Spill a glass of wine on the wooden floor at Abbey Road and the studio triggers an emergency procedure. In this, England’s most storied recording venue, change is resisted at a molecular level – and not only because, in 2010, the government listed the building as a heritage site to ward off vampiric property developers. A few years ago, decorators varnished the floor of Studio Two, whose decor is somewhere between a 1950s prep school gym and a ballroom on the Titanic. Complaints quickly followed. The room’s acoustic resonance, made famous on most of the Beatles’ albums, had changed. The varnish was promptly chipped off, at vast expense. Since the 1960s, the studio door has been repainted and the seaweed once used to stuff the drapes that hang from the ceiling swapped for a less pungent material. Everything else remains preserved, with monastic reverence.

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As such, the sight of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) tuning up in Studio One on a sweltering September evening in 2016 looks much the same as when Edward Elgar took up his baton during its opening in 1931. There is one key difference: the music performed tonight will not end up on vinyl, film or in a concert hall. It is destined, instead, for a video game, Final Fantasy XV, the next instalment in a series that debuted in 1987.

Concerts at Abbey Road are rare, but this work by the 48-year-old Japanese composer Yoko Shimomura – who sits on a tidy throne facing the 85-piece orchestra and a 35-piece choir appendage, one of the largest orchestral gatherings in the room since the recording of the soundtrack to Star Wars: Episode I – is far from the first video-game soundtrack to be played here. According to Abbey Road’s managing director, Isabel Garvey, the medium is an increasingly major component of the studio’s business, as game outfits hope to borrow the scent of its best-known cinematic scores – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter – that lingers in these old walls.

It’s been a swift invasion. Senior engineer Andrew Dudman, who joined Abbey Road 20 years ago as an intern during his third year of college, remembers the first orchestral recording for a video game, Headhunter, almost 15 years ago. “It snuck under the radar,” he says. “But soon after we got Tomb Raider, and suddenly everyone here started paying attention.” The 2003 score Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, written by Peter Connelly and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was one of the first recorded orchestral video game soundtracks, and was a galaxy away from the bleeps and snicks that had defined the medium’s music. Since then, blockbuster scores, from Halo to The Sims to Uncharted, have been recorded here at a quickening rate. “These days, game music is expected to be on a level with the films people watch,” explains Garvey. “The sound must match the advances in gaming’s visual fidelity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yoko Shimomura and the LPO perform the Final Fantasy soundtrack at Abbey Road. Photograph: Michael Bowles

Connelly is one of a raft of game composers, like Richard Jacques, who did the Headhunter score, little known outside the industry. “So many game composers have made fantastic careers and you’ve never heard of them,” says Dudman. “But now we’re entering the era when film composers are crossing over.” Hollywood stalwarts Harry Gregson-Williams and Stephen Barton, who started as Williams’s assistant, have numerous game scores in their oeuvre, as do Tyler Bates and Ryan Amon. Video-game music is also being aired increasingly in public. Shimomura’s music was recently performed by the LSO at the Barbican, while a concert of pieces taken from the Game of Thrones-esque fantasy game Skyrim takes place at the Palladium later this month.

Game composers are also increasingly attracting acclaim for the work. In 2012, Austin Wintory’s score for Journey became the first video game soundtrack to receive a Grammy nomination. The LPO’s bluntly titled album Greatest Video Game Music entered the US charts at No 23 – the highest debut for an orchestral recording since the Star Wars: Episode III soundtrack. Five years ago, Mark Robins organised an online campaign to encourage fans of video-game music to vote for their favourite tracks to be included in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame. “Film scores have long made an appearance in the chart, and it didn’t feel right that game scores were completely ignored,” he says. “Clearly people agreed with me, because they responded and we’ve had video-game scores on the chart for the last five years. Plenty of people will say the music is terrible without listening to a bar, just because it comes from a game. But if you play it to them without revealing the source, they often really enjoy it.”



The pieces don't always feel like they have beginnings and ends. There's less of an arc

There are few differences between recording an orchestral film and video-game score. In both cases, the musicians hunch beneath looming booms, a many-legged creature of points, jabs and vibrato spasms. Tonight, Shimomura’s soundtrack lurches from timpani rumbles to quivering, naked violin lines, as pushy and memorable as any John Williams theme. In its final context, however, there are key differences. A game score is rarely played in a linear form; instead, it drifts and blends between phrases to match the action. “The pieces don’t always feel like they have beginnings and ends,” says Dudman. “There’s less of an arc, because that’s all done dynamically by the programmers. Film scores have more of a clear narrative.”

Dudman, who says he doesn’t have time to play games, typically listens to the finished game scores on CD, where they’re presented in linear form. But he recently had the chance to see one of the scores he’d recorded for Sony’s gothic masterpiece Bloodborne while on holiday in California. “The music was being mixed at Sony’s Los Angeles office, and the team was sitting in a 300-seat cinema in the middle of their building. The team was playing the game to make sure the music all worked properly. It was immense.”

While packing away his Eberle violin – made in 1786, almost two centuries before the first video game debuted – Philippe Honoré, the former principal violinist with the LPO and guest leader for the night’s performance, reflects on the music. “For me, there’s not much that distinguishes video game music from film music,” he says. “It fits a particular character, or mood. It can be very beautiful.” For some players in the orchestra, Shimomura’s music has an image-changing effect. “I was surprised,” says Honoré. “I always imagine video games as being quite violent, but this was melodic.”

Not everyone in the orchestra remains convinced. As we head out into the night, I overhear the loud bits of a conversation between two of the younger players. “I think my brother used to play it when he was younger,” one woman says to another. “On Nintendo, maybe? So yeah, I was familiar with Final Fantasy, but I don’t play it myself.”

“Yeah,” her colleague replies. “Not my cup of tea.”