In celebration of tonight’s premiere (in some areas) of Video Games Live on PBS, we’ve gone and transcribed my June interview with Video Games Live co-creator Tommy Tallarico, who I’m sure is enjoying his BBQ at home right now in celebration of the event! In case you want to be able to read it all at your own pace or in case you missed the video as part of our E3 2010 coverage last month, a full transcription of the interview can be found just past the break.
Again, you can check out the special on your local PBS station, and you can check a partial listing of air times on the Video Games Live website.
Christian Ponte: Hi, everyone! I’m Christian Ponte and I’m here with Tommy Tallarico. He’s a video game music composer, sound engineer, and he’s the founder and Mr. Everything of Video Games Live! How are you doing today?
Tommy Tallarico: I’m doing fabulous!
CP: You’re doing fabulous. You’ve got a lot going [on] with E3 and everything… I know you had two shows in Dallas just recently?
TT: Whoooo! Yeah, just flew back from Dallas yesterday, we did two shows with the Dallas Symphony, and I had to fly back last night. I was working on a new segment for Video Games Live that we’re debuting on Thursday [June 17, 2010]. I stayed up all night long, drove here, and now I’m at E3 here for the whole week, [with] back-to-back meetings from 8 in the morning ’til midnight, and then we have the show on Thursday. Then all in between that, after that I’m doing the final editing for the PBS show, and the DVD, and our album, and… I love it!
CP: I hear ya! It’s all worth it.
TT: I’m not complaining! Greatest job in the world!
CP: I want to talk a little bit first about game music in general. You’ve done a lot of interviews, and fans can check on your website and things like that about what you do and [what] Video Games Live [is]. Can you talk about how video game music has evolved in the twenty years since you’ve gotten involved in the industry?
TT: Yeah, you know when I first started out, it was a bunch of bleeps and bloops, and that’s what we had to deal with. I think that’s a positive thing that came from that era. When you only had three or four voices to work in, some of the greatest video game music of our generation came during that time. Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, Metroid, right? And Tetris. When you only have three or four voices to work with, it has to be melodic, it has to be great, or else it gets annoying really quick, you know?
Then, in the mid-’90s when CD-ROMs became available as a storage medium, we were able to start to doing live instruments and live music and this and that. [That was] a huge leap forward. But then the reality is is that the budgets didn’t really catch up to the technology until the turn of the century, and that’s when you started to get games’ music like Halo, Warcraft, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, and the bigger Final Fantasy stuff, and things like that. That’s great as well.
I love both eras: the old school era and the new school. I think there’s great music and crappy music in both, you know? They both have their pluses and minuses. I like to kind of take that mentality when I write video game scores today. I like to take that mentality that I had twenty years ago, which is, “OK, let’s pretend I only have three or four voices, because it’s all about melody. That’s the most important thing of any song — that hook, that motif. The opening of Halo. [sings chant melody] Those notes. You can create all sorts of music from that once you have that hook in there. So I’m fortunate to have been around in those early days to kind of learn that way of thinking and then bring it forward into the modern times.
CP: You’ve talked a lot about how video game music differs from… a lot of people compare it to soundtracks, movie soundtracks. Can you about how different they are in terms of video game music being a dynamic art?
TT: There’s a bunch of differences between film and television [compared to video games]. The first of all is that film music, for the most part, is considered a “background” music or “incidental” music, and the reason for that is that films… they’re linear. They’re also stories, right? In a film you’re telling a story, and the way to do that is through dialogue. People are talking all the time through this linear piece of media, whether it’s film or television, whereas in video games, it’s completely different. Video games, it’s the music that actually helps drive; it’s the interactivity and the design that drive the entertainment of what video games are. Video games tell a story, sure, but through interactivity.
It’s like in a film, you get a big chase scene, right? The composer gets really excited because he gets to do the chase scene or the battle music, and he gets to do that maybe one or two times during the film. Well in video games, we get that scene every time! We get the action scene every level, pretty much.
Because [a movie is] linear media, even the great John Williams has to sit down with George Lucas, and George Lucas says to him, “OK, John, here’s the deal: At 00:01:43, the music has to do this because Darth Vader just walked through the door. And then at 00:02:42, the music has to do this because the Death Star just blew up.” So John Williams, as a composer, is completely trapped in that linear media. His music has to do certain things at a certain point.
Now let’s compare that to the video game industry where a designer will come up to me and say, “OK, here’s the scenario: We got a hundred guys on horseback with swords, all coming to kick your ass. Write me a three-minute piece of music.” So I have no barriers. I can just dream up this thing in my head and start creating music around it. But then maybe there’s fifty guys left, and then maybe only ten guys left, or five, or two, or one, or zero. I might do different arrangements and different orchestrations and different mixes of that same song, so I have to think in that way to say, “OK, when this happens, how is the arrangement going to change? How is the orchestration going to change?” Maybe I’m going to add more drums as there’s more people, and take the percussion away as there’s less people, or change the percussion. Maybe when there’s a hundred guys, I have a male choir and a female choir all going at the same time, but maybe when there’s only one guy left, it’s a single solo child’s voice. Maybe the strings are doing sixteenth notes when it’s big, but then when it’s small, they’re the same notes, but they’re only doing eighth notes.
The other thing, too, is that I like to call video game music “foreground” music. If they call it “background” music in films, I like to call [game scores] “foreground” music. We’ve got the interactivity, we’ve got the story telling element, the action/adventure… but the final thing is that in a film, let’s say you take a film like Avatar where you go to the film, you watch the movie, there’s maybe about 90 minutes of music in there, 80% of which is all being talked over, right? So you see Avatar once in the theater, then maybe six months later you buy the DVD. So in a whole year, you’ve heard the music to Avatar, maybe about three, four hours of music through the whole year, 80% of which people were talking over.
Now let’s take video games. Let’s take a game like World of Warcraft where the music isn’t in the background, it is in your face, and people are hearing 20, 30, 40 hours a WEEK. I mean if you think about it, no time ever in the history of the world has music been played more often and in your face more often than in video games. Never. That would be like taking your favorite Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album or Beatles album and putting it on repeat for 40 hours, right? Maybe [people] did that in the ’60s when they were tripping out on acid, but nowadays that’d be unheard of without the proper amount of angel dust or something, I don’t know. That’s the thing.
Again, no time in history has more music been played more often than [in] video games. It’s incredible to think about and people don’t realize that. Especially Roger Ebert.
CP: I know we don’t have too much time, so I want to jump into Video Games Live now. Can you talk about why you started Video Games Live and what you’re trying to accomplish through Video Games Live?
TT: The reason I created Video Games Live was I really wanted to prove to the world how culturally significant and artistic video games have become. I wanted to create a show for everybody, not just for guys like me and you, the gamers. We know how cool Final Fantasy music is, and Halo, and Warcraft, and all the rest, you know, Zelda. But I wanted to create a show that you don’t have to know anything at all about video games to come to the show and to get this huge, massive appreciation and understanding of what video games and the industry is all about.
That’s why it was really important for me to design the show the way I did, with big, massive video screens, synchronized videos, synchronized rock and roll lighting, special effects, a stage show production, interactive elements with the crowd, little comedy routines, soloists, and things like that. All of that stuff, it’s a show. I don’t even really consider it a concert; it’s a show. It’s kind of like this big Las Vegas production that we take on the road every night. The people who are most blown away by our show are the people who don’t play video games, ’cause they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I never knew that video games were this cool, I never knew the music was so powerful and emotional. I never knew the characters were so cool and the graphics are so amazing. I get it now! Now I know why my kids are so much into video games.”
Coming up on July 31st, we have a 90-minute PBS special, a nation-wide television program. They’re predicting that over 55 million people will be viewing the program because it’s in primetime for a whole week, and then it’s going to air in repeats for three years, and 80% of those people have never even played a video game. I think it’s going to be a huge turning point for our industry entering into pop culture. Roger Ebert… I challenge him to watch our PBS special and tell us that that isn’t art. I think it’s going to be a game-changer, I really do, because if a guy like him can say that movie music is art but video game music isn’t, that’s a guy who’s never played a video game. That’s a guy who doesn’t understand. That’s a guy who’s now turned into somebody that he used to be against when he was a kid. He’s lost his way. I’m sure when he was growing up in the ’50s, people were saying, “Oh, rock and roll music’s bad for you, it’s the devil’s music,” and he was like, “No way, man! Rock and roll!” He’s become that guy he hated when he was growing up, so if he wonders why he gets so much flack from gamers, maybe he should take a look in the mirror and figure it out a little bit.
CP: Now going along the lines of perception, obviously Video Games Live has had a lot of influence. People have said Video Games Live possibly influenced Star Wars: In Concert…
TT: Oh, sure. They admit it! In fact, our agent at William Morris is also the agent for that show as well.
CP: Well, all I’m saying is there’s also a flip side. You’ve talked about how you and Video Games Live have convinced people that aren’t necessarily gamers or people that don’t listen to video game music to come to embrace it. I’m actually a professional, classically trained musician myself, and I’m a music teacher. I know a lot of peers and a lot of people who are music majors, and even they don’t consider movie soundtracks to be real [art] music. I know you’ve talked in previous interviews how game music has even surpassed movie soundtracks…
TT: It really has, yeah.
CP: Is there a way that you see that Video Games Live can really embrace that small [elitist] demographic that’s really, really resisting?
TT: Well you know, I tell a story about when I was growing up. When I was ten-years-old, I grew up in a rock and roll family, [my] cousin’s Steven Tyler from Aerosmith (his real name’s Stephen Tallarico), and so I always grew up with rock and roll. My parents were a product of the fifties so I was listening to Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, and the Beatles, and all that. When I was ten-years-old, I went to see the film Star Wars. In 1977, I was ten, and that was the first time where I really heard and experienced orchestral, symphonic music. It was the first time I paid attention, anyway. I was like “Wow, what is this? That’s what I want to do when I grow up.” Then I would start to read — because we didn’t have the Internet back then — I would start to read magazine interviews with John Williams and learn through him that his influences were Beethoven and Mozart, and so I would start to listen to Beethoven. When I heard Beethoven for the first time, when I really heard it, when I listened to it… that changed my whole life. I was like, “Oh my God!”
So, because of pop culture, because of Star Wars, because of a film, that got me interested in classical music and being a composer. The same thing is happening now with Video Games Live thirty years later. I will get [after] every show we play, the following day, I’ll get at least ten or fifteen emails from parents, and they all say the same thing. They say, “You know, we went to your concert last night, I brought my kids. I didn’t know what to expect, but oh my gosh, it was so amazing and wonderful and I have a newfound respect for games! But I want to tell you a story! We’re all sitting around the breakfast table this morning talking about it and my 8-year-old daughter said, “Mom, I’d like to start learning the violin, taking violin lessons, so I can learn the music to Kingdom Hearts,” or “Final Fantasy.” Those young people are getting influenced just like I was thirty years earlier with a movie. They’re now getting this because of video games and because of our show. So for those people who are like, “Oh, video games, blah blah blah,” you know what? The next Beethoven, the next Yo-Yo Ma, may just be somebody who went to our show and got interested because they saw you up there on stage.
In fact I’ll tell you about our soloist. One of our solo pianists who travels all around with us, his name’s Martin Leung, he’s an amazing wonderkin. He can play Mozart, and Chopin, and Liszt, and Bach like anyone’s business. Beethoven, you know. But he loves video games because that’s what he grew up on. He rips shreds through Mario, and Final Fantasy, and we have him on stage this week. He’s going to be doing a brand new Warcraft 2 piano arrangement, and I can tell you in all my years of playing the piano and being involved with professional musicians, I have never seen anyone’s hands move as fast as his when he plays this song. It is mind-blowing. It’s like you can’t even believe you’re watching a human being, it’s that crazy.
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