Fortnite Festival Plastic Guitar Controller Revealed

Highlights

• PDP has unveiled a new guitar controller for music games like Fortnite Festival, bringing back the popular peripheral from the heyday of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
• Fortnite Festival, developed by Harmonix, draws inspiration from Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and the new guitar controller compatible with the game once support is added.
• The new PDP Riffmaster wireless guitar controller boasts features like a long-lasting battery, headphone jack, built-in thumbstick, and detachable pickguard, offering an immersive experience for music-game players.

Third-party peripheral maker PDP has just unveiled its new guitar controller, which can be used in music games like Fortnite Festival. These types of controllers used to be extremely popular during the heyday of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, as they allowed players to feel like superstar musicians as they pressed different colored buttons in time with falling notes onscreen. However, both these franchises would fade into the background in later years, and the guitar-shaped controller became something of a relic of a bygone gaming era – though it has been used to play other titles like Dark Souls 3 and Fall Guys.

The rhythm genre has lived on in other titles since then, with the latest example being Fortnite’s music-based Fortnite Festival mode. Epic Games added this new mode back in December, around the same time that it introduced LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing. Fortnite Festival was developed by Harmonix, the studio behind both the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, and draws much influence from the note-matching gameplay formula of those games. PDP, the company that made special controllers for Rock Band 4 way back in 2015, hinted at a new guitar peripheral last month, and now it looks like it will be reaching musical gamers soon.

IGN recently went hands-on with the new PDP Riffmaster wireless guitar controller, which is set to hit stores in spring 2024. Some of the features this new guitar-like peripheral includes are a battery that lasts up to 36 hours, an audio jack for headphones, a built-in thumbstick for improved navigation, and even a detachable pickguard that could be replaced with custom plates down the line. Best of all, this new controller will be compatible with Fortnite Festival once support is added in the future. There is currently no official price tag or exact release date for the Riffmaster controller.

Guitar Games Like Rock Band Could Make A Comeback

While the new Riffmaster controller is being advertised as a peripheral for Rock Band 4 and Fortnite Festival, it could be used for any future revivals of Guitar Hero or Rock Band that could come in Fortnite Festival’s wake. Harmonix is owned by Epic Games, and it is well within the realm of possibility for the latter to bring back Rock Band at some point. Meanwhile, Xbox and Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer recently spoke of resurrecting old franchises that his company has acquired in the Activision Blizzard buyout, such as the long-dormant Guitar Hero.

In the meantime, PDP’s new guitar controller looks to be a solid accessory for Fortnite Festival players who wish to add an extra level of immersion to their jam sessions or anyone looking for a replacement for their old Rock Band peripherals. It could also help bring more nostalgic music-game players to Fortnite’s new rhythm mode, as it does share much of the formula that made Guitar Hero and Rock Band the party games of choice for much of the 2010s.