) songs. Players could sling the controller over their shoulders with a strap and strum along to songs with a switch on the body. The Guitar Hero team saw the potential to bring this to video game consoles and broaden the music selection.

McCauley got involved in the project at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, where he was introduced to two men from developer RedOctane who had rigged up a Guitar Freaks controller to a PlayStation Two (PS2) console. That initial demo wasn’t enough to convince him.

“I’ve shown that I’m a skeptic because I’ve seen so many things like that with a lot of hype go down the tubes,” McCauley told Engineering.com. “The first evidence that I had that it was going to do well is that one of the two guys came and said, ‘Hey, go down to Fry’s Electronics store. We have our Demo Kit sitting there with a PS2 with our beta game.’ I go down there, and there’s a line for people to play it, and people love it.”

From then he jumped on board with the team trying to make a household version of this game a reality.

The team had to face the design challenges of working with first-party video game developers to fit their parameters, and ensuring these instruments could be produced at a massive scale. Sometimes that meant adopting chipsets from different consoles. Other times it meant assuring these companies that they were producing a quality product that would successfully work with their devices.

While the Guitar Hero team started by partially reverse engineering the controller design from the arcade game, later guitars did make more updates on the design. The team also added their own spins on the Guitar Freaks concept, like changing the number of buttons and adding a slider on the neck of the guitar to make for a more challenging experience.

Rhino was used to create the tooling needed to manufacture the guitar. McCauley used Pro/Engineer (now Creo) for design, and Protel 99 for PCB board layout. Although these CAD tools were used for the design process, McCauley is a tactile inventor who prefers to start with a hand drawn sketch.

“After the sketch is done, I built it out of Home Depot parts,” McCauley said. “Now I’d [3D] print that.”

From those base parts grew a design that resonated with the world.

“The design was about capturing the essence of playing a guitar in a fun, approachable way, and that’s why it resonated with millions of players around the world,” he said. “The simplicity and tactile feedback of the controller created an engaging experience that didn’t need complex technology to feel authentic.”

Building a band

Sure they had a guitar ready to rock, but what about the rest of the band? Other video game competitors around the late 2000s like Rock Band had introduced microphones and drums, and Guitar Hero would do the same. To take on the task of bringing drums to Guitar Hero World Tour, McCauley immersed himself in the world of drums, even learning to play himself.

“I’m no Ringo Starr, but I can hold a beat,” he said.

McCauley developed drums that were similar to drums like Roland V-drums, real electronic drums used by musicians that cost hundreds of dollars. The key difference was lowering the price and making them easy to make by the thousands.

“I started looking at Roland V-drums and looking at how things are done, and got ideas from that. But this stuff we’re building is mass produced,” McCauley said. “They’re just shooting that stuff onto a conveyor belt. So it can’t be like V-drums. It has to be better actually. So I basically made a very robust version of V-drums that could be mass produced.”

As the design was coming together, he also took a very different design lesson from the guitars and applied them to the creation of the drum set.

“Intellectual property, of course, is very important. You can’t copy a famous instrument maker’s design or shape or surfacing. It has to look unique unless you have their permission,” McCauley said. “We got sued by Gibson, so you have to be very careful with that.”

Making millions (of guitars)

McCauley had conquered the design challenge. Now, he had to face a manufacturing one.

“Once Guitar Hero launched and took off, it started. We couldn’t produce guitars fast enough,” McCauley said.

The guitars were being made in three separate factories with three different companies to meet the required demand.

“They were all manufacturing it with different tooling, different molds, and all this stuff. Because I didn’t work on anything that big before, I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the expenditures and the risk,” he said.

Despite that, McCauley said they had very little loss because of having negligible hardware returns. First, the designs had been made with mass production in mind. On top of that, he had found partners he was confident he could count on and were able to deliver on the quality and quantity being asked of them.

“Find a high-quality manufacturing partner who understands the vision and can deliver on it. The best ideas can fail if they aren’t executed well, so it’s crucial to work with people who are as committed to quality as you are,” he said.

The millions of Guitar Hero sales eventually petered off. Blame is sometimes put on the recession in the late 2000s as well as the broadening of the game’s music selection. However, the game and the feel of the guitar controller in your hands left an impact on millions in its time in the spotlight. And some fans still cling to their love of the game today, continuing to stream it online. “Sometimes, the best designs are the ones that focus on the basic human experience rather than adding flashy features. I believe the Guitar Hero controller achieved that balance,” McCauley said.