Symphonic Game Music Concerts - Development

Development

Since 1999, Thomas Böcker has been working in the games industry as producer, director and advisor for a variety of soundtracks. His role as executive producer and project director of the Merregnon trilogy provided him with many contacts to conductors, orchestras and composers from around the world.

Inspired by game concerts from Japan, the Orchestral Game Music Concerts from the 1990s in particular, he developed a concept for the first event of this kind outside of Japan. To attract as many people from the target audience as possible, the concert was to be scheduled alongside an established event connected to the game industry. In 2002, he proposed his idea to the Leipzig Trade Fair which agreed to hold the Symphonic Game Music Concert during the GC – Games Convention, the first trade fair for video games in Europe.

The Leipzig Trade Fair funded GC in Concert while Böcker himself was responsible for planning the event, inviting composers, obtaining the approval of the individual publishers to play music from their titles and assembling the concert programs. He did not want to limit the selection of compositions performed to European games, but instead opted for the best Asian, American and European titles of recent years, providing a wide range of musical styles.

Böcker's main focus with the First Symphonic Game Music Concert was to honor publishers that had worked with live orchestras before. The majority of compositions had already been recorded with this kind of ensemble in the past which reduced the development stage to four months, beginning in mid-April 2003.

Following feedback from attendants of the first event, more music from classic games was added to the programs. The concerts took Böcker almost one year each to plan and started to include more new and experimental arrangements that, instead of just being presented as an orchestral version of the source material, were based on their creators' personal interpretations of the original pieces. The pioneer work done by Böcker and his team resulted in a lot of publisher support for game concerts outside of Japan and paved the way for many similar events. The Symphonic Game Music Concerts have since become widely known for its numerous world premieres, some of which have been reused in Press Start -Symphony of Games-, PLAY! A Video Game Symphony and Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy. Böcker was involved with PLAY! in a leading role from 2005 to 2007, and is working as a consultant for Distant Worlds since 2007.

Favoring a more classical atmosphere, the series does not rely on showing game footage or extensive light effects, but rather on the quality of the music and its performance. The original inspiration GC in Concert drew from the Orchestral Game Music Concerts was reflected in the presentation and rearrangement of two of its compositions and the use of orchestra figures designed by Chisa Suzuki, akin to those depicted on the Orchestral Game Music Concert CD covers.

Many famous game music composers have attended the events and the associated autograph sessions, while Shiro Hamaguchi, Michiru Yamane, Yuzo Koshiro and Takenobu Mitsuyoshi actively participated in the series as guest arrangers and performers.