When music and gaming made love for the first time, Dance Dance Revolution was pushed into the world. This union gave us several other lovable titles, namely Donkey Konga, Elite Beat Agents, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band.

But you have never seen anything like this before. It’s kind of like Guitar Hero. But with a banjo.

“Oh No! Banjo was an RIT student project from an Alternative Controllers seminar at the Rochester Institute of Technology,” explains Sela Davis, audio lead of the project. Other team members of the team included lead programmer Mike Ey, another programmer Dominick D’Aniello, artist and user interface expert Joe Pietruch, and our content developer Alex Lifschitz.

The project was developed in six weeks. Unfortunately, it is unavailable for public play—there’s only one hand-made banjo controller in existence.

“Our main goal in terms of the controller design was to simulate fingerpicking, which is an important aspect of playing a banjo. By having the player use her right hand as well, we are also able to get her thinking in a different way. People expect it to play like Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but it turns out it plays very differently due to the use of both hands.”

More videos are available here. Strum on, gamers.

Tags: gdc, Video Games