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Play the Game
Videogame scores have come a long way since the blips and beeps of the '80s.
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By Tiffany Maleshefski

Photo Credit: Gautier Deblonde
A videogame’s joystick has become akin to a conductor’s baton, commanding and inspiring the hearts and souls of composers in the same way seasonal changes stirred Vivaldi. Considered the pioneer in this emerging musical genre, the London Symphony Orchestra made headlines for daring to venture into what most consider thousands of degrees removed from Bach and Mozart when it recorded the soundtrack for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, a wildly popular game released in 2003.

The orchestra actually garnered a large amount of praise for what many regarded as a sumptuous and lyrical soundtrack worthy of the long-considered elite orchestra’s talents. “Video games are trying to create a little atmosphere now and therefore have very high production qualities,” says Chaz Jenkins, head of LSO Live, the orchestra’s recording label.

Gone are the days of the singular blips and beeps that once defined videogames. Advancements in videogame platforms offer the kind of sound quality found on a CD or MP3 player, while game platforms, such as the Xbox, boast a surround-sound format that simulates a cinematic experience.

Orchestras throughout the world are beginning to recognize not only the artistic and sophisticated compositional values in the emerging complexity of videogame music scores, but also are finding it a surefire way to fill concert-hall seats.

“The orchestras and arrangers that are working on these pieces have done a really great job of using all the voices in the orchestra,” says Arnie Roth, conductor of the Chicagoland Pops. “If I had to compare it, it would be along the lines of really great music scores.”

Without compromising artistic integrity, Roth says, videogame scores have struck upon a winning formula that appeals to both the creative and business sides of symphony orchestras.

The now-famous Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy concert, conducted by Roth, debuted with a highly-audible bang in 2004, and sold out its first scheduled concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic within three days; a total of 4,300 seats.

More than just a crowd-pleaser, Roth adds, the score’s artistic value is significant and moves beyond the bombastic quality that videogame music tends to inspire, due to the large volume of fight scenes typically comprising a game’s content.

“It’s a big body of music that goes from 1987 through today,” Roth says, adding that the Final Fantasy program showcases several lyrical themes.

That concert’s success inspired a nine-city concert tour led by Roth, who has gone on to head up the new videogame music-concert series called Play!, now on its worldwide tour.

Dear Friends also spawned a similar series titled Video Game Live in 2005, a series that upped the ante and offered concert-goers laser-light shows and actors reenacting fight scenes, among other things.

Surprisingly, that series failed to win over gamers, while it faced problems securing rights for several different game platforms. It was forced to cancel its tour after only a handful of shows. The organizers are re-thinking the program and hope to launch a North American tour in 2006. Roth contends that Video Game Live tried to do too much. “The crux of this is that the fans wanted to hear the music,” Roth says. “The fans have played the games; they know what it looks like. To hear it orchestrated as a full symphony score is what was fascinating to them.”

The gamer contingent also shows signs of being the ultimate cross-over audience, a highly sought-after demographic that orchestras have chased for years, and one that Roth believes is likely to make a return visit to concert halls to hear the standard classical repertoire as well.

Meanwhile, classical composers are getting in on the game, too, seeing videogames as a fresh outlet for their creations, with videogame producers lending a very eager ear. Richard Jacques, the award-winning composer, penned the orchestral score for Empire Interactive’s Starship Troopers, the newly released videogame based on the 1998 Tristar movie of the same name. “It was inevitable that this would happen,” Jacques notes. “After the CD-ROM media became widespread in the video-game industry, we started to see a number of live musicians being involved with game soundtracks.”

A self-described “avid gamer,” Jacques is a classically trained musician who played in traditional symphony orchestras for 20 years. “I knew that the old stigmas and preconceptions of video-game music would soon be outdated,” he says. “This was, indeed, the case and now video-game music is becoming as popular as many other forms of music.”
This article also appears in Strings, Issue #137




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