EMI Readies Video Game Music Album Featuring "Castlevania Rock"

While artists continue to abandon EMI, the label is hoping video game music can give them a boost. Video Games Live, like its name suggests, brings video game music into a live venue. Now, they're taking their interactive live performances and putting them onto an album recorded at London's famed Abbey Road Studios. EMI Classics will release Volume One of Video Games Live on July 24th. The compilation eschews the old-school classics by from Nintendo's resident Mozart Koji Kondo (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, the underrated score to NES' Ice Hockey), opting instead to cover modern day tracks from games like Kingdom Hearts, Halo and Medal of Honor. For the 8-bitters, there is the "Castlevania Rock" and a piano opus version of the Tetris theme. "If Beethoven were alive today, he would probably be a video-game composer... he was always ahead of the curve," says VGL co-creator Tommy Tallarico.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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