Strike a chord with Football Hero

The rhythm game format has become firmly entrenched in mainstream consciousness over the past few years, to the point where the coloured symbols at the bottom of Guitar Hero and Rock Band have practically become pop culture icons. But there's clearly a need for innovation in rhythm game controllers - the standard band configuration is starting to look a little tired. So why not merge fretwork with football?

Football Hero is a wonderfully bizarre project which swaps plastic axes for acrobatic strikers, dreamed up by Phil Clandilon and Steve Milbourne, the creative geniuses responsible for The Editors Street View hack and the Calvin Harris' Humanthesizer. Clandilon explains the concept to Make:

"Football Hero is basically an experiment to create a Guitar Hero type game played by footballers. The game was constructed in a warehouse in West London, and a talented young team of freestyle footballers were drafted in to participate. We created the game to promote the Kasabian single Underdog.

The game was powered by the open source GH clone Frets On Fire, and we used two enormous projectors to create a three story high image on the side of the warehouse wall. The coloured buttons on the typical guitar controller were replaced by five huge pressure sensitive pads which were carefully positioned on the wall in order to line up with the game's descending notes. The idea being that the footballers would try to hit the pads in time with the music in order to play the Kasabian track Underdog. Each of the pads contained a piezoelectric vibration sensor, and these were wired back to an Arduino, which in turn was connected to the MacBook Pro we used to run the software."

So unless you have a very large living room bereft of breakables, this unique take on the rhythm game won't be coming to the home market anytime soon. It seems the game has a high barrier to entry, too: their team of talented freestyle footballers only managed 13 per cent accuracy on their first try, but by the end of the day that score had been bumped up to a respectable 76 per cent, and that was at a reduced difficulty setting.