Months after Harmonix and MTV Games announced a landmark deal with Apple Corps to deliver a Fab Four Rock Band game, Activision pushed the budget to license a Metallica themed Guitar Hero piece.

Now, speaking to USA Today, Guitar Hero Metallica’s lead designer Alan Flores explains that the game will be designed for the more experienced Guitar Hero players, saying that the game “is a lot harder, especially on drums. Well, it's a lot harder all around, to tell the truth.”

“Most of the songs have a higher level of difficulty, certainly at the end of the game when you are playing the old-school Metallica stuff where you play really, really fast and there's lot of double bass playing, fast guitar playing and crazy leads," he adds.

The band’s lasting drummer Lars Ulrich also spoke of his respect for the Guitar Hero titles: “I was first introduced to Guitar Hero in my house about a year ago by my kids. It seemed like this was the first video game that really brought the family together, we were all sitting there and we were all sharing it. It wasn't something that was just about the person playing, it was about everybody. It became a collective thing.”

Details of how he game will play also emerged from the interview, with Flores attesting that it doesn’t play out chronologically due to Metallica’s debut album, Kill ‘Em All, not being particularly suitable for a videogame’s difficulty curve, in that “you would play something off of Kill 'Em All and you would throw the controller against the wall and stop playing. We have to do it based on difficulty.”

Instead, players will form the band and play two Metallica songs at local gigs, building up prestige and moving to venues which the band consider to be the highlights of their touring careers. Two such venues will be San Fransico nightclub The Stone, as well as London’s Hammersmith Apollo.

The tour mode of the game will end at a special venue for the band, as Flores illustrates: “There is a particular venue that Metallica has played that they sort of view as the pinnacle of their success. It's funny, out of all the venues they have played, there are so many huge ones, for them to really pick one out and single that out, it's kind of interesting.”

In regards to competitive multiplayer, Guitar Hero Metallica is expected to get dirty. “In battle mode we have ‘amp overload’ and ‘whammy bar lock,’ and we took those and sort of themed them to Metallica. So we have one that is called ‘Fade to Black’ that totally blacks out your opponent's highway, which makes it devastating for them to play because they can't see any notes. We have ‘Ride The Lightning’ which is the electrical attack and we have ‘Trapped Under Ice,’ which freezes your whammy bar.

In terms of the wider picture of music and gaming, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was philosophical about the future about both entertainment mediums, believing that the games and music industries are set to accelerate their convergence. 

“That's cool in that it gives you a different sort of dynamic, a virtual aspect of the delivery of music rather than it just being one-dimensional. It's enabling the artists to present the music in a very new and different and modern way,” he said, adding that “it's going to open people up maybe to the prospect of taking the whole thing one step further and actually picking up an instrument. We might be rearing an entire culture of future musicians. That prospect is just super-cool.”

Full interview can be found here.