Directional Pad

Harmonix helps keep ScoreHero afloat

Fans of the Guitar Hero series are likely familiar with the fansite Score Hero, a site populated entirely by robots, or at the very least humans with glorious robot hands. They're the keepers of scores. If you absolutely need to know how many points you need to five-star Jordan on expert [you know, like if the fate of the universe depended on it, as it so frequently does in my nightmares], they'll be able to tell you exactly what that number is, what your best path would be and best places to use Star Power to keep yourself from failing miserably.

They know these things because they haven't just beaten Jordan, the hardest song in the history of mankind, and they haven't just five-starred it. Oh no, they've beaten it normally enough times to find the exact five-star cutoff point by process of elimination, and have screenshots to prove it.

That's the kind of dedication these guys exhibit, and today it paid off big.

They've been running a donation drive since around the time when GH2 was released. They set a goal of $10,000, enough to get them a new dedicated server and pay the bandwidth bills for a year or so. It might seem like a lot, but Score Hero is a big site and (like Directional Pad) runs no advertising, has no paid staff, and operates purely on donations and by the owner paying out of pocket. They were coming up on their deadline, June 30th, and had managed to raise around $7,500. Then today, out of nowhere, Harmonix president Alex Rigopulos stepped up with a $2,000 donation on behalf of the company.

This rush resulted in everyone else flooding in to close the gap, and by the time I write this, they've reached and exceeded their goal, with a total of $10,220. By current estimations, this should easily buy them a new dedicated server, and keep everything running smoothly for another 18 months, which should carry the site well past Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80's, Guitar Hero III and Rock Band, assuming Rock Band has scores to be heroes of.

Congratulations, guys!

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