Competition in rhythm action gaming heats up considerably this year now that Rock Band has crashed Guitar Hero's party. Consumers have been miffed that the developers for both games couldn't at least play nice with their guitar peripherals; Guitar Hero controllers won't with Rock Band and vice versa, outside of a notable exception on the Xbox 360, making things inconvenient on the wallets of budget-minded gamers.

1Up speaks with Guitar Hero co-publisher RedOctane over the lack of cross-compatibility of peripherals between the two games. According to RedOctane co-founder Charles Huang, Rock Band developer Harmonix had knowledge over how Guitar Hero controllers worked, thanks to their experience as former developer of the franchise. That explains the Guitar Hero controller compatibility with the Xbox 360 release of Rock Band. RedOctane wasn't able to have that same luxury with Rock Band's peripherals after Harmonix left to join MTV Networks. Meanwhile, neither side was required by Sony to ensure cross-compatibility for the PlayStation 3 versions of their games, as Sony cannot release information about a game to another developer during their own testing.

Even then, RedOctane remains relatively cool on the prospect of Guitar Hero compatibility with Rock Band guitars. Huang cites the documented issues some users are experience with the build and functionality of Rock Band peripherals as a key factor:

"I don't think we're too interested in having their guitars work on our game, because they're having a lot of issues with their guitars. From our standpoint, to be quite honest, if you know a competitor's product has issues, there's not a whole lot of motivation to make these problematic controllers work with your game. Why would you want to cause yourself the headache?"

Additionally, Huang explains that cross-compatibility won't be a priority item for both companies so long as a standard fails to exist for console guitar peripherals. Until then, they can only rely on proprietary tech for console platforms:

"There is no such thing as an open standard on PS3 for guitar controllers. That's just a crock. Open standard is something like USB or 802.11 [a wireless protocol]. They publish the spec and if you want to build a USB anything, you follow these specs. I defy anybody to show me, before our games were released, to show a published spec of how to build a guitar controller on PS3.