By Melissa Beall
Published: February 20, 2010
Print
Email
 Tommy Tallarico is an icon to any one with a love of video games or modern classical music, and to those with a love of both he is a veritable god. Despite having no musical training beyond playing his parents' piano as a kid, Tallarico was able to virtually infiltrate the video game industry and compose for nearly 300 games, winning over 35 industry awards and establishing his own namesake studio which has become the largest audio production house in the multimedia world. While these accomplishments on their own would certainly be amazing, Tallarico, with conducter Jack Wall, have gone on to create the phenomenon that is Video Games Live, an orchestral rock experience, utilizing the music, images, and raw emotion of video games to create an immersive experience like no other. The concert, if it can be called such, has gone on to repeat world-wide tours and untold success, introducing those in the video game world to the experience of the symphony and vice-versa, letting worlds collide for a spectacular musical outcome.
STR: I know that you've composed for a lot of video games; what would you say is your background in music and video games?
TT: I've been a video game composer for over 20 years and worked on over 275 video games – I'm actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for the person who's worked on the most video games! And when I first started out, it was just a bunch of bleeps and bloops, and then in the mid-nineties, CD-Roms became available as a storage medium, we kind of went from little cartridges and bleeps and bloops to live instruments, but the reality is that the industry really didn't change until the turn of the century when the budgets finally caught up to what we could do technologically. But even some of the earlier games I've worked on, one of those games being “Earthworm Jim” which was a really fun game, and later on a game called “Advent Rising” which is probably one of my most favorite games to have composed for, because it was really the first time I'd worked with a 100-piece symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and I wrote it kind of like an Italian opera. But, for me, growing up, my two greatest loves were always video games and music, but I never thought to ever put the two together, because there was no such thing as a video game composer in the seventies.
So it wasn't until I moved out to California from the East Coast when I turned 21. I got a job at a music store, and the first person who walked in the first week I was in California worked at a video game company and I was wearing a video game tee-shirt that day. I was hired as a games tester and I would bug the vice president of the company every day to let me write music when they needed it. I kinda learned how to do it and I've been doing it ever since! I never had any formal music training at all; my parents had a piano in the house. My parents were a product of the fifties so I grew up banging out “Great Balls of Fire” and Elvis Presley's “Jail House Rock,” and things like that to show off in front of my parents. Then in 1977, when I heard the score to “Star Wars,” I was about nine years old. That really affected me. I started paying attention to symphonies and orchestral music. So it was because of pop culture that I was interested in the masters like Beethoven, Mozart, those type of folks, and I think you're seeing the same thing happen nowadays with video games. Many people are coming to our shows and concerts, young people, and it's the first time they're experiencing a symphony live. We get so many emails and letters from parents after the show saying, “We were really blown away by the whole thing and my eight-year-old daughter at the breakfast table this morning said, 'Mom, I wanna start taking violin lessons so I can learn the music to Final Fantasy.'” Just like “Star Wars” and pop culture had an effect on me when I was a kid, I think you hear the same thing happening now with video games and Video Games Live.
STR: What made you go from composing video games to wanting to do something like Video Games Live; to make it a big, epic event?
TT: My goal in creating Video Games Live was that I wanted to prove to the world how culturally significant and artistic have become. My goal was to create a show for everybody. To describe Video Games Live is all the greatest video game music played by a full symphony and choir but what makes it special and unique is that everything is completely synchronized. The big, massive video screens, and rock n' roll lighting, special effects, and the stage-show production, interactive elements with the crowd; I like to describe it as having all of the power and emotion of a symphony orchestra but combined with the energy and excitement of a rock concert, mixed together with all of the cutting edge visuals and technology, interactivity and fun that video games provide. You don't have to know a thing about video games to come on out to the show and be entertained. In fact, it's the non-gamers who come to the show who are the ones most blown away because they had no idea! They might be bringing their kids along, grandmothers bringing their grandson for the first time. People are just interested in seeing a new form of entertainment, and they're the people who are most surprised, like, “Wow! I never knew the graphics are so incredible these days; I never knew that video game music was this emotional! I get it now! Now I know why my kids are so much into video games.” That was really the goal from the beginning. It's great that here we are, touring for five years, and we play all over the world. The last couple shows were in China and Taiwan, playing to tens of thousands of people, all over the world. It's a very big even in those countries. I think it says a lot for how far the game industry has come, and of course, video game music. When you can take a show like this anywhere in the world – we play Brazil every year, and Mexico, New Zealand, and all over Europe – to be able to take it anywhere in the world and have it be a popular thing, it says a lot about how far the industry has come, and where it's going.
1
2
|
Next Page »
View Comments (0)
« Back
|
Sorry, your account does not have access to post comments.