Will Guitar Hero Live bring music games back into the living room?

Offering a vast collection of videos to play along to, Activision's rhythm action reboot looks to be a worthy encore to a once-popular genre

If you've been a gamer for at least 10 years, the chances are, your under-stairs cupboard is a shantytown of plastic guitars, dusty half-size drum kits and unsolvable tangles of wire.

Once upon a time, Guitar Hero and its many copycats ruled gaming, playing to arena-sized crowds of excited fans - but then they exited the business with unusual haste. The genre, in which players strap on plastic guitars and strum along in time with an eclectic soundtrack, was so dominant it even lured in The Beatles, that notoriously vigilant guarder of legacy. But it came at a cost. Viacom spent $20m (12.7m) on advertising alone for The Beatles: Rock Band, a figure that illustrates both the belief in the genre at the time, and the depth of its subsequent fall. By 2010, wearied players had hung up their instruments en mass, and the flood of music games slowed to a drip.