Geek Fest in London

There's a week long computer game festival taking place in London this week and as part of the launch activities the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank put on a concert using their Philarmonia Orchestra (not to be confused with the Philarmonic) to play the music of various video games. Yup, completely geeky!!

Starting with an opening segment covering the history of gaming including the music of Out Run, Asteroids, Pong etc they moved through away from the electronic blips and bleeps towards full orchestral scores that can be found in today's games such as Halo, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy. Rather unfortunately they focused on arcade games and consoles and so totally overlooked the music of Rob Hubbard, who had quite a following in the days of Commodore 64s and Spectrums.

Most of the pieces came from the orchestra and choir and a small number from a very good chinese piano player who goes by the name the video game pianist. The best pieces for me were Metal Gear and Zelda, although quite a lot of people in the audience were going crazy for Halo and the Final Fantasy stuff. One guy sounded like he was having an orgasm he was enjoying it too much. I will admit to not knowing all the tunes but that's probably because I don't have an X-Box or go crazy over everything Bill Gates does (He had quite a following at this event based on the cheering).

There was also a fancy dress competition, and some people did actually bother dressing up; some costumes better than others I might add. I did get pics but untill I get my desktop back I can't upload them on here.

A good evening but by quite a long way the most geekiest event I've ever been to, and it was also the first sell out show at the newly re-opened festival, which I have to say has some amazing acoustics in there now, so expect to see the show come back here next year.