A concert that celebrates game music sounds like a great idea to us gamers, but did you think publishers would easily lend their copyrighted tunes for the good of someone else’s project?

Tommy Tallarico, co-founder of Video Games Live, recently told IncGamers that a lot of industry folk just didn’t understand the concept of live game music, even big dreamers like Shigeru Miyamoto.

"I’ve worked with Miyamoto on Metroid and I’ve worked with all these people in the industry over the years and even they thought I was insane," he said. "It took a lot of convincing and and a lot of calling up Taito in Japan to say “Hey, we want to get the rights for Elevator Action because we’re gonna play it at the Hollywood Bowl in front of 12,000 people with the LA Phil...hello? Hello?"

Copyright law was one of the tricker parts of setting up the concerts, Tallarico said. He struggled for three years to get the rights to video game music from his own industry contacts before the project could see the light of day.

"Getting the rights and licenses was the hardest part for us initially" he said. "We came up with this idea in 2002, but we didn’t put on our first show until 2005. It took us three years to create the show and a lot of that was spent trying to get the rights and licenses from companies and publishers who I’ve worked with over the past 20 years!”

Tallarico is a video game music legend himself, having won 25 awards for best in video game audio. He has worked on a number well-known titles such as, Earthworm Jim, Unreal, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Advent Rising. Despite the consistent copyright struggle facing the project, we’re glad Tallarico and his partner Jack Wall got this project off the ground.