Over the past year, video games have brought people together in ways that would otherwise not be possible, due to safety restrictions regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Not being able to see friends, family, and loved ones has meant people have spent more time than ever this past year connecting online, often through video games. Massive gatherings like concerts and sporting events, like the NFL Pro Bowl, have had to find ways to reinvent themselves using video games.
One such reinvention is the Virtual Video Game Orchestra. A group of musicians who once used to play together in person in local communities now has transformed into an international force of hundreds of musicians who all want one thing to share their love of video game music with other people. Game Rant recently spoke with some key members of the Virtual Video Game Orchestra about the hurdles they have had to overcome and the positive impact the group has had on the gaming community.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic shut most of the United States down in March 2020, two of VVGO’s co-founders, Jacob Zeleny and Brandon Harnish, played together in The Intermission Orchestra at UC Berkeley in California, an orchestra dedicated to playing songs from video games, anime, and film. According to Harnish, the orchestra had a concert scheduled for March 6, 2020 that they managed to perform, but it wasn’t long after that California had to shut everything down due to COVID-19.
The orchestra was ready and eager to perform their concert, but now they had to go into lockdown, a concept that many people are now all too familiar with one year on. But Harnish had an idea that might help make the following year for many of his fellow orchestra members at least a bit more bearable:
“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?’”
Before even a week passed, Harnish began to reach out to his friends from the Intermission Orchestra from Berkeley, as well as another group he was a part of called the Reno Video Game Symphony and suggested a kind of online collaboration. Harnish recalled that part of his inspiration came from his time participating in Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 4, an online choir performance where videos of singers from all over the world are edited together into a single performance.
Some may feel they have seen or heard of that before, as video game music covers are incredibly common on sites like YouTube, but what sets VVGO apart is how completely open the group is. As it turns out, the largest obstacle to joining the group is joining the Discord server. VVGO’s Jackson Argo, who handles VVGO’s website and Discord server, summarized the process of joining the orchestra as “Basically, they join our discord server, then get access to all of our parts and what they need to do the recording.”
As if that didn’t sound easy enough, there are no skill-requirements either, as Harnish pointed out the membership of VVGO consists of “people who have just started playing their instrument to professional musicians.” Recording equipment isn’t an issue either. Jacob Zeleny, another one of VVGO’s co-founders and audio director for the audio engineering team, said that people can record with whatever they have access to, “Phones, high-end microphones, terrible microphones, whatever it is we're going to make it work.”
While it might be simple for those who want to join, it is a bit more of a process on the other end to make these collaborations look and sound so flawless. VVGO’s first video, for Metal Gear Solid 3’s “Snake Eater” theme, pulled in 98 artist submissions right off the bat. One of their more recent covers, of music from Nintendo’s 2019 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, pulled in over 40 ocarina and recorder submissions just for its credits sequence. That many submissions turns editing not just the audio, but the music video of all of the performers playing their parts into a monumental task.
That video too symbolized a next step for the group, as the incredible 3D animation of Link running through dungeons full of VVGO’s performers was actually handled by only one person. Jordy de Lat, a VVGO video director from the Netherlands, put 70 hours of work into the video in just one week. Despite looking like gameplay, De Lat created the dungeons and hand animated everything in the video, including the dungeons' items that are used as transitions. De Lat also assembled the 3D environment for the group’s most recent Super Mario 3D World video.
As one can surely imagine, making all of this happen must have been a learning experience for all involved, but as Jacob Zeleny points out, the learning is far from over:
“We're all here to build each other up and all become better at our craft. 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.”
Zeleny also noted the opportunity this has presented to teach a lot of VVGO’s musicians things that they might not have known before, like how sheet music is created. VVGO will often create parts for instruments in a song that weren’t present in the original version so as many people can participate in a project as possible. Creating sheet music that is easily readable for musicians of multiple skill levels can be “a bit of a bear” to put together, according to Harnish, but the effort is more than worth it.
As for what’s next for the group, the Virtual Video Game Orchestra will be celebrating their first anniversary during VGMTogether, a three-day streaming event happening this weekend, celebrating video game music artists around the world. VVGO’s set begins at 9 AM PST/12 EST on Saturday, March 13. VVGO will have behind the scenes content and introduce their next song, a cover of “For Redemption, Decisive Battle II” from Octopath Traveler.
Beyond that, the VVGO is in different stages of production on songs from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Final Fantasy 11, and Abzu. VVGO also accepts fan-submitted arrangements, which is actually how the group selects many of the pieces it decides to cover. Those interested in finding out more about the Virtual Video Game Orchestra or joining their Discord server can do so here.