The next level

This Monday, in between nights of Leonard Bernstein and Antonin Dvorak, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will perform a night of music by Nobuo Uematsu.

You’ve probably never heard of Uematsu, even though 48 million people own CDs with the Japanese composer’s sweeping, futuristic soundscapes. Tickets for the concert at Disney Hall -- all 2,265 seats -- sold out in a single day. Now they’re fetching $800 a pop on EBay.

Why the fuss? The show is the first U.S. live performance of music from “Final Fantasy,” a top-selling adventure video game series.

Thirty-two years after “Pong” emitted its first primitive blip-blop sound effects, video game music has evolved into a cultural force -- one that’s being taken seriously by everyone from the L.A. Phil to Snoop Dogg.

Now CDs of music from video games, such as “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” are being sold alongside movie soundtracks. Some of today’s most cutting-edge and marketable bands, such as OutKast and the Von Bondies, are debuting new work in games months before those songs get released on a record or played on the radio. Increasingly, top artists like Snoop Dogg and Mya aren’t just heard in video games, but seen as playable characters.

Hollywood, too, is part of the crossover: Film composers like Danny Elfman are creating music for games, and their video game counterparts, like Jeremy Soule, are scoring motion pictures.

Even International Creative Management, a top Beverly Hills talent agency, is feeling it. A year and a half ago, they formed a video game division that, among other things, is working to place clients like Linkin Park in games.

“We’ve really moved from artists and music being in the background to artists and music being in the foreground,” said Keith Boesky, who heads the new division at ICM. “The technology lets you play better music than ever before. But also the demographic is pulling music into it in a more powerful way. They’re demanding this kind of polish or finish on a game.”

The target demographics for video games and pop music are, in fact, virtually identical -- teens and twentysomethings. No wonder the flagging music industry wants in on the game. Previous generations discovered new bands on the radio, but today’s plugged-in kids are much more likely to find music online and in video games.

A 2003 study by ElectricArtists, a New York marketing firm, found that 40% of video game users purchased the CD of a band they’d heard in a video game. Nine out of 10 respondents in the survey of 1,000 hard-core gamers said they remembered a game’s music after they stopped playing it.

After hours of virtually skateboarding in Tony Hawk’s shoes, it’s hard to shake off the Blink 182 and Offspring tracks blaring along to your fakies and nose-grinds. And the more you play, the more you hear it. It’s almost like listening to an album on repeat -- only you’re not just listening.

The industry even has a term for the intensity of the gaming experience: “lean-forward entertainment.” It’s much more effective than passively hearing a pop song during a movie, Boesky said.

“If you play it in a game, you’re hearing this over the course of 10 or 20 hours when you’re engrossed in it,” he said. “You’re really imprinting the music. It’s a much more meaningful connection, I would hazard to say, than has ever happened before with music. Even more powerful than music videos.”

Video game producers, though, were slow to wield that power. For decades they were hampered by limited technology; and when the computing power did arrive, designers’ first concerns seemed to be improving graphics and story lines.

When Trent Reznor, frontman of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, created the sound effects and music for “Quake” in 1996, it was an anomaly. Reznor, an avid gamer who counted “Doom” among his favorites, struck a deal with Activision, maker of both games. Reznor’s gritty sound effects and brooding, ambient score created the perfect mood for “Quake,” a dark and violent first-person shooter. The programmers took his involvement one step further by adding a clever detail: The boxes of ammunition for a nail-gun weapon are marked with the band’s “NIN” logo.

Back then, none of the major game companies had music supervisors. Now most of them do, and nearly all are imports from the record industry. Their work used to be chasing top-shelf music acts for record labels. Now those artists are chasing them. Billboard-topper Kanye West is looking for a video game deal, according to ICM. Modern rock acts like Good Charlotte and Jet have already had their songs placed in hit games.

Steve Schnur left Capitol Records to become the worldwide executive of music for Electronic Arts, the country’s largest video game maker.

Video game sales now top $7 billion annually -- closing the gap on the $9.2 billion consumers spent on movie tickets and the $11.2 billion on CD sales last year. But the industry has only recently started acting its size, Schnur said.

“The entire industry has come to realize music is an essential ingredient in the gaming experience,” Schnur said, and his Playa Vista office is proof. A purple couch is covered with CDs and resumes from composers he’s considering for a future game based on “The Godfather” movie.

“Music drives your game plan. It makes you jump higher or shoot faster or board quicker.... I challenge people to rent a movie and take the music out. All of a sudden, Tom Cruise, when he’s running down the train -- it’s not that exciting anymore. Music drives your emotion.

“Can you imagine if they put out the last ‘Matrix’ film and it had a Casio [keyboard] as the score?” he added. “Can you imagine if the last James Bond film came out and the score was done by an in-house composer in Century City? We really needed to elevate it to another level.”

New, sophisticated sound systems for home entertainment have helped, but the next generation of game consoles -- Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s GameCube -- should mark a major leap forward. All three systems are due for major updates, and industry experts anticipate announcements about new hardware at E3, the world’s largest video game convention, which takes place next week at the L.A. Convention Center.

In the three years he’s been on the job, Schnur has built a reputation as a forward-thinking music supervisor by doing more than putting music in games. He’s pushed Electronic Arts to build games around music. And musicians.

When doing virtual snowboarding stunts in Electronic Arts’ “SSX 3,” players heard electronic dance music by Fatboy Slim and Royksopp. The tricks were named after them, too.

In 2003’s wrestling game, “Def Jam Vendetta,” players didn’t just hear music by hip-hop stars DMX and Ludacris, they interacted with them. Or at least digital versions of them. DMX was a junkyard owner. Ludacris managed a night club. Both places were scenes for battles over control of an underground fight club circuit. Players use fighting moves with names like “spittin’ teef” and “ghetto thuggin’.”

The next version of the game, “Def Jam Fight for NY,” due this fall, will increase the number of hip-hop stars used as characters, from 12 to 40. Picking up where the last game left off, the player springs his bad guy buddy from jail, then battles his way through city streets and alleyways, trash-talking his rivals in more turf wars. Method Man is the player’s best friend; Snoop Dogg is his greatest rival. (Snoop may be on his way to becoming virtually ubiquitous. He also appeared in Activision’s “True Crime: Streets of L.A.” released late in 2003.)

Activision, a major gaming company in Santa Monica, is also ramping up its involvement with artists and their images. Its recently released “MTX: Mototrax” motocross racing game features exclusive music from the metal band Slipknot. A music video is woven into the game itself. In one of the more elaborate tie-in arrangements, there’s a Slipknot band member character who’ll race in the “MTX” game. But to unlock him, players need to punch in a special code. And where is the code? Tucked into the liner notes of Slipknot’s forthcoming record. Buy the game. Play the game. Buy the record. Play the game some more.

Activision also signed up punk band the Distillers to record a title track for the upcoming “Spider-Man 2” -- not the movie, mind you, just the video game. And now that games are as popular as movies, some of them are geting their own soundtracks. While it is far from the norm, the more popular titles are splitting into two products: the game itself and a separately sold soundtrack.

“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” one of the biggest video game hits of recent years, took that to an extreme. It features a tunable radio in the cars your character steals. Don’t like Flock of Seagulls? Use the control pad to change the station to V-Rock, where the DJ is spinning Motley Crue. Throughout the game, there were 100 songs in all, which Sony Music later released on seven CDs that served as a sort of best-of-the-’80s box set.

Maverick Records, likewise, used the popular Tony Hawk skateboarding game franchise to tap into the gaming audience when it assembled “Music From and Inspired by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.” The album, released in 2001, had 13 cuts from Pennywise, Papa Roach, NOFX and others.

All of the “Final Fantasy” titles -- there have been 10 so far -- have separate soundtrack CDs. As a whole, they are unrivaled as the genre’s bestselling score.

The L.A. Phil will be performing selections from the hours and hours of music composed by Uematsu, who is considered the John Williams of video games. Video from the game, whose protagonists are a fledgling summoner of the spirits and a player of the imaginary full-contact sport blitzball, will be projected on a screen during the concert.

In Japan, symphonies perform orchestral game scores frequently. The game soundtracks also sell as well as albums by the country’s top pop stars.

That’s not happening in the U.S. -- yet. But it may. Kyoko Yamashita, marketing communications manager for Square Enix, the company that produces the “Final Fantasy” series, has gotten calls from other American orchestras asking to perform the score.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And the gaming world is no exception.

All the technological advances have some gamers longing for the simple beeps of the early Nintendo era, when they plugged their console into fat TVs to head-butt bricks in “Mario Brothers.” For them, there are a number of websites playing host to thousands of classic game themes.

On www.vgmusic.com, users post re-created and remixed versions of video game jingles -- some 16,000 of them. The MIDI sound files can be downloaded and converted to MP3s, or used as cellphone ring tones. Benny Hsieh, 24, who helps manage the site, said: “A lot of the older music is better, because in terms of what the artists had to work with, it was a lot less, so they had to be more creative.”

Old games have even inspired some tribute bands, like the Chicago-based Power-Ups, which covers “Conan,” “Megaman” and “Defender of the Crown.”

“For those of us who grew up with these games, it really affects you,” says Power-Ups bassist Angie Snyder. “When you hear a rendition of these songs, it brings back all these feelings of the fun that you had playing.”

But for up-and-coming music groups, getting their songs, and themselves, into video games is what they aspire to.

“It’s a different medium to reach people,” says Rob Swift, MC for the New York hip-hop group the X-Ecutioners. His group has been licensing songs to game companies for two years. Their next album, due in June, features songs that have already appeared in three different video games.

“You can make a song and you’re not stressing whether it’s going to get radio play, or are you going to shoot a video, and how are you going to get it to the people,” he said. “With a video game, you make a song and it goes straight from their TV to their eyes. While they’re enjoying the game, they’re listening to your music.”

He knows what he’s talking about.

“I’m a huge gamer,” he added. “When I’m not playing music, I’m definitely at it.”

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From ‘blip ... blop’ to buzz

1971-72

The minimalist beginnings: “Space Commander” and “Pong” arrive in arcades. “Blip ... blop” goes the little dot as it bounces back and forth.

1977

Atari attacks home TVs with “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids” -- but the sound effects are limited to unrealistic shooting and crashing noises.

1985

Nintendo’s more story-driven games like “Mario Brothers” and “Donkey Kong” incorporate short melodies. Sure, it sounds like a cheap Casio keyboard, but it is music.

1988

Technology leaps forward. Sierra On-line’s pioneering PC adventure games, starting with “King’s Quest 4,” incorporate MIDI files that produce high-quality sound and music.

1993

“Myst,” the highly addictive CD-ROM game, uses an atmospheric score to create the unsettling mood of the immersion game, where players explore a deserted island. It doesn’t sound like a game; it sounds like a movie.

1996

The brooding music of “Quake” sounds familiar to Nine Inch Nails fans -- because avid gamer Trent Reznor wrote it. Look closely: That is the NIN logo on the box of ammunition for a nail-gun weapon.

1999

David Bowie composes the eerie, emotional score for “Omikron,” and his image is used for two characters in the adventure game. Eight of the songs appear on Bowie’s album “Hours ...”

2000

In “WipeOut,” gamers race futuristic vehicles to a dance beat provided by Fatboy Slim, Future Sound of London and others.

2000

Games play with the big boys: The Recording Academy says videogames can compete with TV shows and movies for Grammy awards for best soundtrack, song or instrumental composition. No winners yet.

Oct. 16, 2001

Play the game, buy the soundtrack. “Music From and Inspired by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3” gets released on Maverick Records, with 13 cuts from OutKast, Pennywise, Papa Roach, NOFX and more.

2001

Rolling Stone magazine names “Halo: Combat Evolved” the best soundtrack of the year. The sci-fi shooter uses everything from chanting monks to techno.

2002

The ‘80s-themed “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” features tunable radios in the hot cars. What’s on? Judas Priest and Motley Crue on the rock station, and Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet on “Wave 103.” The soundtrack is later released as seven individual CDs.

March 2003

Not only does “Def Jam Vendetta” include the music of top rap artists like Method Man and Lil’ Kim, but the music stars are the characters in this fighting game, too.

March 2004

Metal band Slipknot slips its music video into “MTX: Mototrax.” A character from the band will even race in the motocross -- but only if you have a code from the upcoming album’s liner notes.

May 10, 2004

The Los Angeles Philharmonic will perform selections from the “Final Fantasy” video game series. One song from each of the first 10 games will be performed, accompanied by video footage.

Late summer 2004

Hollywood composer Danny Elfman will compose the title track for the myth-making God game “Fable.”