The opening orchestral intro scrolls down. You hit a few green notes. "This is easy," you think. You sip your Monster Energy. Mistake.

If you’ve scrolled through Clone Hero charts for more than ten minutes, you’ve seen it. Buried between the DragonForce speed runs and the 2000s pop punk bangers sits a file simply labeled: Canon Rock (JerryC ver.) .

Fast forward twenty years. JerryC is a successful producer (he wrote "Little Apple" ), but his legacy lives on in Clone Hero . While real guitarists struggle with the sweeping sections, Clone Hero players have turned it into a . The Clone Hero Experience Loading up Canon Rock on Expert is a rite of passage. Here is the typical three-stage breakdown:

So go ahead. Download the chart. Turn up the speed mod to 150%. Miss every other note. It’s fine. Pachelbel is rolling in his grave, but JerryC is smiling somewhere in Taipei.

Why You Can’t Escape Canon Rock in Clone Hero (And Why You Should Stop Trying)

Here is why Johann Pachelbel’s 17th-century chord progression is the ultimate boss fight of the Clone Hero universe. In 2005, a Taiwanese university student named JerryC recorded a video in his bedroom. He took Pachelbel’s sedate wedding march and cranked the gain to 11. The result was Canon Rock —a sweaty, tapping, whammy-bar-diving monster that became the first viral guitar cover on YouTube.