By Ben Kuchera
July 06, 2008 - 11:45PM CT

When the driver jumps out, the truck keeps rolling... The love of money is the root of all evil, or so the saying goes. The proverb is definitely true in the case of rock-n-roll, where the love of money typically doesn't even bring about the good kind of evil (i.e., mid-80's Metallica), but rather the bad kind of evil (i.e. Metallica's Lars Ulrich whining about P2P and "this whole Internet thing").

Though it's not quite on par with the epic saga of Metallica's stratospheric rise and ultimate descent into rehab and anti-fan litigation, the ongoing story of the Guitar Hero franchise is also a story of money and rock-n-roll, of good and evil. The release of the latest two installments in the franchise—Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for the major consoles—gives us a new chapter in that story, and it offers us a chance to step back and take stock of the direction the story is headed.

Is it toward the right kind of evil, or toward the wrong kind? After Activision announced plans to merge with Vivendi to create Activision Blizzard, the company held a conference call in which new titles for almost every major Activision brand were announced. Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Tony Hawk... the list went on. Activision was on a roll, and the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises weren't just hits, they were monsters.

Between the two of them they were some of the best-selling games of the year, they unseated Halo on the Xbox Live standings, and they it cool to play with plastic guitars. Then Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said something chilling to all of those who had dialed in hear about his company's plans for the two blockbuster franchises.