Music, Mario and the Magic Community: The World of Video Game Music

Published in Spanish by Fintualist

Robin Wong, a flautist and composer/arranger, had burned out on New York City’s music scene. He arrived in the city about ten years ago, drawn, like many musicians, to its top reputation for live performance. What he found instead was an often arduous artistic climate, especially for those musicians dedicated to one of the city’s most iconic genres: Jazz. At the open jam sessions at Smalls and other venues, he saw players elbow one another out rather than invite each other in.

“I was going to all these jam sessions that were hyper-competitive and really intense and not welcoming at all…sometimes they didn’t even tell you what they were playing ahead of time. They’d just start and you had to know what was going on.”

But in January of this year, he found the musical community he was looking for.*

At the Music and Gaming Festival — MAGFEST — in the D.C. area, Robin spent an entire weekend sight reading sheet music from the video games he played as a kid, particularly the music from the world of Nintendo — that vast universe of video games whose characters include Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Kirby, Yoshi, Link, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog and all of the Pokémon. The musicians were a mix of amateurs and professionals, who played every range of instrument, from the guitar and the saxophone to the bassoon and the sousaphone. It was a place where the line between “cool instruments” and “band nerd instruments” dissolved entirely. No one wanted to prove anything. All had come to enjoy the music that had accompanied them since childhood.

“There’s something really cool about learning music that’s already ingrained in your brain,” says Wong. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute…This is basically etudes but more fun!’”

He found particularly inspiring a session where musicians performed songs from the game Super Smash Bros. as people played the game in the real time. He has since expanded on that idea, turning 'Smash Bros. Live' into a monthly concert-gaming experience in New York City.

“I’m so excited about this music and getting to play it in a really fun environment,” he says.

In the last few years, Video Game Music has grown not only as a genre but a global trend. When MAGFEST started in 2002, it had just 300 attendees. Eighteen years later, it reached 24,000. In 2022, the 8-Bit Big Band — a 30-65 member orchestra who solely plays Jazz versions of video games — won a Grammy for their arrangement of “Meta Knight’s Revenge,” a song from the 1996 game Kirby Super Star. Later that year, the revered Jazz saxophonist Kenny Garrett live-streamed a concert dedicated entirely to the music of the game Elden Ring. A few months later, a YouTube video by Adam Neely called “The Nintendo—fication of Jazz” reached 918,000 views. As the musicians who played those games in their childhood come of age, they are creating scenes in cities across the world built around shared nostalgia and a need for gentle, welcoming communities.

Currently, there are two performance types that dominate Video Game Music. In the first, like ‘Smash Bros. Live’ a band provides live accompaniment while a small group plays a particular game, primarily from the Nintendo canon. The second is heavily modeled on Jazz, with most songs structured around melody and improvisation. There is even a Video Game Music Real Book, modeled on the Jazz Real Book — a kind of musician’s bible with sheet music for all of the standard tunes. 

Saxophonist Patrick Bartley is credited as one of the first established Jazz musicians who made Video Game Music part of his repertoire. When he founded the J-Music Ensemble, a group that brings Jazz interpretations to modern Japanese music, he put together a Real Book that included arrangements of songs from Sonic, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy. In 2018, he started a New York-based Jazz jam session that included this music, which, in an interview with Inside Edition, he called “the best way to get the most amount of young people into Jazz.”

“Patrick had a vision to get more people participating in Jazz by way of Video Game Music,” says woodwind player Jasper Dutz, a regular at Bartley’s jam sessions and current artistic director of VGM-NYC.

When the city began to re-open in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, Patrick had left New York and the sessions had spent a year and a half on hiatus. Former regulars of the J-Music jam session — including Dutz, bassist Tyler Lupi and operations manager Richard Shango Woods — searched for a way to revive them. They found OS-NYC, a venue that hosts New York’s local Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, who agreed to host a new Video Game Music jam session. (‘Smash Bros. Live’ is hosted at the same venue). VGM-NYC held its first open jam session in October 2021 and has continued on a monthly basis ever since.

“If there’s a song you really like, you can bring in a lead sheet,” explains Dutz. “Then we add it to our community Real Book, which now has two volumes and almost two hundred songs. So we have a massive book now that we’ve transposed for different instruments.”

Since February 2023, the sessions have been entirely sold out, drawing every level of musician.

“We have multi-Grammy winning musicians standing on stage next to players who just picked up the guitar a month ago. Using video games to break down that barrier between musicians and music lovers is the greatest significance of this event.”

Nearly every city in the U.S.A. has a local Smash Bros. tournament, providing the infrastructure for new jam sessions across the country. One has already been established in Boston and the New York sessions have seen their audience globalize, with people coming from as far as Montreal and London.

Venezuelan bassist Nelson Gonzalez had a similar experience at one of his own band’s shows. He and drummer Ethan Neel had seen videos online of musicians providing live accompaniment to Mario Kart and decided, along with their colleagues from the University of Central Oklahoma, to start something similar. (The band’s saxophonist Colin Ferrell — no relation to the actor — was on a lesson with Patrick Bartley). They started organizing “Mario Kart 8 Live” shows at a local bar in Oklahoma City less than a year ago and have already drawn audience members from as far as Oregon and Philadelphia. They did one all-ages show and found a group of kids whose parents had made the nearly six-hour drive from Austin, Texas to enjoy their live experience.

“There aren’t enough casual events for people who like video games,” says Gonzalez. “Video game events tend to be very competitive. You need to train and practice or you cannot be there. ‘Mario Kart 8 Live’ is a place for people to play the game and just hang out and have a good time. We’ve also had people say, ‘I don’t really play Mario Kart but I enjoy the music.’ So it creates a good environment for game enthusiasts, people who like live music and people who just want to have fun.”

“I wasn’t really interested in setting up a tournament,” says Jack Dobson, bandleader of ‘Mario Kart Live’ in Melbourne, Australia. “There are plenty of those already. I wanted a casual environment that anyone could participate in.”

One of the biggest challenges for every group who puts together their version of “Nintendo Live” is to coordinate the music with the at-times unpredictable developments that can happen in each particular game.

“While we perform, my eyes are glues to the screen,” says Dobson. “I pay attention to what each player is doing and cue the band when I see something. I had to practice this by watching gameplay footage on YouTube.”

Dobson’s group has struck a chord — literally and figuratively — in their island nation, with a tour planned in cities across Australia for later this summer.

“Even if you didn’t play the game growing up, the chaos of the music and energy of the crowd has its own appeal. Sometimes the music will change five times within a minute, and the crowd goes wild whenever someone’s hit with a blue shell.”

“We set up a time mode where each match is consistently three minutes,” says Robin Wong of ‘Smash Bros. Live.’ “But once we get down to the last fifteen seconds, we start to look at each other and figure out an ending. If we go into sudden death mode, where the two players have been tied the whole time, then we just keep on vamping. That’s when things get crazy and everyone is soloing at the same time.”

Although these shows might be new, they remind me of a much older performance tradition, also, like Nintento, rooted in Japan. During that country’s silent film era, most theater screenings were accompanied by a live narrator known as a benshi, who provided commentary to the movie on screen. Many benshis developed fan followings in their own right as audience members became as drawn to their performances as the films themselves. As more live Video Game Music scenes pop up around the world, I can imagine a similar trend appearing, as the audience comes for the video games but stays for the musicians, and all the shapes and flavors they bring to the music.

For now, those who drive the Video Game Music scene in their particular cities are mainly grateful for the in-person community that has gelled together around these events. In recent years, video games in general have been identified as an outlet for isolation and addiction. The World Health Organization has even classified “gaming disorder” as a medical condition. But the VGM music scene offers a cure, a recurring event whose particular appeal can only be achieved through shared experience.

“We’re at a point where there’s this magic welcoming community who are very encouraging and supportive of each other,” says Wong. “I joke that one of my ad campaigns is gonna be ‘Does your partner play too many video games and never leave the house? Do you want them to get out more? Come to Smash Bros Live!’”

Or as Jasper Dutz of VGM-NYC put it, “Anything in this day and age that can get people off a screen and into a real place is worth doing.”

*Disclosure note: Robin Wong and I have been friends since we played together in our high school Jazz band