Friday Q&A: Video Games Live co-creator Tommy Tallarico

This interview was conducted for a new geek culture column called Peer-to-Peer that will publish monthly for Philadelphia City Paper. See it in its original form.
On Sunday, video game music composer Tommy Tallarico will bring more than 20 years of gaming history with him to the Kimmel Center.
Before Madden started licensing real rock tunes, back when Disney’s Aladdin was the coolest Sega Genesis side-scroller this side of the playground, when Epic Games was just launching its Unreal series, Tallarico was there for all of it. In fact, he composed tunes for all of those titles. He even holds the Guinness Book of World Record as the person who’s worked on the most video games.
But this isn’t a gaming history lesson.

Tallarico is the co-creator of Video Games Live, a globally touring, full symphony that plays video game classics. The geeky orchestra will perform dozens of anthems backed by video accompaniment, light show, and rock ‘n’ roll appeal, Tallarico says. There’s even interactive segments, like live Skype sessions with famous game designers and composers.
Did we mention there’s a medley of 25 arcade classics, starting with 1972’s Pong to 1986’s Tetris, with Donkey Kong, Defender, Frogger, Dragon Slayer and more? Now you know.
But we admit our skepticism: Is this just too dorky�even for us? We caught up with Tallarico in a phone interview recently to try to figure out if we’d ever be down. What’d did we learn? We are down. So, so down. Questions and answers after the jump.

What is your background? Why did you decide to start Video Games Live?
I’ve been a video game composer for over 20 years. I’ve been involved with soundtracks for Earthworm Jim, Madden NFL, Disney’s Aladdin, Terminator, the Unreal series, Tony Hawk, Spiderman, Metroid Prime. The reason I created this show is that I wanted to show how culturally significant video game music has become.
How has game music changed from the classic arcade tunes to today’s gaming music?
Games over last ten years or so have been done with live orchestras. So going back�playing songs like themes for Mario and Zelda, hearing them in their full symphonic arrangements can help usher in a whole new generation of people to come out and appreciate an orchestra. Some of the best letters and emails we’ll get are from non-gamers. Parents and grandparents who are surprised by the show because never knew video game music was so powerful. They never knew the graphics were so cool and storyline was interesting.
What are the difficulties of turning this electronic tunes to symphonic pieces? Do you collaborate with the original composers?
It’s not really that difficult because if you take a game like Mario or Tetris, Castlevania or Metroid, the thing about music back then, all they had was the melody line. They didn’t have a lot of instruments to mess around with, so they had to have a really super strong melody. When you rearrange [for an orchestra], the hardest part is already done for you. We absolutely collaborate. We just played two shows with Mario and Zelda composer Koji Kondo in Japan. All these guys are our buddies.
What kind of interactive segments are in the show?
We pick people out of the audience and they play a video game while orchestra is paying the music, changing it depending on what the person is doing on screen. There’s a pre-show festival with a Guitar Hero competition. The person who wins gets to play Guitar Hero during the show on stage while I play a real guitar with the symphony.
Can you speak to the quality of music writing in these game pieces?
I’ve always said because video game music is so upfront, it’s not like movie music where people are talking over it. We don’t have to deal with linear media, so we’re not constrained what’s going on on the screen. If Beethoven was alive today, he’d be a video game composer.