Guitar Hero: On Tour has rocked Nintendo DS owners for over a week now, selling over 300,000 copies in the process. It's a great entry in the series, despite minor discomfort in the hands and the lack of downloadable content. The road to the DS wasn't easy, but Jeremy Russo, lead designer for Vicarious Visions, explains that it was worth the effort.

GameDaily: How hard was it to come up with a playable concept for the Nintendo DS?

Jeremy Russo:At first, it was really difficult to come up with new ideas. Everyone on the team loves Guitar Hero on the home consoles, and it was really difficult for us to think of how we could recreate that experience on a handheld. We came up with over 20 prototypes that used different combinations of the DS' touch screen and buttons, but even though a few of them were quite fun, none of them gave us the same rush that we got from Guitar Hero. An idea our producer had was to create a peripheral that attached to the Game Boy Advance slot with the Guitar Hero fret buttons along the side. One of our engineers thought that was a great idea, so he went out, bought some supplies, took an old GBA cartridge and soldered on some fret buttons. Once we tried it out for the first time, it was immediately obvious to us that this was the only way to go. It actually felt like you were playing the original Guitar Hero game, and it was wickedly fun. We ran across the office to show the CEO what we had created. He loved it, and so Guitar Hero: On Tour was born.

GD:Tell us about the mini-games, such as the autograph signing.

JR: We're big fans of games with wacky power-ups like Mario Kart, so very early on in the project we started talking about implementing our own "wacky" dueling mode, and we really started hitting on some awesome ideas for attacks. One of them was the Signature attack you mentioned. If you're hit with it, an obsessed fan will shove something in front of your face for you to sign, preventing you from strumming your guitar. You have to quickly sign your name to get the fan to go away. Another attack is the Pyrotechnics Mishap where a stray firework will streak across your screen and explode on your guitar. The guitar will instantly light up, and you won't be able to play again until you blow out the fire using the microphone. Other attacks will have you restringing a broken guitar string, stealing items from your opponent, shielding your eyes from a blinding camera flash, trying to play without any sound (due to a busted amp) and a lot more. What started out as just a discussion on a cool little game mode we thought might be fun, turned out to be the most popular modes in the game among our testers: Guitar Duels. Not only can you play this against anyone you want in multiplayer, but we created a whole separate Guitar Duel progression where you battle against all the characters in the game.

GD:Did you work closely with any previous Guitar Hero development members to get their input on On Tour's flow?

JR: We did talk a bit with Neversoft and the Vicarious Visions team working on the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3. We wanted to know what parameters they were using for the fret highway and how they implemented their light shows so we could start with what worked for them and then tweak it to match our gameplay. We wanted On Tour to be as authentic as possible, and our close attention to detail and discussions with the console designers really helped us achieve that. The result is the same Guitar Hero you all know and love, just in a much smaller package.

GD:There's a great selection of songs, along with a few exclusives. How hard was it putting the song list together?

JR: A lot of time was spent on picking the right line-up of songs. We knew that this game would be played by a wide variety of people, even some demographics that probably hadn't played any Guitar Hero before. Since we didn't want to alienate any one group, we decided to use a really diverse set of popular bands so that every person who played the game would find a bunch of songs that they knew and liked. What we ended up with was probably the most varied mix of music in any Guitar Hero game, with bands like Blink 182, Maroon 5, Pat Benatar, Daughtry and Ozzy Osbourne, just to name a few.