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I’m sitting on the stairs to the San Jose Civic Auditorium’s balcony alongside Tommy Tallarico, self-proclaimed “veritable games industry icon” and co-creator of the popular Video Games Live (VGL) concert series. It’s an hour and change before the first show of the night—the first back-to-back doubleheader in the tour’s three-year history—and the audience is beginning to fill the space of the once-empty lobby with the boasting of gaming conquests and click-click-clack of sweaty fingers against plastic guitar frets.
Tallarico is in the middle of running through the list of countries VGL has appeared in since it hit its start button for 11,000 eager gamers at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl in 2005. The show’s worldwide travels could rival Carmen Sandiego for flyer miles. Tallarico’s describing his geeky Rainbow Tour when an usher walks up.
“Are you guys a part of the show,” she asks with the slightest of you’re-not-supposed-to-be-here intonations.
Tallarico pauses before he answers, perhaps wondering how someone who will later take the stage with a moving game of Pong on his shirt and a matching guitar around his neck could go, well, unnoticed. “Yes, I’m the… yep.”
“Are you a part of the show,” she asks again. She cuts off Tallarico before he can play his this-is-my-house trump card. “The balcony’s closed. You’re not allowed to go up.”
“No, we’re just doing an interview, thanks,” he responds.
It’s one of the few times that evening when the Video Games Live frontman will be caught off-guard (the second being an enthusiastic audience member’s request that VGL’s resident pianist, Martin Leung, plunk out the soundtrack to Team Fortress 2). At its core, the production is structured to run like clockwork. Video Games Live combines audience interactivity, a symphonic rock concert, and thematic lighting effects alongside towering gameplay videos. This head-nod to the importance of gaming’s visuals is more than just eye-candy. The videos interweave with the show’s symphonic accents based on the specific game or played theme.
Achieving this synchronization is a process that begins weeks before Conductor and Co-Creator Jack Wall first waltzes out onstage. Video Games Live uses choirs of varying sizes in all of its productions. These singers come from performing groups local to VGL’s venues. They download and prepare their music weeks in advance of any show, with their first and only real rehearsal coming the day of the production. They’ll start going over the music with Wall at two p.m. for an eight o’clock curtain. The orchestra joins them from three to six, only these musicians—also local to the area—see the music for the first time the day of the show.
“Most of the musicians and the orchestra read music like you and I read books, so I show up with my music books and we rehearse it,” Wall says.
The stage they’re working on starts its trip into the venue at eight a.m. the morning of the show. That’s when key members of the show’s seven-person core crew, assisted by an average of 12 local stagehands, begin unloading equipment from the production’s single 18-wheeler truck. Barring any difficulties, the crew can have the show’s stage (including bubble machines and CO2 jets), Vari-light 3000 and ACL lighting, and projection equipment operable within five hours. At this point, Audio Engineer Matt Yelton arrives and begins setting up his equipment.
Video Games Live doesn’t travel with its own audio system, only lighting. Since the size of the production’s human component varies depending on the city and venue, the rented audio setup can range from an average complexity to, well, huge.
“We’re going for almost rock-show volume with a cinematic sub—not hip-hop, just a nice pure cinematic sub, like you’re in a really good surround hall or something like that,” says Yelton, who previously ran over 2,500 shows as a sound operator for The Pixies.
It takes Yelton about an hour-and-a-half to set up the show’s click-track. To synchronize the musical elements with the video montages, members of the orchestra (Wall included) don earpieces. The click-track is the metronome beat that plays through these earpieces, ensuring that the players, conductor, lighting, and video segments are perfectly lined up. A swelling crescendo will always hit where it’s supposed to against an accompanying trailer and Space Invaders music won’t creep into the montage of a frog jumping across a road.
Whereas larger festivals might give an audio engineer a half an hour to set up the particulars of the mixing board, Yelton starts his microphone setup and audio tweaking hours before the audience hits the doors. But even with an ample lead-up time, working the audio of the show itself is no easy task. Video Games Live supplements the sound of the orchestra and accompanying choir with a number of microphones depending on the production's scale—more than 20 instrument microphones were used for the show’s San Jose performances. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that each song in the show has its own sound amplification nuances, ranging from the a cappella vocalizations of Civilization 4’s opening theme to the rock-guitar overtones of the show’s closing Castlevania medley (jammed by Tallarico himself).
“It’s like playing piano with the show,” says Yelton, estimating that he tweaks the show’s digital mixing console thousands of times during every performance. “This show is far too dynamic to not manipulate it. And even then, so much of sound—at least the way I do it—is ironic at best, in the sense that sometimes when things are crescendoing , you actually pull things down. It’s a total paradox.”
For the parts of Video Games Live that the orchestra can’t recreate, like getting the sound of Halo 3’s drum beat to perfectly match the game’s soundtrack, Wall cues up prerecorded tracks from a four-channel Mackie mixer near his conductor’s podium. He likes to stay as true to a song’s original score as possible, but sometimes Wall and Tallarico adopt a shotgun approach: they’ll create a medley based the numerous popular songs from a particular game franchise.
Wall estimates that Video Games Live has a repository of approximately 50 songs to select for any given performance. The orchestra can play around 20 songs per concert, which leads to difficult decisions regarding the types of tunes that go into each production.
“That’s the hardest thing to do. How do you get rid of Sonic the Hedgehog? How do you get rid of Mario? We would be hung out to dry by half the audience if we didn’t play Super Mario Brothers. I would say there’s about 30 to 40, maybe 50 percent of the show that we can switch out at any given time,” Wall says. “The formula that we have right now is we have a certain number of classics in the show and a certain number of newer pieces, different types of music. We usually have two interactive segments in the show. We find if we do more than that, it slows the show down.”
Structured and synchronized as it can appear, Video Games Live still runs into its share of theatrical troubles, with human error serving as the frequent culprit. The show brought its Xbox 360 console to a recent performance at the 2008 Leipzig Games Convention. Plugging the American-styled console into a 220-volt European socket destroyed the system, and the VGL team had to scramble to find a suitable replacement for the show’s interactive Guitar Hero segment. They ended up running the bit on a German PlayStation 2—“a mess,” Wall says.
Tallarico tries to avoid these technical glitches by following the touring practice of introducing eccentric requests into the show’s technical rider, the performance’s Bible that details, explicitly, a group’s technical and personal requirements. A show’s tour manager will often walk through a venue’s dressing rooms immediately upon arriving at a venue. He’ll look for the more esoteric requests specified in the tour’s rider--Tallarico asks for pink marshmallow Peeps or a note explaining that these items could not be found. If the peeps aren’t present, the tour manager deduces that the venue’s management didn’t read the rider. This can lead to grave issues if a show’s technical requirements are stringent, like Video Games Live’s.
“We’ve shown up and they haven’t had the proper lights, not understanding that, look, everything’s pre-programmed,” Tallarico says. “They’re like, ‘these lights will be good enough’ and it’s like, no, we will have no show unless you bring us the lights. But we’ve always pulled off the show. We’ve never had to pull our hair out too much.”
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