“Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s” (released as “Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s” in Europe) was the third and final Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero game, released in July 2007. Despite the previous title, Guitar Hero II, being released on the Xbox 360, “Rocks the 80s” was solely released on the PS2.

As the name suggests, “Rocks the 80s” was an expansion as opposed to a full-fledged sequel, and as such saw no new gameplay changes from Guitar Hero II (the Xbox 360 version of which was released a mere three months prior), featured a much smaller number of songs and was released at a slightly lower price point. Harmonix had already been acquired by Viacom before the release of the game, and this third title fulfilled their contractual requirements with Red Octane and Activision, allowing them to move on and create the Rock Band franchise, while a new Activision-owned developer, Neversoft, took the reigns of the Guitar Hero series.

“Rocks the 80s’” setlist only included thirty songs, with no additional bonus songs – which makes the game only the third Harmonix-developed project not to include any music from Harmonix employees (alongside Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2 and 3). Again, as the game’s name suggests, the setlist comprised exclusively of 80′s songs, excluding one parody by fictional glam metal band Limozeen – created by internet cartoon Homestar Runner, the same group behind Strong Bad Guitar Hero II track Trogdor. Like the two previous games, the majority of the songs are covers created by WaveGroup, although five of them are the master recordings.

Interestingly, two of the songs – Krokus’ Ballroom Blitz and White Lion’s Radar Love – are actually covers of 70′s songs. While neither version has appeared in Rock Band, both of the original versions – by Sweet and Golden Earring, respectively – are available in the Rock Band library. Though to be precise, the Sweet version of Ballroom Blitz featured in the original Rock Band is in fact a cover version.

As noted in the previous Setlist Checklist post (and all future posts, as well), Rock Band 3′s setlist creation tool allows us to create, save, and share setlists, so we have included a Rock Band 3 setlist below that you can save to your profile if you would like to check out any or all of the songs! And as the holes are continually filled in by Rock Band’s weekly DLC releases, we will update this post, and keep it linked in the FAQ page above, for future reference.

Main Setlist

Spanning just one decade, the majority of the songs are either glam or metal, but also include punk, rock and new wave tracks. Of the game’s 30-song setlist, 11 are currently available in Rock Band, or 37%. If you were to to include the two original versions of the covers mentioned above, that percentage would be 43%. The songs included in the main setlist are included directly below.

* Denotes a cover song in the original title.

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s Main Setlist for Rock Band 3

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