According to Rob Kay, the game's Lead Designer, the idea of "Guitar Hero" was directly inspired by Konami's "Guitar Freaks" arcade game, where the player used a guitar-shaped controller to interact with the game. At the time, "GuitarFreaks" had not seen much exposure in North America. RedOctane was making dance pads for games like "Dance Dance Revolution" for home consoles and also operated an online video rental service similar to Netflix. RedOctane's Kai and Charles Huang recognized the popularity of "GuitarFreaks" in Japan through their rental service, and planned to create guitar controllers to bring the game to North America. The Huangs raised $1.75 million for the effort, despite being turned down by some investors who "thought [the idea] was too weird". Greg Fischbach, one of the founders of Acclaim Entertainment, noted, regretfully several years later, they had passed on "Guitar Hero", questioning "Who's going to buy a peripheral like that?" The Huangs approached Harmonix, who had previously made music video games such as "Frequency", "Amplitude" and "Karaoke Revolution" about making a guitar-based video game for those controllers. With a budget of about one million dollars (which Kay noted was "pretty tiny for a video game"), the two companies worked together to develop "Guitar Hero". Kay noted that "No one had any notions about it being a massive success; we all just thought it would be fun to do." Harmonix's president Alex Rigopulos also claims that former Microsoft vice-president of game publishing Ed Fries indirectly influenced the game's creation, who had previously told Harmonix when they were pitching "Frequency" to Microsoft that no music-rhythm game would succeed without custom hardware for it, prompting Rigopulos to investigate the "Guitar Hero" opportunity when it arose.