This summer, video game music is coming to London’s famed Royal Albert Hall. As part of the BBC Proms — a summer concert series founded in 1895 — music from The Legend of Zelda, Battlefield 2042 and other well-known titles will regale audiences who might be more used to pieces from Brahms and Beethoven.
In an interview with The Guardian, Proms director David Pickard said it wasn’t the right moment to previously include game music until now.
“Now we can be there on the front foot and say that there’s a huge range of music here, appealing to a new audience and of a very high quality that we’re really happy to have at the Proms,” Pickard said.
The Proms are late to the, ahem, game. Video game music has been incredible for decades. But it wasn’t always that way.
Initially, video games were silent — the first home console, 1972’s Magnavox Odyssey, didn’t even have sound — but by the mid-1970s, basic music abounded in video games. Walking down the street in Tokyo and Osaka in 1978, people could hear the frantic, pulsating sounds from uber-popular Space Invader cabinets. That same year, Yellow Magic Orchestra sampled game music from Space Invaders as well as Circus and Gun Fight for its highly influential self-titled studio album; the double A-side “Computer Game / Firecracker” was a top 20 hit in the U.K.
During the 1980s, advances in home consoles meant a new generation growing up with the Super Mario Bros. theme in their heads (even though it was only possible for the Famicom to play three notes at a time). Still, some composers like Koichi Sugiyama of Dragon Quest fame turned to orchestral interpretations on CDs for high-quality productions of their chip-tune works. That was no longer necessary by the late 1980s when video games started moving from cartridges to discs with higher storage capacities.
This not only meant better graphics but bigger sound. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games, for example, roped in major pop stars like Faye Wong and Hikaru Utada to sing their iconic theme songs.
Over the past few decades, video game concerts with music performed by live orchestras have attracted audiences comprised of hardcore gamers and music aficionados alike. For many in the video game music industry — like Tokyo-based vocalist Donna Burke, whose work has appeared in the popular Metal Gear Solid series and who also voices the shinkansen’s English-language announcements — the growth of live performances comes as no surprise.
“Game music is so very specific,” Burke tells The Japan Times. “It evokes strong emotions and memories of the game and what the characters were going through. And in gaming, you were the character in a lot of instances.”
The Proms are a big stage for game music but hardly the biggest. The opening ceremonies of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics set athletes’ entrances to game music. Instantly recognizable tunes from series like Chrono Trigger, Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy filled the Japan National Stadium.
Avid gamers likely noticed, but what about their non-gaming counterparts? Ideally, we’re not far away from the day when music found in video games earns the kind of acclaim that music elsewhere already does.
“Now that cut scenes are so beautifully rendered and visually movie-like, game music has transcended just being opening and closing theme songs and action sequences,” says Burke. “We’ll know there’s not much difference when we see Harry Styles or Taylor Swift doing a theme for a game that wins a Grammy for best song!”
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