Discover the story of video game music concerts - from to the present day. Photo: Kamil Rojek. In , he held the world's first video game music concert in Tokyo. Since then, he has held more than 18 of them throughout Japan. Photo: Boljoa. The concert marked the official opening of Europe's biggest trade fair for video games, and was repeated each year until Following in Koichi Sugiyama's footsteps, other composers have gone on to arrange symphonic concert performances showcasing their work in video games. All seats at the concert were sold out in a single day. The concert sold out within four days and more than video game music fans enjoyed the show.
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From single beeps to symphonic sounds in 40 years — today it is not unusual for music from computer and video games to be recorded and performed by world class orchestras and released by renowned classical labels such as DECCA or Deutsche Grammophon. At the end of the eighties, the fledgling genre of video game music left its virtual world for the very first time and moved into real concert halls. On 20th August , composer and conductor Koichi Sugiyama presented his Family Classic Concert at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo — the first video game music concert in the world. Exactly sixteen years later to the day, on 20th August , video game music cast its spell on concert-goers again — at the Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, Germany. From to these concerts were the opening for the annual Games Convention in Leipzig. They were permanently sold out, always documented by the international media, and visited by a young and enthusiastic audience, who were often experiencing their first encounter with symphonic music. Similar events subsequently flourished all around the world. In , the game music concert series moved to Cologne. For the very first time, DECCA, a leading label for classical music, released a live concert recording of video game music. And with this, again for the first time, video game music reached the Top 15 in the German classical music charts.
The Symphonic Game Music Concerts German: Symphonische Spielemusikkonzerte are a series of award-winning, annual German video game music concerts initiated in , notable for being the longest running and the first of their kind outside Japan. From to , 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. In , the cancellation of the concert by the Leipzig Trade Fair resulted in a cooperation with the WDR , eventually spawning new video game music performances by its in-house ensembles, principally presented at the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. Inspired by game concerts from Japan, the Orchestral Game Music Concerts from the s in particular, he developed a concept for the first event of this kind outside Japan.
