Nerd out and rock on: video game music is hot

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This article was published 23/04/2024 (910 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week, Chris Nyarady went to an Exchange District brewery to race in a Mario Kart tournament, picking up a Nintendo Switch controller and taking on the alter ego of Morton Koopa Jr., one of Bowser’s seven pesky underlings, for a race down the hellish curves of Rainbow Road.

As the digital engines at Little Brown Jug started revving, the system was on mute. But when a floating Lakitu gave his starting signal and the banana peels started flying, the taproom filled with the familiar soundtrack of one of the bestselling franchises of all time, provided by an ensemble called the Bandwagons, enlisted by the brewery for its first-ever gig.

With video games like Mario Kart, the pixels are only one piece of the puzzle; the jaunty music and slippery sound effects mirrors the intensity of the match as competitors settle their own personal scores and bit-sized vendettas; without Link’s theme music playing, Hyrule is just another temple in the sky.

In Winnipeg, there is an established tradition of hybrid events merging video games with live instrumentation — the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra hosted a series called Video Games Live throughout the 2010s — but that type of programming is experiencing a minor boom in cities across North America. Last weekend, hundreds of gamers flocked to Minneapolis for three days of video game music at the latest edition of VGM CON, Nyarady says.

Little Brown Jug’s events and content co-ordinator Jensen Maxwell attributes the success of the Kart event — which attracted 56 competitors paying $15 apiece and 54 spectators shelling out one Wilfrid Laurier each — in large part to the Bandwagons (Fred Warner, Kasey Kurtz, McKenzie Walpole, Nolan Gottfried and Ben Kidd), who transcribed and arranged the live score.

“Video game music is pretty notoriously catchy,” says Maxwell. “It gets in your head and it stays there.”

That’s the thinking behind Nyarady’s current project, a live video game concert series called Beeps ‘N’ Bops, organized by Bonus Stage, which bills itself as “Canada’s premier nerdy event production company.”

Bonus Stage has co-ordinated video game concerts in cities across Canada, visiting Winnipeg last year for the first Beeps ‘N’ Bops, a concert name that throws a bit of shade on those who dismiss video game music as being formulaic or basic.

Nyarady, a Sega kid who grew up in Fredericton, N.B., in the 1990s, says that assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. “Even bad games often have great music,” says the professional animator.

Last year’s concert was held at the Rec Room, a Cineplex-run entertainment complex, with about 80 people in attendance. On Thursday, the event will move to the Park Theatre, with an eclectic lineup ranging from jazz (8-Bit & The Single Players) to metal (Super FX) to keyboard loops (OrchKeystra).

Also on the bill is Winnipeg harpist Samantha Ballard, who has carved out a full-time career plucking the strings of her Lyon and Healy Style 23.

Ballard, 30, started playing the harp as a teenager, recognizing that there was a little less competition at the professional level on that instrument than the flute, piano or saxophone.

By Grade 9, the Shaftesbury High School alumna started taking lessons with local pro Erica Schultz, and after graduation, Ballard lugged her instrument to the University of British Columbia, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music.

It was a decision that paid off: Ballard now teaches harp online to 20 students, also performing gigs at weddings and other events.

But her musical output isn’t restricted to nuptials. Mostly, she plays music from video games, with 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and nearly 60,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, where she live-streams performances each Friday.

Recently, she also recorded harp for the soundtrack for the Netflix animated film Orion and the Dark, featuring Jacob Tremblay (Room), Angela Bassett, Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell, I, Tonya) and the legendary German director Werner Herzog as narrator.

Her most recent single was a cover of The Ballad of the Windfish from the soundtrack of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and her most recent album was a harp-based reimagining of the score of Octopath Traveller, a role-playing game she plays on her Nintendo Switch. Her next album will be based on Octopath Traveller II.

“The music for that game is extremely well-orchestrated, and the modulations are just so genius,” says Ballard, who has to tune each of her instrument’s 47 strings individually each time she plays.

“Music certainly does a lot to enhance the emotional content of a video game. It can add a lot to storytelling, and makes me think of Wagner, who popularized the term Gesamtkunstwerk, which means that everything — the music, the lyrics, the costuming, the props — all work together to contribute to the experience of the overall artwork.”

“Sometimes, it’s not as deep as that,” adds Ballard, who practises about an hour each day and recommends listening to harpists Aryeh Frankfurter and Anneleen Lenaerts. “The music can be something to keep you company while you’re playing the game.”

At the concert at the Park, Ballard will be playing music from Octopath Traveller as well as from as many Zelda games as she could fit into one set, ranging from Ocarina of Time to Breath of the Wild.

Ballard also played at the first Beeps ‘N’ Bops concert last year, and the reception was anything but static, says Nyarady, who only pulls out his violin to wish friends and family a happy birthday.

“We had some metalheads getting really into the solo harp,” he says. “It showed us that people in Winnipeg were hungry for this kind of content.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com