Video Games Live!

Friday night Vincent and I went to a unusual Louisville symphony concert. Last summer Vincent had wanted to go to the first version of “Video Games Live!” This unusual event connects a local orchestra with an array of rock-concert-style lights and video screens with video, pre-show and intermission video game contests, and two video game score impresarios – one conducting, and the other MC-ing (and eventually playing guitar). The event also featured a young rock-concert-style crowd, with lots of yelling and screaming probably unlike seen at most Louisville orchestra concerts (though I can’t say that emphatically), because I’ve never been. (We have been to this venue before – the Kentucky Center for the Arts – Stephanie and Vincent to see “Rocky Horror Show,” and the three of us to see “Spamalot” – although we usually get even cheaper seats.)

The event also made me rethink a little what is art and entertainment and music, etc.

Vincent and I got there just before the curtain. We didn’t see until later that two of Vincent’s high school classmates were sitting four rows behind us. I had just figured out how to use the macros on my camera – including the macro that prevents the flash from going off – and so I was able to take a few pictures (although we were a couple of dozen rows back). Stephanie would have liked the first piece, which was a medley of scores/soundtracks/background music from early video games, while the video screen showed the game – like Pong, Frogger, and Tetris – and even one I used to play on the Strip, the driving game Out Run (yes – I recognized the theme music). The majority of the concert was then devoted to a series of pieces (each with the score/soundtrack/music from a single game (with video from the game)). Vincent recognized plenty of the games (even though he’s been on an electronics holiday for most of the past three years, over the years – often at other people’s apartments and houses or at his father’s – he’s played lots of games), and I recognized some of the games but little of the music. One of the grandest themes was from a game I know is quite violent, Halo (1).

But many other pieces/activities were included. Since last year’s tour, the show had picked up a Japanese pianist who was famous for a YouTube video in which he played blindfolded. He played the piece from the YouTube video, then later two other video game music) pieces (and was quite good). Although generally the video screen did NOT focus on the performers (so we hardly ever got to see on the screens the violinists, wind players, drummers, or horn players from the symphony), when this pianist played, we got to see him playing all blown up (in a way that you couldn’t see in most symphony concerts unless you were sitting right in front of him). The show also pulled people (who sat on the front row or side rows near the front) up to play a couple of the early video games (including Pong where the person had no “controller” but had to move around to move the tennis racquet, and Frogger, with a controller) while the orchestra played the theme music from the videogames. The Japanese-American kid who got the better of the two Frogger scores (from Floyd County like Stephanie’s Japanese American students?) had supposedly never played it.

The final audience participation activity tied with one of the video games in which the music IS central to the game. This is of course Guitar Hero, a version of Donkey Kong, which we have (we’ve promised Vincent Guitar Hero if he ever gets his electronics holiday lifted) (and even of Dance Dance Revolution, which Vincent has a generic version of for when his electronics holiday is lifted), in which players must play what are supposed to guitar chords on a video game controller that looks like a guitar fretboard while loud rock music plays – covers of various classic rock songs. (Rock BAND allows four people to play drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar.) I remember the first time Stephanie and I saw this at an anime event, playing a cover of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” we were excited. The game has introduced a whole generation of U.S. kids to classic rock songs, such that Vincent is excited about going to concerts by bands, whose songs he has played on Guitar Hero, but not to concerts by bands that have not allowed Guitar Hero to incorporate their songs.

The version of Guitar Hero that came out earlier this month is Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, featuring – with heavy cooperation from Aerosmith – Aerosmith songs and covers of some of their favorite songs. It turns out that, in addition to the costar of “The Incredible Hulk” being Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler’s daughter, the evening’s MC was Steve Tyler’s cousin. He donned a guitar to play rhythm guitar on a Rock Guitar: Aerosmith version of my favorite Aerosmith song, “Sweet Emotion.” The young man who had won the pre-show Guitar Hero contest came on stage to play the game – on the big screen – with that song. (We later talked with the person who had come in second in the contest.) But this climatic event was somewhat anticlimactic. The man picked the extremely difficult “expert” mode in which to play the song, and – apparently because the brown key on the controller was not working – he got “booed” – by the game – off the stage – because he had missed so many notes – half way through the song. (He was playing lead guitar while the MC was playing a real rhythm guitar (see below) – the MC kept playing through the rest of the show, including the “Halo” themes). Again, I love this song but we never get to the verse that starts: “I pulled into town in a POH-LEESE car . . .”). (See, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ePFFMfsnIk )

I love movies, and I love movie soundtracks (in fact, I’d just seen several movies with very good soundtracks – including “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Mongol,” and even the documentary “Standard Operating Procedure,” for which former Oingo Boingo front man Danny Elfman (who also composed the score to the original Michael Keaton “Batman” movie) had penned the soundtrack). And I pay little attention to video games and tend to think of their story lines as weak/peripheral – and certainly never pay attention to the “background” music. But here was a symphony orchestra playing the video game music, in a wild hodge podge of a video game arcade, rock concert (the event was so crowded that Vincent and I were not able to get sodas or snacks during the intermission – or halftime, as we used to call it), and symphony concert. The world turned on its head. (Final bow pictured below.)

On the walk from my parking garage the police shooed us over to the other side of Main Street, so we weren’t walking right near the Riverview Square building, scheduled for implosion the next morning (see “Friday is for ‘I’”), and on the way back we walked through the Belevedere, along the Ohio River, past the “Belle of Louisville,” and under the 2nd street bridge (pictured below).

-- Perry