Organized by Tommy Tallarico, a video game lover and music composer in the industry, Video Games Live: Level 2 is a loving tribute concert to some of the greatest and most iconic music to come out of the business. Unfortunately, not all games are created equal when it comes to musical accompaniment. Now, depending on which video games you grew up on and spent countless hours completing in the privacy of a dark room with your eyes and ears fixed on the glowing screen in front of you, you’ll have different songs ingrained in your memory as being “classic”. Video Games Live: Level 2 makes a fun little jab at the idea pointing out that the earliest gamers have less a soundtrack than they do a signature set of beeps, boops, and bloops. You don’t begrudge early games their simplistic soundscapes, but similarly you can’t deny that once video game music took off as an important part of the gaming experience, that certain franchises have made a much deeper mark than others (even if they weren’t necessarily more popular). What this concert does show without fail is that even if certain games’ music hasn’t achieved iconic status the world round, often times the results are quite beautiful when given an orchestral backing.
Before we get into a breakdown of the concert and the music therein, let’s just iron out where this production falls short. The biggest downfall is the emphasis placed on games whose music is far from iconic while passing over other better franchises in a minute with only a nod. I’d be interested to learn how much of the decision in this area was based on which companies were willing to grant them license, for which songs, and for how long. For example, clearly Squaresoft was either never approached for or just denied access to any music from the Final Fantasy series, because not a single one of the games appears here. Yet they said yes to music from Chrono Cross? Or how about music from Street Fighter, Bioshock, Doom, or a few other well-known series. Any of those two could have replaced the 5 minutes spent on music from Advent Rising (which was included because Tallarico composed it). There’s an odd bias present in the choosing of the songs here, and I don’t know what influenced it, but it definitely interferes with the overall quality of the production as you’re left scratching your head trying to figure out how the concert pieces were chosen.
Okay, if you don't want to read a full rundown of the concert, just skip to the end where we cover the extra features. Otherwise, read on...
Starting with a “Flight of the Valkyries” enhanced tribute to classic games like Space Invaders and Centipede, it quickly advances to the frenzied score of Tetris before finally diving into the world of popular modern gaming. It starts with Halo, which anyone who’s left the original game on its menu screen, has that beautiful score infused with the chant. What’s less impressive about it though is that when placed back to back with one another, you realize that the rest of the games' scores never made too much of an effort to create a memorable sound beyond that first Halo theme. Granted it’s the franchise’s theme, but there are many other series out there that branched out to new sounds for each installment, even if some homage is always paid. From there it moves to Sid Meier’s Civilization 4 which has beautiful music but whose music never came close to being as iconic as a lot of the other titles in the lineup. From there it moved to Starcraft II, only spending a little bit of time before moving on to one of the bigger players.
Okay, so Sonic the Hedgehog’s signature theme often gets overlooked in the face of his plumber rival’s much catchier pieces (even I’ll admit that, despite preferring Sonic), but the Sonic music sounds spectacular in concert with a live orchestra and you realize how great it is despite being so simple (which is where the beauty of early video game music springs from). It moves on to Advent Rising, which has some haunting vocals, but again ranks very low on the list of games with truly breathtaking and/or memorable music and only finds its way into this concert because organizer Tommy Tallarico composed it. At times, one song even sounds like it was ripped off from Final Fantasy 8, leaving me to wonder how this game made the cut and for about 4 different songs from its soundtrack.
Guitar Hero? What the hell is that doing in here? It kind of broke the mood they’d created for the concert and really has no place in a concert about celebrating music written for video games.
After a 5 minute Guitar Hero riff of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”, it gets back on track with Jamie Lee Curtis, of all people, introducing the score for World of Warcraft. If you’ve ever played the game you know it has quite a few epic instrumentations laden with chant, so it’s no question that it deserves a hefty spot in the concert. Then we reach Chrono Cross, which despite being somewhat resented as a sequel to Chrono Trigger, really does have some outstanding music. It’s immersive when you play the game, and in concert it’s simply stunning to think that it was written for a video game. Unfortunately, they only spend about a minute playing from Chrono Cross (I felt cheated) before moving to Mass Effect, a game I always felt would have benefited from substituting a lot of its music out for the pieces John Murphy wrote for the movie Sunshine. However, there are a few stirring movements to be found in these pieces, even if, at times, it starts to sound an awful lot like music from Halo. Then we reach another classic, Megaman, which always had sort of a metropolis rock sound reminiscent of Guns N’ Roses at times, and Tallarico brings all that front and center.
There’s a brief interlude featuring a clip of the first-ever film recording of a video game being played by the father of video games, Ralph Baer, which is cute, but again cuts into the concert vibe of the whole thing. A grievance only worsened by an impromptu game on the famous Brown Box between Mr. Baer and a kid from the audience. Then we kick back into music with some of the music that surely haunted the dreams of an entire generation of gamers, the soundtrack of Myst. The chant and the diffuse percussion made the music beautiful in the game, and it holds up in concert.
Zelda. You have one of the most memorable themes in gaming history that carried through its many different iterations onto various platforms, and so it’s no small wonder that a few minutes of the concert go toward recreating some of the games’ most memorable choruses. Zelda to Mario. Two of the heaviest hitters back to back. If ever there was a more universally known video game theme song than Mario’s I challenge anyone to offer it up. Call me a purist, but while it’s great to hear the main and swimming themes from Mario played on strings and brass, I think I’ll always prefer a simpler take on the music than what an orchestra creates.
God of War makes a brief appearance, but then the concert takes a good turn and brings Martin Leung onstage who then plays a piano solo of the classic Mario music, which definitely sounds better than a whole orchestra for the piece in question. Martin then goes on to play Tetris on the piano, and it’s pretty great, again beating out the version played by the orchestra earlier on. The production then winds down with a performance of “Lament of the Highborne” from World of Warcraft and a finale of Castlevania (which seems to be Tallarico’s favorite but an odd choice for a finale).
Visually the presentation is superb with the hi-def footage of the concert looking sharp and crystal clear, however the editor then intercut cutscenes and in-game clips from video games which weren’t intended for hi-def viewing (or were captured with a video camera off a monitor or projection screen (sloppy). Either way, when the game footage is spliced in, it ends up looking like an oddly cut game trailer and the contrast between the HD video and the lower resolution of the game footage is distracting. Luckily, the sound suffers no such disparity and is crystal clear and the music is played beautifully, so maybe you’d be better off just closing your eyes or turning off the screen and geeking out in the dark.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Besides a bonus DVD copy, the Blu-ray disc has a lot of standards like interviews with some of the people behind the project, a making of featurette (behind the scenes, a look at Tommy’s guitars, etc.), a commentary track by Tallarico, and a few trailers for video games. The worthwhile extras include a terrific Tetris documentary celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the game that actually has a medical symptom named after it, an interview with Ralph Baer, and a making of doc for the classic game Dragon’s Lair. Now, the most revealing and surprisingly long extra of the disc is Tommy’s video where he chats up (sounding a bit like Norm MacDonald) some Japanese game composers in a small hotel room including Jun Senoue, Kinuyo Yamashita, Tomonobo Kikuchi, Kow Otani, Michiru Yamane, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Shimomura, Hiroshi Okubo, Hidenori Shoji, Keiki Kobayashi-- and you realize that if it appeared in this concert, someone in that room composed it, but it also adds confusion as composers for Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter, Kingdom Hearts, Soul Calibur, Ridge Racer, Tekken, and Final Fantasy are among them, so why didn’t they make it into the concert? Sadly, it begins to look like Tallarico is the least accomplished person in the room, and he let his ego choose the music of the concert.
"Video Games Live: Level 2" is on sale October 19, 2010 and is not rated. Concert-Film. Directed by Allen Newman. Written by Tommy Tallarico, Jack Wall. Starring Jack Wall, Tommy Tallarico.
