Play! A Video Game Symphony

If Play! ever comes to a symphony hall near you, I highly suggest you attend. It's a world tour of full orchestras and choirs performing video game music with visuals. Even if you're not a huge video game fan, the music really is quite excellent, spectacular even, and nostalgic for some scores. I attended the Seattle Symphony's two weeks ago (ages, I know, and I've been duly chastised for not writing more often) and it was fantastic. I enjoyed every note and every visual, and it was so much fun reliving some classic childhood video game moments with my friends, like the feather in Super Mario World.

The entire concert was about 2 and a half hours, with an intermission in between, and the set was quite substantial. They played the big ones such as (a medley of) Super Mario Brothers & World, of course, Halo, Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy (There were 4 suites from Final Fantasy alone, I think, but they didn't show any visuals for it...perhaps couldn't get the rights?? Major bummer.). They also played Sonic the Hedgehog, Metal Gear Solid, World of Warcraft, Chrono Trigger/Cross, Kingdom Hearts, Shenmue, Silent Hill, Battlefield 1942, Guild Wars and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I wish they had played Morrowind (III) instead of Oblivion for the Seattle performance; I love its gorgeous sweeping scores and the whole epic quality of it.

There were 2 special guests that Thursday night: Marty O'Donnell, composer for Halo and , and Jeremy Soule, composer for The Elder Scrolls III and IV and Guild Wars. OMG it's Jeremy Soule!! When the conductor introduced him to the crowd, I was amongst many craning my neck (we were sitting in the balcony) trying to catch a glimpse of him. I didn't, though, and neither did I see him after the performance. Marty was sitting at a table meeting people but I wasn't terribly interested in meeting him and would've preferred meeting Jeremy. That would've been SO awesome.

Some observations:
- WOW, Chrono Trigger/Cross and Shenmue were surprisingly (to me) good.
- Silent Hill was a lot more rock 'n' roll than I'd expected.
- those anime-style games (i.e. Final Fantasy, Shenmue) sure love their wings.
- whoever they hired to play Super Mario World for the visuals kind of sucked.
- it really was too bad that they didn't have visuals for Final Fantasy, as I would've liked to have seen Cloud and his lovely head of luscious hair. (Too bad real men's hair don't come like that.)
- it is as inevitable as the rain in Seattle that at such events, one has to ignore the annoying geeks in the adjacent seats spouting on and on about Halo and outright dismissing all the other music. Oh, shut up already for *censored* sake.
- and then there are those people who dress for this as if they're going to SakuraCon. This is the symphony, not an anime convention people! There is a time and place for such things and a symphony at Benaroya Hall is not one of them.