Gamer conductor leads orchestral concerts of video-game theme music, and fans demand an encore
- Young Korean conductor and keen gamer Chin Sol combined her hobby with her day job by launching a start-up, Flasic, that puts on concerts of video-game music
- Flasic turns game themes into orchestral scores for performance. They started with Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft, and recently signed up Lineage’s NCSoft
By Park Ji-won
In August, 2019, a rare live classical concert was held at the Sejong Centre for The Performing Arts in Seoul, South Korea. Titled “StarCraft Live Concert”, it was conducted by Chin Sol; an orchestra and a band specially formed for the concert played soundtrack works from StarCraft, Blizzard Entertainment’s highly popular real-time strategy game released in 1998.
They played the theme songs of the game itself and those of its three combatant groups: Terran, Protoss and Zerg.
Concertgoers were excited about the familiar, but beautifully “classicised” game music, and have been calling for a follow-up concert ever since. The pandemic delayed most concerts, but because of these rising calls, the arts complex is planning to hold “encore” StarCraft concerts in September.
Despite their popularity, live-music concerts of video-game soundtracks are still rare in Korea, presumably because of the preconceived notion that they would not be classical enough.