Mad Catz loses out on Guitar Hero millions

But at least they've got a sense of humor about it! Kotaku is reporting (supposedly from the Mad Catz booth at CES), that Mad Catz was once in charge of the Xbox port of the original Guitar Hero game.

Kotaku's Brian Crecente writes:

"Guitar Hero was a game that we were actually involved with early on and pulled out because of a lawsuit with Konami," Mad Catz president and CEO Darren Richardson tells Kotaku. "We were doing the Xbox SKU and that's why there was only a Playstation 2 launch. That's why. We were in there and we pulled out as a result of (the lawsuit) and (Red Octane and Harmonix) went forward and it turned out to be a success, a huge success."

This is the kind of thing that makes gaming history. In an industry of huge numbers, games, and egos, this is the kind of thing that gets lost and dug up over and over again. Thank god for Wikipedia for archiving gaming history as well as it does. Will someone do us all a favor and add this factoid to the Wikipedia Guitar Hero page? I'm sure it'll be useful for the eventual Trivial Pursuit Video Game edition.

Richardson goes on to poke some fun at himself for the decision, which I have to say is very cool of a Mad Catz CEO to do. Mad Catz and other third party accessories are always the butt of jokes with friends at a gaming-centric get together, but they've made some slightly higher quality peripherals of late, including the Street Fighter IV Fight Sticks (which I am still wanting of).