MSP @ Video Games Live

BN – So what can we expect from the show tonight?

JW – Madness.

TT – Video Games Live is all the greatest video game music of all time played by a symphony and choir and what makes it really unique is it’s completely synchronised with all the video, all the lights, they’re all synchronised – special effects, stage show production, interactivity with the crowd where we call people up on stage and they play a game while the orchestra plays the music and changes it in real time on the fly. I like to say that Video Games Live is the power and motion of a symphony orchestra combined with the excitement and energy of a rock concert, mixed in with the cutting edge visuals, technology, interactivity and fun that video games provide. Or something like that... (laughs)

BN – Do you guys feel like it’s helped push video games and game music out there to more people – especially people that might not have paid much attention to them before?

JW – Tommy’s been doing this for 18 years, me for 12, and we both came from different backgrounds. I came from making records and things like that. When I first played the game Myst back in 1994, that was my turning point. That’s when I started to notice video games again - I grew up playing the old arcades – and I thought oh wow, the music has really changed. We get emails from all over the world from people saying “where can I hear this music?”, so Tommy and I said ‘how can we get this music out to the people’ – and then the concept of doing one concert came up. We were very naive – we thought we’d do one concert, record it, release the DVD and everybody’ll have their music... but it turned into a tour. We’re quite proud of how parents actually view what we’re doing and how it bridges the generation gap between them. I mean, maybe the parents play games too, but it’s also a way to connect with the kids that come out to see the show.

TT – It’s one of the reasons we created the show the way we did, with the synchronised video, with the synchronised lighting, with the interactivity, with the pre-show festival. We created this so that non-games out there could follow along and enjoy it just as much as the hardcore gamers – and that’s one thing that differentiates what we’re doing from anyone else in the world trying to do game concerts or whatever. It’d be easy for us to just sit there and play the music with a choir and an orchestra, but that’s catering to hardcore gamers and that’s it really. The most positive feedback we get will be tomorrow morning, all of the Mums that brought their kids, the grandmothers that brought their grandsons and granddaughters, or maybe the girlfriends that got dragged there by the boyfriends – they’re the ones that we’re going to get the best emails from tomorrow going ‘oh my gosh, I never knew that video game music was so powerful and emotional’, ‘I never knew that the visuals were so stunning, and the characters and storylines were so deep’, ‘I get it now. Now I know why my kids are so into video games’ – and that’s the reason we put this thing together. To answer your question yeah, the first year we did three shows, the second year we did 11 shows, this year we’re doing about 35 shows, next year we’re doing about 60 shows, so you can see it’s growing from where we started in LA to spreading all over the world. This year alone we’ve played in Korea, three weeks in Brazil, New Zealand, Spain, here we are in the UK, all over the US and Canada – next year we’re going to hit Asia and Australia and all the rest of Europe and everywhere we can go. It’s spreading like crazy, but non-gamers are going to it. That’s why we created it the way we did. It took Cirque du Soleil 7 years to get to where it was. We’re in year 2 and a half, so imagine where we’ll be in seven years from now. Selling out Wembley 2010! Come see the show!

BN – Its every gamers fantasy isn’t it – you’re playing Bioshock or something and it’s sounding good on my little speakers... just imagine it in a big hall!

TT – Imagine if it was live and you could experience it with the video and the lights and the sound... Bioshock we’re debuting here tonight and it’s much different than the experience in the game, we take that experience from the game but take it into a live setting, and it’s pretty powerful.

BN – So you put your own creative spin on the games as well?

TT – For the video and the lights yeah. Bioshock’s a perfect example – we’re good friends with the composer, and so we listen to a bunch of music and we put different elements to different parts that some people might recognise.

BN – Have you had much trouble convincing the rest of the games industry that the event is worthwhile?

JW – Oh yes

TT – Three years. It took us three years just to do the first concert – just to get the rights to do it.

JW – We started in 2002 and the first concert was in 2005 and still now some of the companies like Square doesn’t allow us to play video in the show, still, but that’s going to change soon. The cool thing is now that they’ve seen it a couple of times, all the companies and developers are calling us now – like with Bioshock. They called us and said ‘hey, can you put Bioshock in?’

It’s been an educational process, and that’s all we’ve been doing is evangelising the last five/six years on this thing, and we’ve still got a long way to go. Hopefully tonight, a whole load of other people will go out and start evangelising for us as well – ‘man did you see that thing? It was so cool’. Until you see it, it’s hard to understand or explain it in one line. You really have to experience it, and we just want to put on a great show tonight, that’s what it’s all about. Knock it out of the park. Royal Festival Hall probably hasn’t seen stuff like this!

BN – One last question – there are a lot of students out there getting into games development. As co-founders the game audio network guild, organisers of Video Games Live, and game music composers, do you think that enough emphasis is put on the music in video games to young developers, especially now that things like XNA from Microsoft are starting to appear?

TT – Yeah, well I mean, I’ll start by saying that the Exact Engine that Microsoft put together is amazing, because it puts the power of the tools and the technology into the composer or sound designer’s hands. That’s so important.  I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and when I first started out the biggest struggle we had was that we would create this stuff, and then we’d have to sit there with the programmers and work and work and work and get it to try to sound right and sometimes you’d create this amazing piece of music but it’d sound like crap when you’d put it into the system because the technology wasn’t there, the programmer wasn’t there doing the right thing, so Microsoft is a big proponent in getting that power back into the composers and musicians and sound designers hands, which is exactly why you hear games on the 360 – even the Xbox before – I mean, it’s got the most powerful sound engine out of any of the other systems, and it’s because the guys creating that engine were video games composers.

JW – What was the question? (laughs) Yeah, I just finished Mass Effect, and my experience with Bioware, for example, is that a lot of companies are putting a lot of importance on music and audio playback now; it’s almost taking care of its self. A couple of years ago, one of the reasons why Tommy and I did start the Game Audio Network Guild was to really raise awareness about how to get people to pay attention to what other forms of entertainment had already done years ago, because young developers really didn’t know anything about sound design or any of that. Now people are being hired with these companies to actually implement this stuff, so I think it’s happening now at a rapid pace – certainly more than it used to.

BN – Thanks guys, good luck with the show! Any chance of an advance copy of Mass Effect? You know... just to test the music? Guys?