That product, and some of the people behind it, are the subject of a profile in the Boston Globe this morning, and it's an interesting, though slightly skewed read. The whole crux of the article is that these guys had stumbled onto what would eventually become a huge segment in the game industry, but they sold it off well before it got huge. At no point does anyone talk about the actual quality of the equipment or the Quest For Fame game itself, which, weirdly enough, was an Aerosmith-focused game released over a decade before Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.
Here's how the article describes the game:
A player watches a window in the computer monitor as a red line scrolls past a series of green blips, like pulses on a heart monitor. When the red line crosses a blip, the player strums the virtual guitar's strings, and the computer's speakers respond with Aerosmith hits like "Eat The Rich" or "Walk This Way." Hit the strings too early or too late, and out come discordant notes and insults from on-screen characters.
Sounds familiar, right? I was actually given one of these things to mess around with sometime in 1994, and the only thing I remember is that it was one of the most difficult-to-configure objects I'd ever come across. Granted, this was back in the days of IRQ conflicts and a white-hot hate for making anything on a PC easy to understand or the least bit friendly. So it's not surprising that I never actually got the guitar hooked up and working properly. Even when I did finally encounter one that was properly connected and working, all I remember is a bulky, unwieldy instrument that still just barely worked. Another version was released with a different piece of hardware, the V-Pick. This stripped the big guitar down to just a pick that wired into your parallel port. Man, remember parallel ports?
The article's definitely written in a "dude, these guys could have had it all" style, but that's not how I remember this stuff at all. At no point did Quest For Fame feel like the Next Big Thing. It seemed like an interesting idea hampered by a bad game with bad hardware that only really fooled tech writers with no gaming experience. I remember the whole thing seeming more than a little laughable at the time. Regardless of all that, though, I still found the profile to an be an interesting read and a look back at a rhythm game that time forgot.
For a quick look at something truly amazing, here's Aerosmith performing "Eat the Rich" in the game. I love the amazing CG stage they're performing on. It gives the entire thing a real "OH NO HELP QUICK THESE OLD MEN ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A COMPUTER" look.