How one festival wants to give game music the spotlight it deserves
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Tuesday 17th May 2022
In March, the Game Music Festival came to London for the first time.
For two days, game fans and music lovers alike enjoyed live performances of the jazz from Cuphead and Gareth Cocker's Ori soundtrack, and gathered to listen to talks from the composers behind Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Genesis Noir, Deathloop and Halo Infinite, among others.
The concerts took place in London's majestic Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, which seats 2,700 people. And while not completely full, the venue was extremely well attended.
The Cuphead soundtrack was performed by the Bartosz Pernal Orchestra, while the Symphony of the Spirits -- which gathered tracks from both Ori games arranged specifically for the occasion -- was performed by the famous Philharmonia Orchestra, accompanied by the Hertfordshire Chorus.
From start to finish, the quality of the Game Music Festival led you to assume there was a big budget team of seasoned professional event organisers behind it. And yet, while the quality of the event is a testament to their professionalism, the team behind the Game Music Festival is entirely composed of volunteers who run the event in their spare time.
As with many industry stories, this one starts with a love for video games from a very young age.
"Some soundtracks are the most creative pieces of art in all of the music industry. So it needs more recognition and appreciation"
"It all started 16 years ago, when I was a kid playing video games," smiles Mateusz Pawlak, the founder of the festival. "I have a musical education, a piano degree, so I realised that there was really good music in the games [that] I was playing, and I thought that it was quite a pity that people
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