…A night at the symphony.  The audience arrives at the luxurious Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.  The house is packed out for a one night only performance featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.  The newly constructed 2,265-seat hall is packed out.  Not a seat left unattended; tickets sold out in just 3 days– months prior to the event. On the evening of May 10, 2004, the audience awaits in feverish anticipation as the conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya raises his baton to play the piece Liberi Fatali written by composer Nobuo Uematsu.Why all the excitement?  The piece was from Uematsu’s soundtrack of the video game Final Fantasy VIII. A once-in-a-lifetime event at the time in the United States.

There was a time in the not so distant past that video games were limited by software.  “Real music” wasn’t possible in the early days of console gaming.  All of that changed with the introduction of the CD-ROM.  I’m willing to bet most of you have never tapped into this somewhat new genre of music.  Maybe you’ve just never thought of it existing. The complexities of video game music have changed so much that it’s become nearly indistinguishable from concert hall symphonies and movie scores.  I say “nearly” because I have a bias to gaming music. I find gaming music in MOST cases to be far superior to the world of movie scores I had come to love and appreciate in my teens (I’m looking at you John Williams and James Horner).  My music library has significantly changed over the last 15 years, evolving into a rich world of moody, melodramatic, powerfully intense sound.  Unlike most movie tracks, gaming doesn’t have as much of the same time limits to scores as cinema. Composers can quite literally tell an entire story in just one track. Take Jeremy Soule for instance.  If you pulled up the Elder Scrolls V, Skyrim soundtrack (do yourself the favor and go now!) on YouTube, you’ll find in some cases the streaming of 10+ hours of ambiance.  It’s glorious. While I’m a huge fan of Jeremy Soule and his work composing all the Elder Scrolls music, it doesn’t stop there.  Halo, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect, the Legend of Zelda, Dragon Age, Final Fantasy… the list goes on.

Gaming music isn’t passive, it is a major factor in the foreground of the game.  The purpose of music is to move you in some way, to evoke emotion and make you feel. If you have a passion for music, and even if you are just curious, I urge you to give listening a try. This genre is an undiscovered trove of buried treasure waiting on you to find it. I guarantee you will never see a video game the same way again.

*See something you like? Click here to access the catalog to place a hold on gaming materials.

**For further reading on the Evolution of Video Game Music, check out the NPR article that helped inspire this post.