The city of New York must have a lot of time on its hands. After all, they have enough time to spare to declare today, Sept. 26, 2007, as Guitar Hero day throughout the city.

Never mind that Guitar Hero III doesn't actually come out until Oct. 28, or that the original game came out on Nov. 7, 2005. Never mind that publisher Activision is based in Santa Monica and developer Neversoft is from Westlake Village, CA. Never mind that the city saw a massive publicity blitz for another game as recently as yesterday.

Forget all that... "fans are ready to rock the streets of Manhattan," according to the press Activision press release, with "thousands ... expected to gather in celebration of the day, with guitar controllers in hand." This is kind of surprising to us, seeing as we hadn't even heard about the event before today, but we suppose getting thousands of people together on short notice can't be too hard in a city of millions.

Apparently, the day is just "one of many Guitar Hero events taking place in New York City this week," including an opportunity for members of the public to actually play Guitar Hero III at the DigitalLife festival starting tomorrow. So while we're generally against pointless publicity stunts like this, we suppose we can turn a blind eye given the public demo. Citizens of New York, do yourselves a favor and go check it out.