The N.C. Symphony gathered June 7th at the Meymadi Concert Hall to play music from popular video games. It was a first for the orchestra and Raleigh alike.

The production featured a combination of works from many video games spanning decades, including Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Skyrim, WarCraft, and Tetris.

Tommy Tallarico, the program’s composer, spent several years touring the world with the Video Games Live show since the its debut in 2005. Tallarico worked composing music for more than 300 different games and garnered almost 50 awards in the industry.

“I want to show how culturally significant video games and video game music is today,” Tallarico said. “I want to show that it’s not just bleeps and bloops.”

The program started at 8 p.m. and lasted for two and a half hours. The symphony played 16 different pieces accompanied by images or videos to compliment the tracks. The program also included a member of the audience playing Guitar Hero live while the N.C. Symphony performed the music.

Other songs came from the Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 soundtracks.

The N.C. Symphony was founded 80 years ago. Although the symphony is an established act, going from playing classical pieces to video game music was a major transition for the orchestra.

While the N.C. Symphony performed well, the show in general had some noticeable problems.

The light show setup included one light that would frequently point at the audience, blinding them. Also, the crowd was often encouraged to vocalize their passion for the music, making some pieces very difficult to hear over the shouting.

While Young adults and teenagers dominated the crowd, although some N.C. State faculty also attended, including Robert Golub, a Physics professor at N.C. State.

Golub said the show was fascinating, but he noticed some shortcomings.

“The light show was mostly nice but they spoiled it by shining the lights directly into the eyes of the audience for long periods of time so that you could not see the video accompanying the music, which was sometimes interesting,” Golub said.

Tallarico participated in some of the performances by playing his electric guitar. The performance was skillful, but during some parts the guitar was not fully in tune with the sound system resulting in an unprofessional sounding pieces.

The N.C. Symphony also featured a full choir who performed themes from the WarCraft series, Skyrim and minor parts of games.

Tallarico hasn’t announced future plans to bring Video Games Live back to Raleigh, but says he intends to continue touring and may return in the future.