My husband surprised me and took me out for what ended up being an amazing and very unique experience last Saturday night. I knew he had something planned, as he asked me to block off that night, but he didn't tell me why and I didn't ask, as I love his surprises. He told me where we were going as we arrived at the Henderson Pavillion, a very cool outdoor performance center about 3 miles from our apartment Turns out he got us tickets to a concert called Video Games Live where the Las Vegas Philharmonic was going to be playing music from video games! That's right, video games. While they were playing the music from everything from Super Mario Brothers to Halo to Warcraft to Tron, there was a screen above the stage showing the games in action. They even brought a few members of the audience up on stage to play the games live while the Philharmonic played the music to go along with what was happening as it was happening. The music played during the show sounded *exactly* like it does when you play the games, they even got the dog laughing at you after you missed the duck in Duck Hunt! It was really one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The concert tours the world and I believe that they get local symphonies and orchestras to play the music, it's not one group of musicians doing the whole tour. You can read a recap of the night here. They even have a CD coming out on July 22, which you can pre-order here if you're interested. A huge thank you to my husband for surprising me with this, it was just so neat and I had a great time.
I'm not sure how many people know that there are composers whose focus is solely video game music, but I had no idea. What a cool job. I am not much of a "gamer", my parents would never buy us a Nintendo when they were all the rage in the late 80s/early 90s. We had a Gameboy for about 4 months until it got left/stolen in Cancun (the verdict is still out on which), but for the most part had to play Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog at friends' places. So video games aren't all that intuitive to me and I don't feel particularly drawn to them, despite the fact that my husband has an Xbox, a Wii and even Guitar Hero. I have played Sonic a few times on his old Sega and like some car racing games and play Burnout every so often, but I digress. The video games of today are insanely cool, the graphics are amazing and the music is beyond epic in scale. A lot of it is booming classical music and it's beautiful. It's a far cry from the bleeps and bloops of Frogger, Donkey Kong and the original Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt that I remember growing up.
A cool bonus that those of us in Vegas got that night, was the guy who played the music from Super Mario Brothers on the piano while blindfolded on YouTube was at the show and did his thing live. Here's the YouTube video that apparently sparked quite the sensation a couple years ago:
Who doesn't recognize that music! The video isn't sped up or anything, he really does play it that fast.
A quick sidenote to the show was the water they were selling at the concession stand. It was 104 degrees when we left our house to head to this outdoor concert. It really was comfortable after the sun went down, it is dry heat after all, but that's just hot. Anyway, the bottles of water that we bought came partly frozen so the water stayed cold a lot longer while the ice slowly melted. I assume this was intentional and thought it was absolutely brilliant.
So anyway, I really wanted to write about the show because it was just so cool and unique and I'm not sure how many people know about it, so keep your eyes peeled in case they swing through your town, you won't be disappointed!
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