The results of unofficial the ”Suggest songs to Guitar Hero III” -campaign 1/22 THE RESULTS Compiled, organized and gathered by Anssi ”ahj” Tenhunen between 2006-08-10 and 2006-12-31 Table Of Contents Forewords – how it all came to this 2 Timespan – votes and days 3 List of bands – in general 4 – with 25-50 votes 5 – with 50-100 votes (with top 3 songs) 6 – with more than 100 votes (with top 3 songs) 9 Most voted bands – top 100 13 Most voted songs – top 150 14 My personal picks 16 Thanks list 18 Note: I shall refer the Guitar Hero® games as GH1, GH2 and GH3 from this point onwards The results of unofficial the ”Suggest songs to Guitar Hero III” -campaign 2/22 FOREWORDS how it all came to this First of all, I never thought this thing would ever be this popular. After deleting the morons that just sent duplicates and didn't confirm their emails, I got a little shy of five thousand voters, and over ninetyfive thousand suggested songs. I think that is kinda nice for absolutely zero budget. Not even one advertising link was put anywhere. It all started when I just got bored one night while playing GH1 on my PlayStation 2, and there I was one song (Cowboys From Hell by Pantera) away from getting the ”Battle axe” ( the ”trophy”-guitar that you get when you have beat the game). Then I went online and headed to the official Guitar Hero forums to get some tips how to beat it and saw literally hundreds of and hundreds of lists of ”I want this and this and this song to Guitar Hero II”. I live in Finland (a small country in Northern- Europe between Sweden and Russia), and I wasn't even aware of that the Guitar Hero II was coming, eventhough I got GH1 first day it was released here, which was roughly five months after its release in the USA. Then I thought, damn, that is really stupid. There would be really much more sense, if you would centralize the action and gather a huge list instead of posting useless lists on some messageboards that nobody will ever read. The chance of the gamedevelopers to read the list is pretty much zero. After a small research I also found out that the final songlist of the GH2 was set and it could not be affected, so then I thought, that I have so much free time and some extra cash for stamps and an envelope, so I decided to make a system to let people vote songs to GH3 (which everyone knew that would come in a name or another, eventhough it was not announced yet), that would come to a list that I would send to the developers directly. I coded a really simple PHP- and SQL-system, that would allow people to send their 50 song lists, having only artist and song name and who voted in the database. But then I thought, damn, those americans can't even spell ”Led Zeppelin” right. No offense, but in the final list there was 27 variations of LZ, most from which common was ”Led Zepplin”, which was 12% of them all... But majority (85%) was typed correctly, but don't let me get to Lynyrd Skynyrd or Ozzy Osbourne.... OK, I had to think of some backup plan.Then I had to make small admin-panel kind of thing that would easily allow me to rename the artists without losing the original name if I messed up. So I made an another two fields that were called ”artist_az” and ”song_az”. These were basically the same, but they had the names without any special characters and spaces, so Guns N' Roses – It's so easy turned into ”gunsnroses” and ”itssoeasy”. When I just renamed those to mach the majority of the titles, it was really peace of cake. I also made small and clear rules to not same band twice or more to prevent ”I want the whole Metallica discography in the game” -effect and disallowed the use ”The band” form of the name, just ”band” to make the the counting easier. Many people didn't seem to understand this rule, so that is why eg. ”The Eagles” had huge jumps up everytime when I removed The's from the lists. After few weeks of the publishing I set the goal to 500 voters or by the time GH2 was published, but in the end it was pushed up to 5000 after it became awfully popular. Now here are (hopefully) the most intresting parts of the poll-research. Hopefully You like it. This document is distributed freely on the internet and maybe used for any non-commercial purposes if the author is mentioned. Please contact me if this document is going to be used on commercial or educational purposes. Helsinki, Finland. Dec 30th 2006 Anssi Tenhunen [email protected] www.ahjteam.com PS: I finally beat Cowboys from Hell on December 14th and Freebird on December 25th on expert The results of unofficial the ”Suggest songs to Guitar Hero III” -campaign 3/22 TIMESPAN votes and days What I realized was that most people started out with a bang and typed the whole 50 artist song or they just typed in 1-25 names and then got bored and just sent the list. Some entries were deleted because they got in the GH2 (mostly Sweet Child O' Mine), thats why there are so many 49 lists. Graph of votes per count The graph below is from the time when I thought the list was done and then I published it on September 8th until I closed the list. After three weeks it was recognized on wikipedia at ”Guitar Hero III” page, but after October 1st it had huge leap in the lists-per-day -statistics. Before that it was rational 4-17 per day, but after that it has not been below 20 a single time. Even though it was unofficial, it was linked on multiple blogs, Guitar Hero related news and such. The highest peak was reached on December 3rd with 99 lists per day. I got the GH2, played it to the fullest and closed down the voting form on December 11th to compile the list and send it to the developers, Harmonix and RedOctane. Votes per day (color swich indicates a month, top peak is 99) The results of unofficial the ”Suggest songs to Guitar Hero III” -campaign 4/22 LIST OF BANDS in general After major removals and regroupings bands (mainly duplicates, mistypes, unconfirmed lists, same lists from the same IP or clear spams, etc), there total of 95204* songs suggested, 5093* different bands suggested and from the total there was 11360* songs (11.93%) that we're marked ”any song from that band is ok”. As you can guess, the majority were bands had been suggested only by one person, which there was total of 2740 bands. That makes 53% of all the results, so I will not list them here. There was also 1248 bands that had 2-5 votes each which equals small visibility making about 24% of the total, and also totally way too much of the space in the text for them all to be listed here. As you can understand, the higher we rise, the less we get the results. There was only 631 bands that had 6-25 votes. That is 13% of the list and almost the size of a small club audience, but I find it still too small crowd to please the majority of the people. I will list the 176 bands on the next page, that cover the 3% of the list that had 26-49 votes, but I think I'll just save pages list only those with 50 votes and over with their most wanted songs. Here are the statistics of the artists with with bands with low votecount NUMBER OF BANDS WITH 50 VOTES OR LESS* 01 2740 53,80% 26 11 0,22% 02 611 12,00% 27 7 0,14% 03 301 5,91% 28 11 0,22% 04 220 4,32% 29 14 0,28% 05 116 2,27% 30 9 0,18% 06 92 1,81% 31 9 0,18% 07 78 1,53% 32 12 0,24% 08 58 1,14% 33 13 0,26% 09 61 1,20% 34 6 0,12% 10 57 1,12% 35 6 0,12% 11 29 0,57% 36 6 0,12% 12 25 0,49% 37 5 0,10% 13 33 0,65% 38 7 0,14% 14 17 0,33% 39 5 0,10% 15 23 0,45% 40 8 0,16% 16 27 0,53% 41 7 0,14% 17 19 0,37% 42 4 0,08% 18 18 0,35% 43 6 0,12% 19 23 0,45% 44 8 0,16% 20 21 0,41% 45 4 0,08% 21 13 0,26% 46 4 0,08% 22 8 0,16% 47 5 0,10% 23 10 0,20% 48 3 0,06% 24 10 0,20% 49 6 0,12% 25 9 0,18% 50 4 0,08% SEPARATED IN SEGMENTS* 1 2740 53,80% 26-49 176 3,46% 2-5 1248 24,50% 50-100 121 2,38% 6-25 631 12,39% 100- 177 3,48% * Margin of error is under 2% from the total, except in the 1-5 votes section it might be over 5% The results of unofficial the ”Suggest songs to Guitar Hero III” -campaign 5/22 LIST OF BAND with 25-50 votes 10 YEARS, 3 INCHES OF BLOOD ACCEPT, ADEMA, AIDEN, ALEXISONFIRE, ALKALINE TRIO, ALL THAT REMAINS, AMON AMARTH, ANGELS AND AIRWAVES, ANGRA, ANTI FLAG, BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE, BARENAKED LADIES BEACH BOYS, BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, BILLY SQUIER, BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, BLACK-FLAG, BLACK MAGES, BLACK STONE CHERRY, BLIND MELON, BLONDIE, BOB MARLEY, BOB SEGER, BOWLING FOR SOUP, BRAND NEW, BRUCE DICKINSON, BRYAN ADAMS CACOPHONY, CHIODOS, CINDERELLA, CLUTCH, COAL CHAMBER, COLD, COLDPLAY, CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, COUNTING CROWS, CRANBERRIES, CROSBY STILLS NASH AND YOUNG DAFT PUNK, DAMAGE PLAN, DANZIG, DARK TRANQUILLITY, DAVID LEE ROTH, DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979, DEPECHE MODE, DEREK AND THE DOMINOS, DEVO, DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, DIR EN GREY, DOKKEN, DOWN, DREAM EVIL, DROPKICK MURPHYS, DURAN DURAN EDDIE MONEY, EDGUY, ELECTRIC 6, ELTON JOHN, ELVIS PRESLEY, EVE 6, EVERCLEAR, EXODUS, EXTREME FEEDER, FILTER, FINCH, FINGER ELEVEN, FLAMING LIPS, FLYLEAF, FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE, FROM FIRST TO LAST, FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND, FUNKADELIC GAMMA RAY, GARABAGE, GARY MOORE, GENESIS, GOD FORBID, GOOD CHARLET, GRAND FUNK HAUNTED, HAWTRONE HEIGHTS, HELMET, HOLE ILL NINO, INTERPOL, INXS, IT DIES TODAY JACK JOHNSON, JAMES GANG, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, JERRY C, JOAN JETT, JOHN MAYER KAISER CHIEFS, KAMELOT, KING DIAMOND, KINGS OF LEON, KITTIE, KREATOR LESS THAN JAKE, LIVING END, LUSTRA MASON WILLIAMS PHONOGRAPH RECORD, MATCHBOOK ROMANCE, MESHUGGAH, MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSSTONES, MINDLESS SELF INDULGENCE, MOLLY HATCHET, MONSTER MAGNET, MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK, MOUNTAIN, MURDERDOLLS, MUSHROOMHEAD