Guitar Hero, Rock Band co-creator is Tel Aviv native

Eran Egozy

The worldwide video game phenomenon of “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” can be partly traced back to an MIT grad from Tel Aviv, Eran Egozy. Listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2008, his love of music came from his childhood in Israel. But given his musical passion, one might expect that Egozy would have developed something like “Symphony Hero.” He took up the clarinet—not the guitar—as a seventh-grader. When his chemist parents—who met on the Technion campus in Haifa—asked him what instrument he wanted to play, his mind flashed to a series on musical instruments he watched on Israeli television.

“It seemed kind of cool, so when my parents asked me if I wanted to learn an instrument, I said, ‘Sure, the clarinet.’”

The Boston-based Egozy, 36, has performed in a variety of symphonies and currently plays in the Radius Ensemble. He recently returned to Israel for the first time in 10 years and was stunned at the high-tech developments made during his absence. He also found his Hebrew a little rusty.

“I still can get by, I still speak Hebrew casually with my parents and with some Israeli musician friends who are in the US. But being back in Israel demonstrated to me that my Hebrew is not quite what it used to be,” he laughs. (Jerusalem Post)