So if you haven’t been looking at this, or if you dismissed it as I did in our 14th podcast, let me give you the story about exactly what’s happened with the Wii version of Guitar Hero III. You may wish to pull up a chair.

Shortly after the game came out, a poster on the official Guitar Hero fan boards, named ooooolinooooo, posted in a thread right here asking the following reasonable question:

It says Dolby pro logic II, isn’t it suppose to be surround sound? But there is no sound come out from my rear speakers. I got Wii version, what’s wrong?

After a lot of people came to the poster’s side reporting the same experience, the situation was analyzed and a more detailed picture began to form: a picture that showed that something had gone horribly wrong in the bug-testing phase for Guitar Hero III on Wii that resulted in most of the audio in the game being output only in dual mono, rather than Stereo or Surround.

Activision has yet to make an official statement on the issue, but if you contact their support site, you’ll likely get the same response that I, and many of these other people, did.

Hello,

At this time we are looking into the problem but as of yet have no solution. Keep checking back with us to see if there is any progress on the problem. If you go to our support page at https://activision.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/activision.cfg/php/enduser/home.php. From here you can log in to our support system by clicking on My Stuff. You can log in with your email and no password. You can always change your login and password at any time. From here you can communicate with us and check the status of your inquiry.

This may be as close as we’re going to get to a confirmation right now, but I can picture what’s happening behind the scenes. Coders are typing like crazy, trying to find a way to patch the existing copies, while other coders are fixing the code for the game so that future copies of the game don’t have the issue. Once they realize there’s no practical way to patch a game on Wii, they’ll announce the issue and offer replacement discs, at a great cost to Activision. I sincerely doubt we’ll see any word on this from them until they figure out how to fix it, but I’m confident they will. This game is far too big and popular for them to sweep under a rug, and the issue is equally so.