“People laughed at us, saying, ‘Why are you playing guitar solos? This is so lame.’ We thought, ‘Let's go even faster’”: Herman Li on how Guitar Hero helped make guitar solos cool again – and why grunge killing off the shred scene wasn’t a bad thing

A portrait of Herman Li of DragonForce with his new PRS custom build.

For a certain generation of readers, understanding the cultural impact of Guitar Hero is not a difficult task: it triggered a cultural explosion that made guitar music cool again and birthed a new generation of electric guitar heroes, with Herman Li and DragonForce leading the charge.

Li, who has just completed his surprise pivot from Ibanez to PRS with a wildly different signature guitar, recently reflected on the life-changing madness the video game’s popularity helped grant not just for him, but for a whole legion of players.