Tag Archives: Classic FM

Train2Game News: 2014 Classical Music charts

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FF7 OrchestraWith a new year comes a new chance to get some of your favourite video game music in to the charts!

Voting in the 2014 Classic FM Hall of Fame is OPEN and once again you can help to see video game scores represented in the World’s BIGGEST poll of classical music tastes by voting for your favourite classical bit of gaming music. You can vote for any orchestral video game score or arrangement – many are in the voting database already but you can also enter your own and the only stipulation is it must be orchestral.

This year many scores are lumped together into one entry, including last year’s #3 (Final Fantasy Series, Nobuo Uematsu) and #5 (Elder Scrolls Series, Jeremy Soule). You get to make three votes and this year we want people to vote for their favourites and get gaming communities they’re part of to vote for their favourites to. We want to see as many pieces of game music in there as possible!

The more game music that can be put in to the charts the better as it will further strengthen Video Games as a form of art in this world.

So what are you waiting for! Go to http://halloffame.classicfm.com/2014/vote/ to vote! And follow what happens at www.facebook.com/classicvgmusic and @classicvgmusic on twitter. Spread the word and lets get our favourite game music to the world!

Train2Game News: Game music on Classic FM

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Aerith's ThemeEver since I became your Train2Game blogger I have been contacted by a PR Guy for some of the biggest games developers. He has been leading his own personal campaign.

The guy I am talking about is a man called Mark Robins. Mark is a 13-year games industry veteran who used to work as a journalist at Computec and Future Publishing before moving into PR. The firm he works at, Lunch PR, is an agency whose clients include Bethesda Softworks.

The campaign he has been leading is to get some of the orchestral game music more well known. Robins’ campaign made amazing headway last year and recorded amazing success. Thanks to his efforts, he and his followers not only propelled Aerith’s Theme from Final Fantasy 7 and the theme from Skyrim into the Classic FM Hall of Fame, but Classic FM produced a pair of two-hour shows featuring nothing but video game music.

Mark has been using his contacts he gets through his job to ask for there help in spreading the word about his cause.

He firstly stresses “This campaign has nothing, nor has it ever had, anything to do with any of the clients I represent”

He goes on to say “This is a purely personal crusade. Skyrim made the Hall of Fame thanks to community motivation by Bethesda’s social media team. It’s no secret that I run the campaign, but I don’t actively tell people who I am via the social media channels and I’m actually really keen to keep this as distant from my work as possible.

“One of the interesting things I found when I started this was just how accepting the people at Classic FM were of the music. To them the revelation was, ‘Oh, we thought game music was all beeps and bloops, but actually this stuff is great. If Mozart or Beethoven were alive today then who’s to say this isn’t the stuff they’d be composing. It absolutely sits alongside movie and traditional classical music.'”

This year Robins is encouraging people to vote for Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtrack to Final Fantasy 7 again. He points out that thanks to last year’s voting effort there is now loads of video game music in Classic FM’s voting database, making it easy for people to highlight particular favourites. He also encourages fans of classical game music to join the Facebook group – not just to rock the vote, but also to share their enthusiasm.

This is great news for the games industry as it further cements the games industry as a main stream art form. I think it would be a good idea to further spread the news of this around to as many people as we can.