Video Games Live (Dundee)
Video Games Live is a concert featuring the music from various well-known games. VGL is touring the world and at the time of writing, has just performed at the Caird Hall in Dundee. The Dundee concert involved the Dundee University choir performing along side the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
The main host of the concert is Tommy Tallarico who according to the VGL website "has won over 45 industry awards for best video game audio and has worked on more than 275 game titles" as well as having 3 Guinness World Records.
The conductor for the VGL concert is Jack Wall who's "composing credits include Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dungeon Siege II, Rise of the Kasai and Wrath Unleashed among others".
The quality of the music was fantastic throughout and the list of music played was Mario, Zelda, Halo, Final Fantasy, Warcraft, Sonic, Metal Gear Solid, Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Megaman, Castlevania, Metroid, God of War and to much awe music from StarCraft 2. The concert started with a compilation of different arcade themes which then moved onto Metal Gear Solid. The list mentioned played with One Winged Angel (FF7) being played last, however an encore ensued and Castlevania finished off the night.
At points during the concert there was audience participation. The first to happen was where a random audience member was picked and had the chance of winning a home arcade system that played over 5000 different arcade games. What they had to do was win a round of space invaders with a twist. They were given a black T-Shirt with the green picture of the thing they controlled on the back. Their movement was being tracked and they had to move along the stage to move on screen. Sadly they didn't manage to pass (they never shot the end ones) and the prize wasn't won, however they did go home with a bag of goodies. The second event was the result of a competition that had happened just before the concert began. There was a guitar hero aerosmith competition and the winner would then end up on stage for the second event. The winner (only 14 years old) went on stage for the chance to win some prizes. They had to score 125k on Sweet Emotion on hard. Instead he upped the difficulty to expert to much applause. However this game would be different. Instead of listening to the music from the game, the orchestra and Tommy on the guitar played it instead. The young gamer passed the challenge while being cheered on with great ecstasy from the crowd.
Unaware of what was going to happen during the concert, we were treated to Martin Leung throughtout the concert who is most commonly know on the internet for playing mario on the piano blindfolded. On his first appearance he played a compilation of different Final Fantasy tunes including To Zanarkand, Aerith's Theme and more. His second act in the concert was to perform his famous blindfolded mario piece which was even better than the video we had all seen on the internet. Right after playing blindfolded he played quick pieces of music requested by the audience which included more mario, tetris and monkey island. His final showing on stage was to play the organ during the Castlevania piece with the orchestra.
(Martin Leung)
The whole concert was absolutely fantastic and I am pretty sure everyone else would agree. It was great to see people who never really had much of a care for videogames being wowed at the quality of music being played. From what we were told, every concert they had done was different as they had over 60 different segments they could play however there was only room for 18. After looking through the website to see what other segments they could have played, I would have personally prefered to hear the Beyond Good and Evil music instead of the Metroid piece. Every segment had video to accompany it as well as lighting to set the mood of the piece.
On a final note, if you have the chance to see the world tour of VGL I would definately not give up the opportunity to do so. A definate must for anybody, gamer or not.
(http://videogameslive.com/)
. The concert was just too good to pass up reviewing it! Glad I had no uni today though ><