I know GameStop isn’t usually regarded as the pinnacle of information in the video game industry, but it has been proven on more than one occasion that the retailer often gets information about game releases and cancellations before they are announced to the general public. That’s why the fact that GameStop has pulled Guitar Hero: Van Halen from its computer only a couple of months after it first showed up is worthy of suspicion. Not only is the game no longer reservable, but GameStop’s website also has no listing for it. Van Halen was pretty much confirmed both by the listing and a trailer shown during E3, and Activision stated in early May that it would be out in the second half of 2009. Does this mean that the game was canceled, or is it something else entirely?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly broken-hearted by this news, but it is a little strange. Even if no release date was made official, GameStop typically uses placeholder dates in order to promote reserves, and it seems unlikely that they would remove it entirely unless they had a good reason. Furthermore, Activision seemed dead set on getting out as many Guitar Hero games as possible this year, and it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to slap together a few dozen Van Halen tracks and put them on a disc.

At this point it is merely speculation that anything is wrong with Guitar Hero: Van Halen, but like I said, GameStop computers can reveal things that have yet to be announced. We've contacted Activision for their inevitable "no comment", and we'll continue to obsessively study GameStop’s reserve lists.