Last night, my son, wife, and I went to go see Video Games Live which was visiting our town on their 2009 world tour. Suffice to say, it was an amazing night filled with amazing music from such games as World of Warcraft, Halo, and Chrono Trigger, all played by a symphony orchestra! Hosts (and renown video game music composers) Tommy Talarico and Jack Wall put on a great show with the orchestra, video and light show, and uniquely innovative interactive entertainment. We had a blast!

One highlight of the show was witnessing the amazing (read brilliant) talent of Martin Leung hammer out music from the Mario Brothers family of games. Oh yeah, did I mention he did it blindfolded? If you don’t believe me, here he is in Lisbon at VGL:

However by far the most stunning event during the show was it’s historical perspective. Starting the show off with showing footage from video games I grew up on like Donkey Kong, Joust, Gauntlet, and yes, even Frogger! The crowd obviously must have been as old as I am because the theater erupted with cheers at each game. Although I am sad, Karateka wasn’t in that list. Man I played that game for hours!

The historical perspective went even further with a look at the first television broadcast of a video game with Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison playing their creation in 1967 (ping-pong – yes, predating Atari’s Pong by three years). Their invention led to Mr. Baer being called the Father of Video Games. His hand written notes for the development of the game now safely held within the Smithsonian.

As I watched that news clip from before my time, I wondered if Mr. Baer ever saw how significant his creation was in sparking a digital revolution? In the span of a mere 40 years, a small fragment of a man’s lifetime, we have the video games we have today; where people like me are blogging on the Internet about video games where hundreds of people play and fight with each other from all over the world all at the same moment in a virtual world with complex avatars. It simply boggles the mind to think how far video games have come and how advanced they’ve gotten in such a short span of time as a mere 4 decades. I truly wondered what Mr. Baer thought of that?

Well, as if in answer to my thoughts, Tommy Talarico shocked us all in the theater by having a live video chat via Skype with Mr. Baer asking those exact questions in my head. The audience was floored and the pioneer of video games was greeting amid tears to a standing ovation by thousands of grateful gamers.

Man, we’ve really come a long way. Good show, Mr. Talarico. Good show.

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