An Audience with Tommy Tallarico
Composer, conductor, games evangelist
One of the highlights from last weekend’s NEoN festival in Dundee was an appearance from legendary videogame composer and co-founder of Video Games Live, Tommy Tallarico. The 41-year old has been writing music for games for 20 years, and his work can be heard on titles as varied as Earthworm Jim, MDK, Unreal Tournament, and Metroid Prime.
The Video Games Live project is his current baby, a touring ensemble of musicians and stagecraft experts who perform spectacular orchestral concerts of game music against a backdrop of awesome in-game visuals. VGL performed a rare Scottish date in Dundee last Sunday, and the affable American’s excitement about the project was apparent to all who attended the NEoN event.
He began his presentation with a short discussion about his history in the gaming industry, and how he began composing game soundtracks. A cousin of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Tallarico moved to California in the late ‘80s with a view to starting a rock n’ roll band.
All that changed, though, when a Virgin executive spotted him working in a music store sporting a TurboGrafx T-shirt. At the time, Virgin was moving into interactive entertainment, and the exec wondered whether Tallarico would have any interest in working for them?
For Tallarico, who had been sleeping rough for his first three weeks in Cali, this was a dream come true. He explains: “It was a chance to put my two greatest passions – music and games – together. I’d never thought that was an option before that meeting.
“It also taught me a rule that I would never forget – talent is only 50 per cent of the equation. Networking and making friends is just as important. For anyone who wants to work in this industry, I’d advise them never to forget that fact. Keep an open mind, and make connections wherever you can.”
A brief period in game testing followed before Tallarico began to get his audio work into videogames. At the time, he recalls, game music was still mostly “C-64 style bleeps. The hardest task was actually getting songs to sound like real music.
Tallarico onstage with Video Games Live.
“Now, that time is spent in recording orchestras and in post production. The whole industry has changed so much since the early days, but there are some elements that haven’t changed. I’ve always approached a project through the emotional side, rather than an environmental one, and things like melody and motif were just as important then as they are now.”
To illustrate the point, he asks the crowd to hum the Mario theme. Unsurprisingly, everyone in attendance knows it, although the rendition wouldn’t have troubled any professional choir.
Tallarico is quite an evangelist for game music, and hopes to change people’s perceptions of it through his work. He explains that while film soundtracks are static by their very nature, the world of videogame music can open up hundreds of interactive options for a skilled composer. “In movie work, a composer is limited by the director. He might be told that the crescendo must hit a peak a minute and thirty-two seconds in, for example, simply because that’s the way the film’s been cut. In games, I’ve got a lot more freedom. If film music is often background music – it takes a back seat to dialogue – then game soundtracks are foreground music. In virtually every game, the main event is action rather than dialogue, and a good soundtrack can interact with a gamer in ways that many people don’t appreciate.
“For example, if I’m scoring a fight scene, I can orchestrate multiple intensity levels which can be switched between to correspond with the action. If the number of enemies increases, I can tell the game to switch to a more intense version of the music, or alternately the soundtrack can step down a notch once the fight is drawing to a close. All of this takes place under the hood, but quite often I’ll have three or more versions of a scene orchestrated to reflect what’s going on in the game.”
This passion for the medium carries over to Video Games Live, which Tallarico first conceived eight years ago. “Game music has become the radio of the 21st century: it’s all-pervasive. At the time, I remember thinking that I really wanted to show the world just how culturally significant games had become.
“Video Games Live is all about combining the power and the emotion of a symphony with the energy and excitement of a rock concert and the cutting edge interactivity and sheer fun of videogaming. I didn’t want it just to be for hardcore gamers, I wanted everyone who attends to leave with a much better idea of what games are about.”
VGL has played hundreds of concerts in venues as far afield as Brazil and Japan.
Part of the VGL mission, then, is to attract non-gamers to its shows, and Tallarico has a definite strategy in place to help him achieve this. “We use the best local orchestras – for example, tomorrow we’re playing with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra – to bring a sense of legitimacy to the concerts. This also gets the mainstream press interested, and has the effect of getting young gamers interested in symphony music.
“I remember watching Star Wars as a young kid, and John Williams’ music just blew me away. I’d always been about rock n’ roll up to that point, but after seeing the film I began to get into Mozart and Beethoven. Now, I get letters from parents telling me that after coming home from one of our concerts their kids have spoken to them about taking up the violin or buying symphonies, which is really cool.
“And it works both ways – we also hear a lot from people who haven’t really understood the attraction that games have until they came to the show. But after seeing just how epic some of this stuff is, how beautiful a game like Halo can be, they finally start to get it.”
Tallarico touches on a number of other topics during the hour-long appearance, including working with Shigeru Miyamoto on the Metroid series (“he told me ‘just make some really cool weapon noises, and I’ll get the developers to design guns around them’ – the guy is just so different to any other developer working today”) and what the most popular tunes are from the vast VGL repertoire (“worldwide, people love Mario, Final Fantasy, Zelda and Kingdom Hearts. My favourites are Castlevania, because we do a rock version and I get to play guitar, and the Warcraft section simply because Blizzard’s visuals are such an awesome backdrop.”)
As a composer, Tallarico is among the very highest echelon of anyone working in games today. But his real talent is in taking the music that so many of us love to a much wider audience in such an inspired fashion. He’s also one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending some time with. In this case, rock n’ roll’s loss is undoubtedly videogaming’s gain.
