By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi! I’m videogame composer Winifred Phillips. These are the times that try our musical souls, with live concerts enduring an avalanche of cancelations and postponements due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For our community as game music composers and game audio pros, this means that most video game concert tours have gone silent. As one of the composers whose work was featured in the Assassin’s Creed Symphony World Tour, I was honored to join the players onstage during the Montreal performance last year (pictured below). It was a thrill to have my music from Assassin’s Creed Liberation performed in Berlin, Milan, and all around the world.
Now, I’ve sadly watched as the coronavirus postponed the entire UK leg of the tour, with no resumption date as of yet. This fate is common to live concert events around the world.
While we all have reason to be sad about this, there is some light in the darkness. A few touring companies and orchestras have nimbly shifted to online live-streaming events as a way to sustain their fan bases and keep enthusiasm alive through the Covid-19 pandemic. Other video game music shows are holding things together while continuing to sell tickets, with optimistic plans to resume their in-person tours later in 2021. As both game audio pros and game music fans, we all want to enjoy and support this music, so let’s check out what’s happening this year in the world of VGM concerts! We’ll start by taking a look at those organizations that have moved their concerts online with live-streamed events. After that, we’ll check out the concert tours that are still selling tickets with hopes to return to their stages sometime later this year.
This week I thought we’d check in with some of the top orchestral video game music concert tours currently underway. We’ll take a look at some reviews of 2015 performances from the respective tours, and we’ll also take a look at video from some of the most recent concert performances.
Originating as a simple four-minute overture performed at a Nintendo press event in 2011, Symphony of the Goddesses kicked off as a full-fledged concert tour in January 2012 and