It's been five years since the last Guitar Hero game, but the franchise is poised to come out of retirement for a cross-platform reunion tour. Designer James Norris was in town recently to chat about the rebirth of the rhythm genre, so I sat down with him to find out why it was a good time to bring it back.

This is what he had to say.

AusGamers: So we’ll jump into some of that. Why is now the right time to bring back this franchise that’s been sitting dormant for the last five years?

James Norris: You said it yourself, so the last five years we kind of thought that there are new consoles out. There’s a whole generation of gamer out there who maybe didn’t have a chance to play Guitar Hero. And we thought that because there’s a new console, there are people who maybe haven’t played it before, that now was the right time to do it. And of course, we’re FreeStyle, so we wanted to do it a bit differently.

AusGamers: You mentioned bringing in newer people, which is an easy sell if you’ve never played a game before, but for someone who’s familiar with the series and played a lot of it on the last-gen consoles, is there a big reason to bring them back, or is the pitch the familiarity?

James Norris: There are three main things that are different about it. We’ve got the new controller and so this is a six-button controller. Three buttons on top of three.

Rock on over here for the full Guitar Hero Live interview.