#Dark symphonic orchestra music series#
Böcker was involved with PLAY! in a leading role from 2005 to 2007, and was working as a consultant for Distant Worlds from 2007 to 2011.įavoring 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 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. The pioneer work done by Böcker and his team resulted in a lot of publisher support for game concerts outside Japan and paved the way for many similar events. 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. įollowing feedback from attendants of the first event, more music from classic games was added to the programs. 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. īöcker's main focus with the First Symphonic Game Music Concert was to honor publishers that had worked with live orchestras before. 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. The Leipzig Trade Fair funded GC in Concert while Böcker himself was responsible for planning the concert as producer, inviting composers, obtaining the approval of the individual publishers to play music from their titles and assembling the concert programs. 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. 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. 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 Japan. His role as executive producer and project director of the Merregnon albums provided him with many contacts to conductors, orchestras and composers from around the world. Since 1999, Thomas Böcker has been working in the games industry as producer, director and advisor for a variety of soundtracks.
3.6 Symphonic Selections - Japanese Video Game Music.
3.1 Symphonic Shades – Hülsbeck in Concert.From 2013, the programmes eventually embarked on a world tour. From 2008 to 2013, new video game music performances were presented in cooperation with the WDR by its in-house ensembles, principally performed in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. įrom 2003 to 2007, GC in Concert took place at the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig and was held as the official opening ceremony of the GC – Games Convention, a trade fair for video games in Leipzig. They are produced by Thomas Böcker and performed by various orchestras conducted by Andy Brick (2003–2007), Arnie Roth (2008, 20), Niklas Willén (2010, 2012) and Eckehard Stier (from 2012). The Symphonic Game Music Concerts (German: Symphonische Spielemusikkonzerte) or abbreviated to Game Concerts are a series of award-winning German video game music concerts initiated in 2003, notable for being the longest running and the first of their kind outside Japan. The participants of Symphonic Fantasies after the performance of the concert in 2009