I had the amazing opportunity to go see Video Games Live at the Vancouver Centre of Performing Arts tonight courtesy of Futureshop. VGL is an awesome concert performed by a live orchestra and choir and featuring music from popular video games. Every night is different as they have many songs to chose from a vast collection of games. Tonight they started off with mashup of old classic games including Pong, Space Invaders, Frogger, Duck Hunt, Street Fighter II and Tetris then moved to more modern games including songs from Final Fantasy, Halo: Reach, Castlevania, Silent Hill 2, Super Mario, Legend of Zelda, God of War, World of Warcraft, Uncharted 2, Chronos Trigger and a bunch of others.

Performances featured Tommy Tallarico, the creator of VGL, who was playing guitar, flutist and vocalist Laura Intravia and piano soloist Martin Leung. Intravia's first appearance on stage involved opera version of Tetris! Who ever thought Tetris could sound so opera-like! "Flute Link" also made an appearance with Intravia playing a solo from Legend of Zelda dressed as Link with Ciela on her shoulder that she arranged herself! It was very amusing to watch as Ciela had her own "flute" and kept interrupting Intravia and the whole piece was basically a flute playing war between them. Martin Leung played the theme from Super Mario Brothers and blindfolded at that! His fingers just fly across the keys; it is very mesmerizing to watch. I am really amazed at all the talented people that performed tonight. In fact both Intravia and Leung were recruited because Tallarico saw them playing on Youtube! I guess it is a breeding ground for stars! It's also the conductor, Emmanuel Fratianni's first time in Canada. If you look at the photos I took you will see that his conductor stand is actually a joystick!

Throughout the performance they also gave away prizes. There was also a contest which involved two audience members playing Frogger while the orchestra played the sound reacting to what was happening on screen. A Guitar Hero contest was also held prior to the concert and the top scorer was invited on stage to play "Emotion" by Aerosmith on Guitar Hero while Tommy Tallarico played real guitar. He only needed to get 125,000 points in Hard to win a prize but he choose to play it on EXPERT and hardly missed any notes! The audience went wild cheering him on. He took home the prize of a Kinect for XBox360 courtesy of Futureshop! Some lucky person walked away with a PS3 AND PSP courtesy of Sony from a random draw! I'm so jealous!

After the show, they held a meet and greet with Tallarico, Intravia, Leung, Fratianni and Chris Mair (?) and I got to meet them and get their autographs. Unfortunately Flute Link accidentally smudged her signature. ='(

Anyways I had an awesome time and will definitely go again next year! My favourite part must have been when they sang "Still Alive" (from Portal). (Oh my gosh! I found it on iTunes!) The lyrics are so funny and the images that accompanied the song in the background were hilarious! I wish I had taken a clip it. Here's one I found on Youtube:


Video Games Live is only in Vancouver for one more night, April 14th, so get your tickets now! And in honour of the Canucks win tonight they released the discount code: CANUCKS for 50% off any balcony seat ticket! Don't miss this opportunity to see them! Any one who enjoys music should go see Video Games Live, gamers and non-gamers alike!