Are Rhythm Games Ready for a Comeback?

Music has always been central to video games. Motifs from popular franchises like The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. are so canonized that people who don't play games could likely point them out. Even games with licensed soundtracks like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater have gone on to reflect and inform the tastes of an entire generation of players. But for a brief and fleeting moment in the mid-2000s, music became central to the way we played and interacted with games--and the genre this spawned, the rhythm game, became one of the most profitable in the world. By the latter half of the 2000s, off the back of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, the rhythm game cemented its commercial dominance.