NEW YORK — With a little help from the Beatles, the slumping video game industry is hoping for a sales resurrection this fall.

The season gets a late-summer start today, with the release of "Guitar Hero 5," a game featuring music from the Rolling Stones, Nirvana and other popular bands. Then on Sept. 9 comes the launch of "The Beatles: Rock Band," which marks the rock icons' debut in a video game.

Plagued by the recession and a lackluster game release schedule for much of this year, the video game industry has fallen into a slump — the first once since the latest game consoles, the Xbox 360, the Wii and the PlayStation 3, were launched in 2005 and 2006.

The music genre — the second-most popular category behind action games — has suffered in particular, though that's partly because it's been so popular in the past couple of years that it needs exceptional sales just to stay even. According to the NPD Group, U.S. retail sales in the music and dance game genre were nearly $390 million less at the end of July than at the same time last year.

Music games invite you to play and sing along to real tunes, offering on-screen cues about when to finger guitarlike plastic controllers or hit touch-sensitive drums. When the game is played well, the songs sound pretty good.

"You just get into it — it feels like you're in a real band. It's like you're really on stage," said Marquez Alexander, 14, who bought two sports games yesterday at a GameStop store near San Francisco's Union Square. He said he plans to pester his mother to buy him the new Beatles game — even though he barely knows the band.

"I never heard of them until I was like 7. It's just another game, another challenge," he said.

While John Lennon may have boasted the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, time will tell whether today's video game fans feel that way. The "Rock Band" game will cost $60, typical for a big release, but there also will be a $250 version with "limited edition" instruments resembling the ones the Fab Four used.