FACT: No other videogame comes as close to making players feel like true rock stars as Guitar Hero and its sequels. Yet as satisfying as nailing a face-melting riff in Freebird might be, there’s always been one obstacle that interferes with the immersiveness of the experience: the guitar peripheral itself.

Indeed, as much as we adore Guitar Hero and want its babies, there can be no denying that the replica guitar controllers you use to play the game are closer to what you’d see in Fisher Price’s Fall line-up, rather than an actual axe. They’re very, very plastic, two-thirds the size of the real thing, and thus fall short of completely satisfying our rock god fantasies.

Enter Art Guitar, a firm that specialises in custom designed real guitars. Its latest project is the AG Riff Master Guitar Controller, an actual guitar that’s been gutted and adapted to play any Guitar Hero game on the PlayStation 2. It uses the innards of the official Harmonix Guitar Hero controller, and comes with a neck built from natural rosewood and with the original tuning pegs still in place. In other words, this puppy is the ultimate Guitar Hero controller, and only for the hardcore.

They’re not out yet, but you can pre-order them here. Just make sure you have the necessary $399 (£197 / €287) ready for when Art Guitar comes a-knockin’.