The music from video games means a lot to those who play them. Whether it’s the bleeps and bloops of yore, or the sweeping orchestras of today, the themes from video games get stuck in players’ heads, leading to unforgettable moments that fans bond over. Covers of these iconic songs are nothing new on sites like YouTube, but in light of the way the world has changed in the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one group has found a new way to bring video game music fans and musicians together.
The Virtual Video Game Orchestra is coming up on its one-year anniversary. A response to video game orchestras and cover artists no longer being able to collaborate in person, VVGO collects recordings from artists who live all over the world and creates wonderfully edited music videos celebrating iconic tunes from games like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Monster Hunter, Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and more. Recently, three key members from the Virtual Video Game Orchestra spoke with Game Rant about the incredible sense of community the group has fostered during a time when many people have never felt more isolated. The following interview transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
GR: Hi guys, thanks so much for doing this interview, let’s start with introductions, shall we?
Jackson Argo: I’m Jackson and I live in New York City, Brooklyn. I am a software developer at Slack. Music is kind of like my hobby. I work on all the website stuff and the integrations with our Discord, we use Discord pretty heavily for all of our communication, and just kinda helping to make sure that we can distribute all of the recording materials. That’s actually surprisingly difficult to try to get done. *laughs*
Jacob Zeleny: I’m Jacob from central Texas. I’ve been doing audio work for the last six years. I’m one of the co-founders and executive directors of VVGO. I’m also the audio director for our audio engineers team, basically taking all the recordings, compiling them together and making them sound like a fully recorded orchestra as if it was sitting in, say, Abbey Road.
Brandon Harnish: I’m Brandon Harnish. I’m originally from San Jose. I’m currently living in Reno. I am also one of the co-founders and one of the executive directors. I’m also one of the directors of the video team, and I’m also director of the communications team.
GR: Your first song was the theme from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Can you talk about how you first decided to start and start with that song specifically?
Brandon Harnish: Last March, Jackson and I were both playing in the Intermission Orchestra at Berkeley, which is a community orchestra that plays music from video games, anime and film. And we had a concert on Friday, March 6. Within a week, COVID came and closed, absolutely everything. And I thought to myself, “okay, now we have this overwhelmingly large group of musicians who were newly stuck at home and their social circles have been taken from them.”
A lot of people also had to move back to their family homes. And music is perhaps. I mean, for me, it’s been one of the best things for my social life and one of my only outlets from it all. And I thought, “okay, what’s really preventing us from continuing to make music?”
And for context, I participated in Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 4 and was aware of it since 2010. And the concept there for the uninitiated is that the composer will record himself conducting and he’ll be able to publish reference audio and collect submissions and compile it all together.
I thought, “Hmm, is that something we can do?” So within a week of the closure starting, I started a Facebook group chat with some friends who I had from the Intermission Orchestra at Berkeley as well as from Reno Video Game Symphony, I made the pitch to them like, “Maybe this is something we could do? Maybe we can provide something for all these people who are stuck at home?”
And Metal Gear Solid 3, it was accessible where we could make just a handful of parts, include transpositions for all these different kinds of instruments, but you can really come in, whatever instrument and have something to play. And we got a soloist from intermission, at Berkeley, Joie Zhou, and she provided amazing vocals on it. And we thought, all right, let’s see who we can get. And it turns out we got 98 recording submissions in for our first one. And it was a lot bigger than I think that we anticipated.
I personally spent a few dozen hours editing the video together. I know that Jacob’s spent a lot of time on the audio, and it was incredibly well received, and only, paved the road for us to be able to grow into the community that we’ve become now with the production value that we have now.
GR: So you are basically coming up on one year, congratulations on your first anniversary! When you start out on a new song, how do you start? Do you send recording equipment to anyone or anything like that?
Jacob Zeleny: There’s not really equipment that people get. The only resource that we actually hand out is reference materials. There’s the sheet music, and what we call reference tracks. Basically, we take sampled library music, compile that together to basically follow along with the score of whatever we’re producing, and hand that out to the musicians so that they have something to record to, so that way everybody’s in time, in video and in audio.
People can record with pretty much whatever they want. Phones, high-end microphones, terrible microphones, whatever it is we’re going to make it work, which is the really cool thing.
Brandon Harnish: As Jacob was saying, the materials are sheet music, which is, kind of a bear to put together, where you are trying to make it in such a way that’s really easy to read down. They really look like parts that you would receive if you were a session musician in Hollywood going in to record and usually get one shot to read it down before playing it.
So we’re trying to make sure that the musicians have really no barriers to accessing the music. And as Jacob was saying with the reference tracks, they’ll have a click in them. And we’ll use that click, to first synchronize everybody’s takes, but it also helps them know exactly where they are in time.
Jackson Argo: One of the cool things we do in regard to sheet music, we’ll produce files for almost like a hundred instruments sometimes, we try to hit every possible instrument that are community might have. People come to us and say, “Hey, I want to play this instrument, there’s not a part for it.” Well, we’ll try to make them a part or find them a part that fits best with the instrument.
We’ll also do conductor videos. Where we, well, actually have one of the members of our orchestra conduct the music so you can watch that while they play. Which I always think is really cool. Yeah, so there’s quite a lot of work that we do just getting the pieces ready for our members to start recording.
And then of course, you know, on the other side of it collecting all these files and processing them on the other hand is also a big hurdle.
GR: What software then do you use to compile all these different audio files and everything together?
Jacob Zeleny: As far as receiving submissions and whatnot, we currently just use Dropbox to gather everything, which is the simplest way. After that, Brandon, who is our very awesome organization person has the role of going through Dropbox and relabeling, half of almost everything, to where it’s all organized and systematically placed for his team and for my team to where we can just drop files in and just start editing and then drop them back in, and they’re already there for the next person. So yeah, it goes into Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, any other editing software for sound or video that you can think of is it’s probably gone through it.
Brandon Harnish: We wrapped submissions for our 10th recording project last weekend. And we got I think it’s 271 submissions and we’re still waiting on a couple of stragglers. And it’s on the order of maybe even 400 files by now. And I have to go in and rename everything, so that when you sort it you know, exactly who is playing, what part is being played, who it’s being played by and on what instrument.
It helps, when, as we go through a score in post-production and see who’s supposed to be playing at any particular moment on a particular part, we know who to show on screen for the video team and for the audio team they’ll know what group of instruments to work on next.
GR: What instruments do you all play and what was your musical background like?
Jackson Argo: I played tuba middle school and high school and my high school marching band. And since then, I mostly picked up like classical guitar, it’s kind of my main instrument now. But, for the orchestra, I’ll occasionally do a tuba recording. And I just started a collection of melodicas and I love them. They’re so much fun to play.
Brandon Harnish: I started off playing piano from a very young age. For the orchestra I’m, playing all sorts of middle and low brass. In middle school and high school, I played the trombone. So I have trombones, baritone horn. I’ve got this, E-flat Alto tenor horn, which is a lot of fun to play. I have a little tiny pocket trumpet that I play, and then I sing as well.
Jacob Zeleny: I play violin, but I also can play the rest of the string instruments as well as piano. And then I also sing a stupid range in vocals.
Brandon Harnish: Very high and very low.
All three of them laugh.
Brandon Harnish: Yeah, there was a project we did, “Aurene, Dragon Full of Light” from Guild Wars 2, where Jacob provided the vocals for the reference track, and he sang the upper soprano part as well as the lowest bass part.
GR: That’s quite the range. So how do you decide on what games or music you’re going to do? Is it personal favorites or is it like you said for Snake Eater, something that just seems like a good fit?
Jackson Argo: I think probably the biggest factor is what’s going to fit best with the orchestra, and we take community submissions for arrangements.
If they have an arrangement more or less already prepared, we’ll take it and we’ll decide if it fits in with our orchestra. And that’s the main way we make our decisions. I think we typically also want to pick ones that are like a little more popular, ones that are going to get a little more excitement around them. That’s like our main selection process.
Brandon Harnish: For the current season that we’re pushing out. We had 19 arrangement submissions of which we were choosing 4. So the competition is very fierce, and we’re always thinking, similar to if we were in person, how do we program a set of four pieces that are going to get people engaged and that are accessible, and appropriately challenging for the range of skill levels that we have, and as inclusive as we can for the range of instruments that we do have.
Jackson Argo: One advantage that we did have early on is, because, you know, COVID restrictions came in so quickly. Nobody saw it coming. A lot of people had already prepared arrangements for their orchestras to play, and now they have these arrangements for orchestras that can’t meet anymore.
I think that’s also what drives us, what got us so many submissions to begin with. It was like, people had this want to write music and want to play music and didn’t have a way to do it.
We all really wanted to do it and turns out a lot of other people wanted to do it too. *laughs*
Brandon Harnish: It’s a little bit self-serving in a way but seeing how many people we’ve been able to make a positive impact on has been really motivating, particularly motivating as we move forward.
GR: What are some of your favorite video games personally for musical or non-musical reasons?
Jacob Zeleny: For me it’s going to be The Legend of Zelda series, the music from the Zelda series is so diverse in how it’s created. Koji Kondo, the composer, is also one of the main composers with Nintendo. He’s created a very special lineup, with Zelda and Mario games as well, where it brings you into the game in a way that you didn’t expect it to. And it’s designed where you get all these little tunes in your head.
And it’s also a type of music, like if you play it, it’s a very interesting set of sheet music that you can get in front of musicians and be like, “Why don’t we learn a different style of music that doesn’t really get heard very often?”
Jackson Argo: I think for me, music in Nintendo games I feel like are just in a league of their own, just far better than any other games, like they’re just meant to be fun. I really like that. And I think it really comes through. The Mario soundtracks always blow me away, like Super Mario Galaxy is great and Mario Odyssey had “Jump Up, Super Star!” which is just ridiculously good.
The Pokemon game are always good. I also really like more like turn-based strategy games, like Civilization 6 and then some classic late 90s games that I still play like Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Those tend to have like really big orchestral pieces, really big full sounds, and I always really like those.
Brandon Harnish: Some of my favorite video games growing up were Guitar Hero and the Pokemon series. We have done a track from Guitar Hero, which is kind of weird to say, but it was originally from a video game. So it counts!
We haven’t done any Pokemon music yet. Very unfortunate. We’re going to figure that out pretty soon. I also have a soft spot for the music from Final Fantasy. Similar to what Jacob was saying, a lot of the Final Fantasy music is very genre bending where, if you want to give music to performers from Final Fantasy, and they don’t know what the piece is beforehand, they won’t know what the style is either. You know, there’s so many different, musical genres and elements from those genres that get thrown together and twisted and mangled and into some truly memorable and nostalgic music.
GR: You mentioned the Guitar Hero/God of War song you did, “The End Begins (To Rock),” and you got to actually work with God of War’s composer, Gerard K Marino. How did that come about? Did he approach you or did you approach him?
Brandon Harnish: He’s actually a friend of Jose’s. Jose is one of our co-founders and one of the co-founders of the Game Music Ensemble at UCLA, and he and Gerard had played together before.
Jacob Zeleny: And another one of our executive directors, Jerome has an extensive history on just a lot of music stuff and specifically in the music industry. He’s got a lot of connections to all these brilliant people, but it also helped us get to where we are right now. And honestly, without Jerome and Jose, as well as us three, I don’t think this would have been possible.
Gerard, when we were working with him, he made it very clear that it was like, we want to make something really, really good. We don’t want to rush it, we want to focus on it and not let it just be something that we have a deadline that if it’s still not good, then it comes out crap. And that proved to be very wise words from him because that project actually took an extra month and a half to do than was originally planned, but we ended up turning something absolutely amazing out.
He is very good down to the dime of it and making sure that when he’s working on something that he’s focused on, getting the best possible product, and he understands the value of music and how it can impact people as well. And we had guitar solos for that particular project, and he was able to combine different soloists to get something that really excels.
Brandon Harnish: He was even going to play a solo and then gave it up and said, “Nah we’re going to have this other person continue to solo because what he played is better than what I was coming up with.”
Like, I think that was a really interesting move because we were always thinking like, Oh yeah, we’re going to feature the composer. It’s going to be awesome. And then he said, “no, no, I’m good. Like your people are awesome.” And that was a really cool thing.
It soon became a really public much closer collaboration than we expected it. The results were epic, completely epic. We reopened submissions after he joined and we nearly doubled the number of submissions. We were sitting at around like 95 or so, then we reopened it and ended up with 183 and I’m like, “excuse me?” *laughs*
From “Snake Eater” as project one with 98 submissions, then “Proof of A Hero” as project two with 92, and then 183 with “The End Begins (To Rock)” from God of War/Guitar Hero. We’re just like, “Oh no!’ *laughs*
GR: So how did you decide to do specifically the Guitar Hero version?
Brandon Harnish: That was Gerard.
I don’t know how we got the initial arrangement. And then, one of our music prep people, Thomas Håkanson, his primary job is to handle how the music is presented for musicians. He went in and was like, “we’re going to make this gargantuan.”
And we went from having a standard rock orchestra, a couple of guitars, couple bassists, drums. Then we had choir and strings. We have a handful of the wind instruments. He went into it and was like, “Okay, yeah, we’re going to have the six horn parts we’re going to have a huge sweeping organ part. We’re going to have these crazy extended techniques on the strings. Anything that we can do to compliment the sheer hype of that song.”
It’s like a five-and-a-half-minute track of pure hype. I guess Gerard, his idea was like, “We’re going to do the Guitar Hero version because we can, and we have all the things in place to make that happen. And Gerard more than happy to give us his original stems [individual recordings of each instrument] to work off of as well.
But yeah. Having Gerard from one end and then Tom on the other, brought it together to just make it overwhelmingly more hype than we could’ve ever thought.
GR: And then you also got to work with another video game composer, Maclaine Diemer for the Guild Wars Guild Wars 2 song, “Aurene, Dragon Full of Light” and that one was a cappella.
Brandon Harnish: That one really followed our usual, somebody from the community will submit an arrangement and then we’ll go ahead and do it. But that arrangement that we got was the official published version.
Maclaine had posted his arrangement online and said, “fans have at it.” So that’s how it was fronted to us initially. We thought choir is different, very different, very restrictive in terms of instrumentation. It doesn’t have that inclusivity thing, on its own, but programmed amongst a set that has all of the instruments, it would provide something that would be really refreshing and fit very well.
I expanded his five-part arrangement to eight parts. There were some light motifs, some musical themes, and little ear worms from other places in the game that were incorporated into that arrangement. And then we got 144 submissions. All Vocal.
We went to Maclaine with our arrangement already done, so different from Gerard in that respect. He listened to the conceptual tracks and he was like, “This is really cool. You’ve expanded on this. What’s the point in doing a cover if you can’t at least somewhat make it your own?” He was more than for it.
And then we got a lot of people to join our community who are avid Guild Wars fans. A couple of dozen people joined our server just because they wanted to perform this song. And so we thought as a thank you to them, something that can be really special is if, Maclaine appeared in the video, conducting similar to what Eric Whitaker did for his Virtual Choir. And Maclaine said, “I’m not really a conductor, but I’m happy to give it a shot.” And the response was overwhelmingly positive, People were just stunned.
That video was and still is our most successful and most widely spread video that we’ve created. And I’m just thinking this is really a community effort. Without individual people hitting the share button, without Maclaine speaking so highly of us as he has done in another article that was just published, that musical experience couldn’t have spread to so many people.
Working with him was an absolute pleasure. His mindset for what video game music can and should be and how it can and should be performed is exactly in line with what we’re doing.
Maclaine said, “There’s nothing that brings back all of the memories of playing a video game like the music. And so for us to be able to keep making it and performing it, and keeping it in the public eye, is something that touches everyone in a much different way than, for example, film music.
Jackson Argo: *jokingly* “Oh, yeah, that’s a choir one. This will be cool, we’ll throw it in there for the, for the choir guys,” since like the other two we were doing at the time had no choir. So we thought “we’ll be nice to our partners.” And then it ended up being one of our top pieces. *laughs*
GR: I also wanted to talk about the Zelda one from Link’s Awakening with the beautiful number of ocarinas in it.
Brandon Harnish: So Thomas Hakanson thought it’d be really cool if we could, you know, since it’s Zelda and we have a lot of nerds in our server who play ocarina let’s give them something to play for the end credits. And before that point, we had never had any music in our credits. And so Tom made an arrangement for ocarina and recorder called “Encore” for ENd Card for Ocarina & Recorder Ensemble. It was an acronym, and I was really glad that I figured that out. *laughs*
We got 40 submissions for that. We had other instruments in addition to ocarinas and recorders, but the ocarina playing community at large, there were people who joined our server just so they can play ocarinas and recorders for that encore. That was like the icing on the cake for this amazingly produced video.
GR: That video really is impressive. Was it actual in-game footage or something else?
Brandon Harnish: All our thanks go Jordy de Lat, our other video team director who’s in the Netherlands. The nine-hour time difference between us is very difficult to manage, but not only do we continue to do it, but it’s, it’s become normal. He handled all the animation for that video and it’s wild to me.
He found someplace where they had some 3d models that were fan created, so he had a baseline to work off of, but he went in and made all his tweaks and created those environments from scratch. All of the dungeons that you see in that video are in chronological order and then the items that come across the screen to wipe are the items that you get in each of those dungeons.
He is a motion graphics artist by trade, and the company he works for had just completed a huge project, so he had a week off of work. He put 70 hours into that animation over the course of his week off. And we were all floored, I was speechless when I saw that first preview. And usually, we don’t show video previews to anyone. I certainly hadn’t, but I told all the executive directors, I said, “You need to take a look at this.”
*laughs* Everybody’s like “Jordy’s been holding out on us!” because somebody in our midst is not only is willing to do this but is a pro at it. And I can’t, I can’t even begin to explain my gratitude and the immense fortune that we have come across in that regard.
GR: It really is fun to watch. Did Jordy also do the 3D environment for your Super Mario 3D World video that you just released?
Brandon Harnish: He does all of it. All the innovation that you see is him.
GR: If someone wants to submit something to you guys, how do they do that?
Jackson Argo: Basically, they join our discord server, then get access to all of our parts and what they need to do the recording. And then for the recordings we give them the Dropbox link.
GR: So what’s next for VVGO?
Brandon Harnish: We currently have released seven, we’re working on number eight, which is “For Redemption, Decisive Battle II” from Octopath Traveler. And that will be premiered this Saturday, March 13, on the one-year anniversary of Virtual Video Game Orchestra, as part of our set with VGM Together, which is a very large, crazy, three-day online community event, all around video game music.
Our set begins at 9 AM, Pacific Time, that’s 12 Eastern. We’re kicking off the day with a half-hour of some behind the scenes as to how we create everything as well as four pieces, ending with that premiere.
Our ninth project is also actually currently in our Discord server. The audio guy on that is currently in our server, streaming himself working on it. The piece is called “The Republic of Bastok” from Final Fantasy 11.
Our tenth piece that we just wrapped for is called “Hilda’s Healing.” It is an original arrangement compiled of some themes from The Legend Zelda Majora’s Mask and from A Link Between Worlds. It has a harp feature in it, which is awesome, with now nearly 300 submissions.
Project 11, the music is being prepared for that. It is an arrangement of the prologue music to Golden Sun from the Gameboy Advanced in 2001. That was arranged by Jonathan Shaw, who was not on our production team. He hails from the UK and produces these amazing arrangements. And that’s another one similar to the God of War/Guitar Hero piece. It has, I think, 65 parts to it. It’s something nuts, absolutely absurd. And all of those, again, have their own credits music as well. That adds a bunch of additional parts to that.
And as of a couple of days ago, we just opened up submissions for our 12th project. Another choral piece, this time by composer, Austin Wintory. It’s from a game called Abzu, and the title is “Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven.” It’s extremely difficult. And a lot of people are going to be scared. That’s fine. it is a very scary piece. *laughs* Very close harmonies, very contemporary.
We have partnered with another Discord server called Epiphany that’s run by Jen Hewitt from the UK. She has her own virtual choir, and she has got quite a lot of her members to join our server as we’ve been partnering together. And, she said, “please, sing this with them because music is awesome.”
She also provided soprano recordings for the reference tracks so that Jacob didn’t have to.
The three of them all laugh.
GR: What are some games that you would like to do, without confirming or denying anything? You mentioned Pokemon earlier.
Jacob Zeleny: Pokemon is definitely one of those ones that we want to do in the future. But we haven’t even gotten a submission for it yet to be considered, which we hope to fix in the future. We have some Zelda ideas for the future. We also have some Final Fantasy ideas for the future. We can’t go into detail on either of those though.
Brandon Harnish: So from those original 19 that I mentioned, we picked 4. There’s a handful of those that we’re still keeping in the rotation for consideration in the future, because it was unbelievably close, Just the quality that was submitted.
There’ve been arrangements from old NES game, there’ve been arrangements from stuff that is very new and that’s just come out, and everything in between. All consoles and even some PC games, so it’s really a mixed bag.
If a game that somebody loves has epic music and they are willing to put in the time to arrange it or to find someone to arrange it for them, they can send it to us, and it’ll have a good shot at consideration. We’re really open to anything.
GR: Is there anything else you want to add?
Brandon Harnish: If you play an instrument and you want people to play with, if you play any instrument, and you like the kind of stuff that we do, you can join us by joining our Discord server. Not only will you be able to play with us, but you’ll join an amazing community of people from all over the world who are so stoked to be able to enjoy the experience of making video game music.
And any skill level as well. We have people who have just started playing their instrument to professional musicians.
Jackson Argo: Like Brandon said, we’re an awesome community. We have a lot of fun. A lot of memes.
Jacob Zeleny: One of the other big things, this has been made clear to us even more as we’ve gone on, is it’s not just about playing the music. It’s also about getting to teach people how the music industry works as well, especially with how sheet music gets created, how stuff gets arranged, how video production goes, how audio production goes, how web coding goes with Jackson. You know, I think that’s the biggest thing because we’re all teaching each other something.
We’re all here to build each other up and all become better at our craft. And I think that’s what, as you’ve seen, as Brandon said earlier, our videos and our audio production have gotten a lot better. And we’re only going to get better, but that’s because of how many people have been able to join us and also help us and teach each other.
Jackson Argo: Yeah, we’re definitely a community of very passionate and very smart, very talented people.
Brandon Harnish: It really does take a village. And yeah, not only being able to perform with everybody, but I think that for all of us here, the amount that we’ve learned. If you just think to a year ago where we were, I didn’t think that this would really be possible. I was having a lot of doubts that this idea would even come to fruition. And I fronted the idea thinking maybe we’ll get a handful of people.
And if there’s anyone out there who wants to create music, and do something similar to what we’ve done, do it, go for it, get organized, get some friends together, because you’ll surprise yourself at what you’re going to be able to create.
GR: That’s a great message. Clearly the VVGO means a lot to a lot of people during this past year that has been rather difficult for a lot of us, so I hope you guys continue to grow and have a lot more fun while doing it. Thank you for your time.
Virtual Video Game Orchestra debuts their version of “For Redemption, Decisive Battle II” from Octopath Traveler during their set on VGMTogether, which begins at 9 AM PST, 12 EST this weekend.
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