Musician Is a Top Scorer for Video Games

The warm strains of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” pour out of musician Tommy Tallarico’s living room speakers. It’s the composer’s famous third movement, the one where a pianist’s fingers frenetically dance across the keys like a Pac-Man gobbling power pellets.

Volume cranked, the song’s lower tones rattling the stacks of CD-ROMs scattered across the living room floor, Tallarico suddenly decides to skip ahead to a different track. But instead of reaching for his CD player, he leans over and grabs his Sony PlayStation.

“People expect video game music to be a series of bloops and bleeps,” said Tallarico, of San Juan Capistrano, one of the best-known--and best-paid--musicians who create soundtracks for computer games.

“Why settle for mundane music when you can kill to Chopin?”

In the last six years, Tallarico has written and performed music for dozens of computer games. Along the way, he’s helped broaden the scope of game music, often blending electronic with classical and jazz works, hard rock, Big Band, psychedelic pop and reggae.

Never mind the blips, here’s the symphonies.

As game music evolves, so does the demand for artists who understand the technology. Developers willingly pay people like Tallarico--as well as fellow game gurus Thomas Dolby and George Alistair “The Fat Man” Sanger--good money for this ability.

“It’s a viable industry that keeps a small group of players very, very comfortable,” said Dan Lavin, an analyst with Dataquest in San Jose who tracks the game industry. “In the feature-film world, these would be the equivalent of a score writer.

On average, Tallarico says he takes on a dozen titles a year and earns between $70,000 and $100,000 for each game soundtrack. In addition, he gets a royalty of 25 to 35 cents for each unit sold.

“I usually don’t take jobs that sell less than a couple hundred thousand copies,” the 29-year-old musician said. “I want my music to be heard, not stuck on some game that never gets played.”

For years, game music languished as software companies focused more on visual flash and less on aural moods. Technology limited creativity because the original Nintendo and Atari machines used chips that generated only simple tones.

And the role of songwriter often fell to the programmers themselves, who preferred to devote most of the limited memory on game cartridges to code and art. Sound was an oft-overlooked addition, squeezed in mere days before shipping.

As the field matured, the processor tucked inside the game machines sped up and the capability of the sound chips expanded. With the advent of next-generation systems like Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, musicians could now play with sampled audio clips in digital sound.

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Enter Tallarico, who in 1991 was a struggling musician and avid video game fan. Hoping to crack into the recording industry, he left Springfield, Mass., and came to Southern California with $500, a bag of clothing and his keyboard stuffed into his beat-up Pontiac Fiero. A month later, he had no money and no job.

“I was sleeping on the sand at Huntington Beach, eating whatever I could get for free,” Tallarico said. “It was getting pretty bad, then I landed a job selling keyboards at a music shop in Santa Ana.”

His first customer was an executive at then-budding software firm Virgin Mastertronic. (The Irvine-based company, now called Virgin Interactive Entertainment, is one of the country’s largest game firms.)

The pair began talking about video games. As the executive left, Tallarico followed him into Virgin’s offices. Within weeks, he was on Virgin’s staff.

For eight months, he tested games and created music samples for Virgin. Tallarico’s first soundtrack was for “Prince of Persia,” a 1991 adventure title for the portable Nintendo Game Boy. Soon after, he started work on pieces for other platforms, like “Muhammad Ali Heavyweight Boxing” and “Disney’s Aladdin” for Sega Genesis.

As Virgin Mastertronic expanded, other game shops noticed Tallarico’s work, and recruiters for the competition began wooing him. Instead of jumping to another corporation, the musician opted to open his own studio.

Today, he regularly works with several companies and has released albums compiling his game tunes.

In the fall, Tallarico will break into television as the host of “Electronic Playground,” a show dedicated to video game culture. Fox, WB and UPN have picked up the program in several West Coast markets, including Seattle, Portland, Ore., and the Bay Area.

And some day, Tallarico hopes to blur the line between penning soundtracks for games and creating film scores.

“Video games have become culturally significant and hip in the U.S. and abroad,” said “Playground” executive producer Victor Lucas. “Nightclubs in London remix game music and play it on the dance floor. U2 mixes Andy Warhol paintings with images from ‘Tomb Raider’ on their latest concert tour. Tommy is one of the few musicians who understand the medium.”

Quiet and shy while working in the recording studio, Tallarico transforms into a cheeky self-promoter in public. At computer game conferences, he dons a gold lame jacket and swaggers around the room, surrounded by burly security guards and scantily clad groupies.

At home, the Fiero has been replaced with a white Lamborghini Countach--”the 25th anniversary edition,” he notes--and a blood-red Porsche. The top floor of his three-story house has been converted into a digital recording center, complete with a 24-track mixing board, a pair of guitars and several computers.

“I get up at noon and start playing music. I come downstairs and play games,” said Tallarico, who settled in Orange County after he started working at Virgin. “How rock ‘n’ roll is that?”

Game executives say his success stems from his ability to understand the medium’s constraints.

“People buy $200 synthesizers and think they can write video game music,” said David Perry, president of Shiny Entertainment in Laguna Beach. “I get tapes from these hopefuls all the time, and they’re dreadful.”

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Most titles contain 30 to 60 minutes of music, with the sound divided into longer pieces played straight through and shorter sections that loop.

Unlike the linear format of film, a game requires music to move backward, forward and sideways. Some players finish a level in a minute, while others may take 10 times longer. The music must capture an emotional feeling--be it excitement, fear or anxiety--and maintain it for as long as a player roams a particular part of the game.

Perry notes that the better musicians develop tricks to make the music sound “real.” Program a PC to play a drumbeat and the machine will do it--too perfectly. Ask a human to hit the same beat and the sound, though seemingly steady, will have minor fluctuations.

“Tommy knows that you have to program the drum with these inconsistencies,” said Perry, who uses Tallarico for many of Shiny’s titles. “He’s probably 10 times more expensive than most musicians, but knowing that kind of trick is the reason why he’s never out of work.”