My grandfather, a lover of classical music, was president of the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra for many years. When I was 15, I played him an orchestrated version of Nobuo Uematsu’s To Zanarkand, from the video game Final Fantasy X. “This isn’t real music if it’s from a video game,” he told me at the time. I don’t think he could ever have imagined that 12 years later, the Hull orchestra to which he had devoted so many years would be performing music from 1980s video games, in front of a packed hall.
In the past, video game music concerts were a promotional novelty, but today they are regular and well-attended billings in venues across the world. From The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddess to Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds, Assassin’s Creed Symphony to the recent debut by the London Video Game Orchestra and even a performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra hosted by lauded composer Jessica Curry, fans are flocking to concert halls to hear their favourite video game melodies played live. For many, it is their first experience of live orchestral music.
This unique concert, the 8-Bit Symphony, is the culmination of many years of work. It isn’t pinned to a massively popular series such as Mario or The Elder Scrolls, though. Instead, the 8-Bit Symphony features orchestral arrangements from titles such as Monty on the Run, WAR, International Karate, Firelord and Trap, video games that were released over 30 years ago on the Commodore 64.
With no corporate budget, the 8-Bit Symphony had trouble finding the right orchestra to work with – but that changed once it found financial support from Hull College and enlisted the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra. Hull might seem a strange place to debut a video game concert, but it makes sense when you consider that one of the trailblazers of video game composition was born here. Rob Hubbard composed music for over 75 video games in the 80s before capturing the attention of video game giant EA, and becoming their first full-time time sound guy.
Hubbard’s video game music was truly pioneering. Advanced musical and programming knowledge was needed to compose music for the C64: musicians had to code their own drivers to generate sound. The musical limitations imposed by the hardware posed a challenge, but also led to innovations; the C64 is still used by composers today, thanks to its unique sound. Hubbard combined his musical theory knowledge with programming expertise to make the C64’s three-voice SID chip sing.
“In the old days, composers had to write code for something as simple as vibrato,” Chris Abbott explains. Abbott is the organiser behind the 8-Bit Symphony and has been remixing C64 music for over 30 years on C64 Audio, a website that he runs with other chip music enthusiasts.
“The way that composers got round playing chords when you could only play one note at a time, for instance, was to play the notes really fast to create the illusion of chords. That [technique] was different from composer to composer; each had a unique voice and it was very specific.”
Taking pieces of music that solely exist as computer code and arranging them for a live symphony orchestra has been no easy task: in fact it has taken the team behind 8-Bit Symphonies a number of years. Composers and developers including Ben Daglish (The Last Ninja, Gauntlet, Trap), Paul Norman (Aztec Challenge, Forbidden Forest) Mark Cooksey (Ghosts ‘n Goblins) and Peter Connelly (Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation/Tomb Raider: Chronicles) have contributed arranged versions of their music or dabbled in C64 remixes, in order to bring the concert to life. Further help was provided by musical prodigy Alisdair J Pickering, who had just won the prestigious Ricciotti Ensemble’s Great Arranging Contest for his arrangement of Jeroen Tel’s theme from the video game Overlord on the C64.
Conductor Robin Tait also spent several months working on the scores – his first foray into the world of video game music. “I knew nothing about this area before taking on the job,” he says. “8-bit music is somewhat akin to playing a suite of music taken from, for example, a ballet like Swan Lake, or Romeo and Juliet. It’s not like playing a symphony, where structure is much more important. Game music follows the action and the characters of the games, so the structure tends to be more episodic, much more like film music. The orchestra has been fantastic – dealing with 16 new pieces, full of very challenging music and enjoying it, too.”
At the performance, concertgoers queued to get their Commodore 64 keyboards signed by video game music legends. Unfortunately, some of the greatest composers of the era are no longer with us: Ben Daglish and Richard Joseph were two incredibly talented composers who sadly died while the concert was in development.
8-Bit Symphony is a celebration of their legacy, featuring three co-arrangements from Daglish and two pieces of Joseph’s music, and the performances were a beautiful tribute to their work and the incredible “bedroom blitz” of video game development in the 80s. On the night, the Hull Philharmonic demonstrated complete mastery of the material.
C64 fan Rich Garbutt from Hull attended with his daughter. “My daughter has been brought up seeing me use the C64,” he says. “She plays the games with me and has heard me play the SIDs endlessly, so she has grown up with the same tunes stuck in her head that I had as a kid. She loves music and is learning the piano herself, but she’s never heard a live orchestra before. For her to be sat alongside me at the concert meant everything to me … More than just the music, this concert has done so much for the [C64 fan] community at large. She’s seen her old, shy, introverted dad speak to so many people because of the Symphony and it’s helped me teach her how important community and reaching out to people is, no matter how difficult you find it.”
Abbott hopes that this important era of video game music will continue to be celebrated. It’s been an incredible journey, he tells me, and it would be a shame for it to end here. The chip music scene is comprised of passionate people all over the world, after all. “I would really like to end up in the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra, or taking the concert round Europe.”
