"Tommy and I met, I would say, about... 8, 9 years ago when he asked me to write some music for some games that he was working on." "My whole life, my two greatest loves and passions were video games and music but I never thought to ever put the two together because, you know, growing up in the seventies, there was no such thing as a video game composer" "You get so many requests from people all over the world to hear this music outside the game for video games, that... you know, we thought, "Wouldn't it be a great idea to do a concert of videogame music?"" "I've been a video game composer for over 20 years, and when I first got in the industry we were dealing with bleeps and bloops, you know, and the history of game music..." "I mean, if you go back to "Pong" in 1972, it was... you know, that was it, for a long time." "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage video game composer and co-creator of Video Games Live..." "Tommy Tallarico." "I like to describe Video Games Live as... having all of the power and emotion of a symphony orchestra... combined with the energy and excitement of a rock concert... mixed together with all the cutting-edge visuals and technology... and interactivity and fun that video games provide." "I know you." "Your past, your future." "This is the way the world ends." "As a composer, I mean, it's one of the most amazing things to see your music on stage performed live and to hear... hear audiences cheering for it, and..." "I mean, I'll never forget the first time it happened." "Video Games Live was doing a performance at the Hollywood Bowl... you know, the lights went down and the opening notes to my Civilization music started playing and the audience already started cheering... and they had already heard this music, even though this was the first time" "it was being played live, and... it was just an overwhelming feeling." "One of my favorite things in the world when we do the show... is when parents come up to me and say..." ""I am so glad you're doing this for my kid."" ""I never knew that video games were this amazing!" and..." ""It's such a great thing for me to be able to bring my kid to the symphony who'd never wanted to see the symphony before."" "Advent Rising is probably one of my favorite projects that I've worked on because my whole life all I ever wanted to do is writing an Italian opera." "And this project, you know, gave me the license to do that!" "What is this?" "This is the hope of Aurelia, human." "All that we see is noble and good and pure." "All that we aspire to is held in that symbol." "It is held in you." "I, I never understood." "It is a heavy weight you carry, human." "Apox of history, the tides of war, the blood of nations, all this is laid at your feet." "But, I, I... how can I be possibly held to..." "I mean it's not..." "It is not easy being God." "Part of the fun of Video Games Live doesn't just happen on the stage during the show." "We really want to create an environment where people can come before the show and have some fun as well." "So we have a pre-show festival where... we'll set up game competitions, we'll set up game demonstrations." "We have a fun costume contest where people will come dressed up as characters and we'll put them on stage, and we'll have the audience decide who the winner is before the show... you know, things like prize giveaways and things like that." "In fact, one of the cool things we do is that we have a Guitar Hero competition where all people will come in and they can play Guitar Hero... and the person who has the highest score, we'll bring them up on stage during the show" "to play along, and they have to score a certain amount of points in order to win a prize... while the symphony is playing along with them and I'm playing along on real guitar." "Ethan Schmoltz." "Ethan?" "Where's Ethan?" "Come on up, Ethan." "So, Ethan, what you have to do is score 200,000 points on hard." "Now, if you can do that and... what?" "Expert." " What?" " Expert." " You want it on expert?" " He said expert." "Ok." "Ethan, take it away." "Ethan's Dad" "150!" "160!" "Come on, Ethan!" "Bring it home now!" "Come on!" "170!" "180!" "190!" "Come on, Ethan!" "200!" "Everyone who's seen Avatar and has appreciated the beauty of that vision..." "World of Warcraft has been doing it for a long time." "Those same visions, those same expansive worlds of color and imagination exist in World of Warcraft as much as it does in a movie, if not better, and the next wave is the music, and the music is orchestral." "The music is deep and layered and important." "Some of the greatest comments that we get from our show are from the grandparents who brought the grandkids to the symphony for the first time, or the mom who brought the neighborhood kids, or the girlfriend who's taking her boyfriend out for a night on the symphony." "And those are the people who are most... taken back by what they're hearing and what they're seeing, 'cause they don't expect it, you know." "You know, a lot of people ask "Where were video games created?"" "and "Who created them?" "How did that all happen?"" "Well, the answer to that question... the person considered the father and founder of video game industry is a gentleman by the name of Ralph Baer." "And Ralph Baer..." "Ralph Baer invented something he called The Brown Box back in the 60s it was the first game, and Mr. Baer went out to create the Magnavox Odyssey and... remember the game Simon?" "For all of you old enough to remember Simon... that was one of his as well, it's still..." "still being played today." "Well, we happened to find the very first video, we dug it up it was the first time a videogame had ever been recorded on film." "And this is from back in 1968, 42 years ago." "And we'd like to share that video with ya right now." "oughta" "Here's a ball batting back and forth." "*****, best one yet, courtesy of all CATV station." "Here's my partner, Bill and I are going to play ping-pong with you in a minute." "But before we do, I'd like to show you the controls that we're using which are part the plug-in module, the ping-pong plug module, gaming plug module, I'll be." "All purpose by people ***." "There's a knob here, as you can see, which, when I ****, moves my paddle left or right." "There's a vertical control which moves my paddle up and down." "Right here there's an English knob which allows me to put curves on the ball control the vertical position of the ball as it leaves my paddle." "When I intercept the ball, if I've not missed it, and bat it back to my opponent" "I have control over the ball's vertical position, and that's what the English pad is for and watch me fake him out with it." "There's another control here, the serve knob, which puts the ball into place serves it from my side of the ***." "If I trick him out of the play" "In Bill's position, he's got the same kind but with the button right here pushing the ball coming from that side." " Ready?" " It's on your side." "Is it on my side?" "Okay, lets' go." "Let me move away from the net up here." "Here we go." "One... two... three... and down they go!" "And up they go!" "And down they go!" "Now watch me fake him out." "Ah, didn't do it." "Ah, did it this time." "One... two..." " You wanna score, Bill?" " Sure." "Okay..." "One to nothing." "Here we go." "Up... and down." "And up... he's getting tricky." "Missed it." "One up." "Keep it on the table, Baer." "Here we go." "Faked you out again." "Two to one." "We'll play up to five." " Good show." " Get close to the net, we will go faster." "Two up." "Missed it again." "Three to two." "I guess that makes a ***" "Okay, who else would like to play?" "Why won't you come on in?" "You know..." "Mr. Baer is still alive today." "He's 88 years old." "Eighty-eight years old." "And you know something else?" "He's here tonight in person!" "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the creator, inventor of the video game, Mr. Ralph Baer!" "Tell us, what gave you the inspiration... to create the video game, and what was it all about?" "I'm a TV engineer by degree." "And in 1951 I built a TV set, and even then I had the idea of doing something other than just watching a normal black-and-white TV set." "Well, nothing came of it until much later." "By this time I'm running a big division ***." "I can afford to put a couple of guys in a room and tell them to build something." "So I told them to build something that moves spots around the screen." "Within a couple of weeks of shooting at the screen with light guns and moving spots around with joysticks, then one of the guys came up with the thought of a third component which turned out to be the ball and the ball game," "and the next thing we were playing ping-pong, handball, volleyball..." "Of course by then the question was "Now that we have it, what the hell do we do with it?"" "I have to ask ya..." "Did you ever think all those years ago that it would grow into something as big and as amazing as this?" "That's incredible, yeah..." "Couldn't possibly predict that." "Well, I think I speak for everybody here in the audience tonight when I say thank you so much for creating the industry that we all love so dear and so much, so thank you, Mr. Baer." "Now... now, we've got another surprise, though." "We've got another surprise, cause uh..." "Back there in the 60's, the first original unit... it was called The Brown Box, am I right?" "Well... tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we have a piece of history right here on our stage." "The original Brown Box right there, and what we're gonna do... actually, we're going to pick somebody out of the audience right now to come up and play... the Brown Box against Mr. Baer, so who..." "Who in the audience wants to come up?" "Who'd like to come up and play with... play with Mr. Baer, let me see..." "How about this guy right here?" "Come on, come on up here." "There you go!" "All right now, how're you doing?" " Good." "And what's your name?" " Paul." "Paul." "You're almost as tall as us!" "Wow." "Here we go." "We're gonna play to three." "Are you ready?" "Ok, there we go." "That looks familiar." "There we go." "Mr. Baer is on the left." "There we go." "Here's one, get it up, oh!" "That's tough, see?" "You thought your Halo game was pretty good, but he's beating you." "Thought you were pretty good." "There you go, here's one." "There you go, that's... okay." "Invisible walls there." "We still haven't fixed that in video game industry." "Okay, here we go." "Here's to two, okay." "He faked him out, he faked him out!" "All right, let's go one more." "One more, next one wins." "Here we go." "There you go, hit it." "Whoa, that's nice, that's good." "Whoa, that's okay, here you go, that's alright." "Well, you beat him." "There you go, congratulations." "Good job." "Tell you what we've got." "There, we got..." "We got Mr. Baer to sign a Video Games Live poster for ya, so there you go." "Put that up on your wall." "You can tell your friends about it." "All right, we thank Mr. Baer so much." "Can we give him a round of applause right now?" "One more time." "There he is, right here, Mr. Ralph Baer." "One of the cool things for me personally... is that my wife Cindy and my 13 year old daughter Gracie, they both toured with the show, and it's always a tremendous thrill for me to have my family with me" "at my side, as I'm conducting they come up and sing." "It's been a really rewarding experience to be involved in all of this." "Tonight I have my family." "My wife Cindy Shapiro... my daughter Gracie Wall, so... thank you." "This is our 150th show... and we're here with a lot of great people putting on a great show and we're excited for everybody to see this thing." "The overarching style for the God of War score... starting with God of War 1, the main directive was for it to be as brutal... and oppressive as possible." "They really wanted the music to convey... the lead character, Kratos... his rage, his need for revenge... and his feeling that he would only be redeemed through revenge." "I thought, "This is greek mythology"... so I called up my Greek pal Kostos and said..." ""What are the words in Greek for revenge and redemption?"" "which happened to be "ekthikisi" and "litrosi"." "So I took those two words and the rhythms that come from those words and used those as the basis for the theme." "So those rhythms "ekthikisi litrosi"" "that's what you hear when you hear the main Kratos theme... the rhythm of the Greek words "revenge" and "redemption"." "Please welcome the "Video Game Pianist" Mr. Martin Leung." "Now, when Martin made his video, he posted it on the Internet, in this video he's playing blindfold piano, played Mario, over 40 million people or something saw that video, and... you know, a lot of people thought that maybe he was faking it," "you know, they said "Oh, he can see through the blindfold!", or" ""He sped up the tape" and all that kind of stuff, well..." "I happen to bring one of these here tonight." "So who wants to see him doing it live then?" "Do you?" "Well, if that's the case, here, you hold this for me, Martin." "Okay now, uh..." "Martin?" "Can you see?" "Do you have any final last words?" "What's up, New Orleans?" "Leave it to him." "Oh man." "Martin, hold on, hold on." "Hold on, Martin." "Where are you going?" "I think these guys like you." "I just..." "Am I right?" "How about one more from Martin Leung, one more time?" "You know Martin, earlier tonight... the orchestra did the classic version of Tetris." "How about the Nintendo version?" "I think these guys would love that." "Here we go." ""Lament of the Highborne"came to be almost by accident." "I had been creating music for this part of the game that involved the Blood Elves." "It was a new race we introduced with the Burning Crusade and something really unique in World of Warcraft." "Of the 8,000 plus quests that you can do in World of Warcraft there's this one, special one... and the reward at the end, it's not loot, it's not epic armor or anything like that." "The reward is this song... and it's really resonated well with our players and it's been such a pleasure to have it performed at Video Games Live over these last couple of years." "This is the first time in music history where tens of thousands of young people... are coming out to see a symphony." "I think that's one of the most exciting things for us is knowing that so many millions of people around the world are getting turned on to a whole new genre of music that they didn't really have any idea about." "And that's really cool for me." "Ladies and gentlemen!" "Boys and girls!" "Please put your hands together for the one and only" "Castlevania!"