It’s time for a confession – I am a big nerd. I’ve been into games for pretty much my whole life, amassing what I would call a pretty solid collection, following all the latest news, importing hard-to-find titles from overseas, and so on.

So, QSO finally doing a concert of video game music was, well, music to my ears. That’s why I’m sorry to say that this concert was a mixed bag. The playing was generally excellent with Leonard Weiss conducting, but the arrangements QSO tackled here were absolutely not all up to the same standard.

Here, it’s important to note that there are really two strands of video game music. In the early days (let’s say perhaps the mid-’80s to circa the early 2000s), most of the music was synthesiser-based, to a greater or lesser extent. Sometimes that meant synthesisers cosplaying as orchestral instruments, and sometimes it meant synthesisers writing music more in line with rock, pop, metal, funk and so on. The latter creates a tricky time when adapting the music for a full orchestra. These days, though, plenty of games start with an orchestral score straight from the word go.