by Eric Olson
It’s an oft-stated but hard-to-believe statistic: The global video game industry generates more revenue than the music and film industries combined.
• In 2022, the global gaming industry generated an estimated $184.4 billion.
• In 2022, the global recorded music industry generated $26.2 billion.
• In 2022, the global movie industry generated $26 billion in box office revenue.
With each passing year, a greater share of the world has experienced video games as part of their lives.
This points to a big potential market for older art-and-entertainment forms such as orchestral music and big band jazz. This Saturday at Benaroya Hall, coinciding with the , a performance of video game music by New York-based The 8-Bit Big Band seeks to bridge the gap between these seemingly dissimilar enterprises.
Led by composer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Rosen, The 8-Bit Big Band is a full jazz orchestra — utilizing about 30 members — performing arrangements from what Rosen calls “The Great Video Game Songbook”: thematic music made popular during gaming’s early commercial peaks. Think Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII. “People talk about video game music like a genre,” says Rosen, speaking from New York via Zoom. “In reality, it’s not a genre but a delivery vehicle where we take all kinds of music and repurpose it.”
Rosen, 34, is a Tony-winning composer who primarily orchestrates for Broadway shows — and also a gamer. He began the 8-Bit project in 2017 with little expectation of staying power, saying, “I had no idea there was a scene for this other than people wanting to be nostalgic. But it took off in a huge way, and I discovered other musicians online also doing these songs. YouTube is like the Tin Pan Alley of video game music.”
The Benaroya Hall show is 8-Bit’s West Coast premiere. Apart from some core members, the band is a rotating cast of musicians who record regularly in New York City and gather occasionally for one-off East Coast performances. They’ll bring a handful of members out to Seattle and fill the other seats with local talent. The band isn’t affiliated with PAX, but Rosen says his managers booked the date knowing there’d be abundant gamers just blocks away. Rosen scored a Zelda-inspired short film, “Chuck and Fern,” that debuts at PAX West. “So I’m probably going to go.”
Although this will be 8-Bit’s Benaroya debut, it’s not the first time video game music has graced the Seattle concert hall. The venue has hosted gaming-centric concerts for years, most recently at a 2023 event called “Game ON!” featuring songs from World of Warcraft, Diablo and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Raff Wilson, vice president of artistic planning for the Seattle Symphony, says video game themes are a logical outgrowth of programming that has long included movie soundtracks and holiday pops. “There is a passionate community of gamers who jump at the chance to hear video game music performed live,” he says.
Still, Raff pushes back against the notion that these shows are merely steppingstones to more classic — ahem, classical — Symphony offerings. “We don’t tend to think about our presentations as ‘gateway’ experiences,” he says. “We present concerts which we know will be really good in and of themselves.”
Rosen would probably appreciate that description. With 8-Bit, he’s struck an entirely new direction with gaming tunes, saying, “I looked out at other video game music orchestras, and they were very serious. They would just go one-to-one, playing the soundtrack in real life. They wouldn’t rearrange. They were doing a symphonic, classical style. But no one was doing it in my favorite sound, a midcentury sound with bandleading and improvising and solos, a multigenre thing.”
For proof of concept, see 8-Bit Big Band’s take on “Bomb-omb Battlefield” from Super Mario 64, or “Gerudo Valley” from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Based on their 340,000 YouTube subscribers, it seems to be working. 8-Bit Big Band began as a side project, but Rosen says it’s been taking “more and more time” due to the demands of their growing fan base.
“We have people in our crowds as young as 6 or 7 who are just being introduced to Mario on a Switch,” he says. “Then we have people around my age who have played these games forever. Finally, we have older people in their 60s and 70s who just love jazz and big band. They say afterward, ‘I didn’t know any of this music, and I loved it.’ That’s the highest compliment of all, because it proves these tunes can stand outside of the context of the games. That’s what makes this songbook possible. The tunes stand alone.”
Eric Olson is a novelist and journalist living in Seattle’s Central District; learn more at ericolsonwriting.com. This report is supported, in part, by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.
