Me and a friend took a trip down to New Orleans on Thursday to see an orchestra play some of the most famous video game music. I must say, I was highly impressed by the work they put into the concert. PBS was filming this for television, so they tried their best to make sure it was a great concert. Music included selections from: Halo, Advent Rising, The Legend of Zelda, Mario, Sonic, Castlevania, Civilization, World of Warcraft, Megaman, Final Fantasy, some classic Atari games, and many others.
For the Megaman portion, they played of course, the most famous songs: The title from Megaman 2 and 3, and Dr. Wily Stage 1 in Megaman 2.
Two contests were held: a costume contest, and a Guitar Hero: Aerosmith contest. What you had to do with the Guitar Hero contest is play Sweet Emotion on expert and get the highest score out of all other contestants. The winner, which was a 12 year old with really long hair, played Sweet Emotion on stage with the rest of the Orchestra. The kid got a signed poster from THE Ralph Baer,a $500 gift card to Gamestop, and some other goodies.
There were a group of people that participated in the costume contest. Some people I can remember that participated were: A duo that had a SNES costume, one was the system, the other a controller, a man and a woman that were "custom characters"(Explain to me why people dress up like this and expect to win), Seto Kaiba, Squall Lionheart, Kairi from Kingdom hearts, a (presumably) brother and sister dressed up as Mario and Peach, two people from Kingdom Hearts 385/2 days, and a 4 year old dressed up in a DK suit.
Wanna guess who won? The kid in the DK suit, by sheer "D'awww..."
Has anyone seen/heard Martin Leung? He was there as a solo pianist. For those of you who do not know, he was shown on Ebaums World for playing the Super Mario Bros. tune blindfolded. He is an incredible pianist.
I think one of the things I will remember about this was they brought the father of video games, Ralph Baer, out to the stage. I didn't know if he was still living or not, but he is still alive and kicking at 88 years old. The deal with this segment was that they selected someone from the audience,which happened to be an 8 year old,to play with Mr. Baer on his "Brown Box," that is, a prototype of the Magnavox Odyssey. The player also got a signed poster from Ralph Baer.
After all that excitement, there was a meet and greet with all the composers, producers, and soloists. I managed to get everyone's signature, except for Gerard Marino, who was unfortunately away from his chair by the time I got to him. I would've liked to get Ralph Baer's signature, but he wasn't there.
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