// PC GAMER — GAMING
A love letter to the Guitar Hero X-Plorer Controller
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I peaked at 16 years old. I was part way through an expert run of 'Through the Fire and the Flames' by Dragonforce on Guitar Hero 3 at a friend's house for their birthday, and I remember thinking to myself, 'I don't think I'll ever top this'. As the song came to an end and I revelled in my passing grade, I got at least one nod of approval from the group before they slunk off to do what actually cool 16-year-olds do when presented with a free house and no adults around: smoke a big joint.
I've given it my all, on that same 20-year-old X-Plorer, with one of my favourite songs from that time.
Not me, though. I got high on sweet riffs, adeptly played out across five colourful buttons, slapped in near-perfect rhythm alongside a singular strum bar. Learn a real guitar? No, thanks. I'd rather sink 100s of hours into a rough approximation of the real thing—a karaoke version wrought of thin plastic from scaled-down body to hollow head unit. Plugged not into an amp, but an Xbox 360, with a whammy bar modulating not the strings, but the signal.
I played that momentous day on a legendary piece of kit: the RedOctane X-Plorer Controller for Guitar Hero.
The X-Plorer is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. It came bundled with Guitar Hero 2, and I was 16 when it first came out here in the UK. That was in 2007. I'm 34 now. And that exact same X-Plorer controller from my proudest moment all those years ago?
It's still in good shape. Its once white hue has yellowed over the years, and there's a little grime between the frets and the gaps in the plastic shell. But it's good. More than that, it's great. It even has the same Gibson sticker beneath the fretboard that I stuck on there as a teenager. There was another one, a bird of some sort? But it fell off. I'd forgotten where the stickers came from, but after searching eBay listings for the X-Plorer for this article, I realised they came in the box with it.
I have a bit of a collection of guitar controllers on the go: two X-Plorers, two for Guitar Hero Live, and one CRKD Gibson Les Paul Blueberry Burst Pro Edition. That last one only came out last year, and yes, it's pretty sweet. I also have a Rock Band kit in an attic somewhere.
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Yet the original X-Plorer from my childhood is still my favourite guitar controller of the lot. They all work on PC, with some small tweaks, but no other guitar has the smooth fret button actuation this one does. My fingers glide across those buttons, man. It just feels right.