July 22: It’s 2:26 AM, i.e. it’s pretty late. The current music of choice is a great new mix that has yet to be posted to OCR by DrumUltimA and his mom, who I’ve been given to go-ahead to now refer to as MomUltimA. It’s from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, so if you’re a fan of the series, you’ll definitely have to check it out. If you’re not a fan of the series, you’ll nonetheless have to check it out. It’s that well-done. Right now, I’m sitting in the darkness of djpretzel’s living room. His dual screens are dark. zircon’s laptop on my left is off and pixietricks’s Apple laptop on my right is running a very trippy screensaver. Over in OCR-land, we’ve had a quite an eventful weekend.
At Otakon 2006 last year, I had to wait in line to get into the Baltimore Convention Center, and I spent a lot of time worrying about the potential attendance in the back of my head. Being OCR’s first year at Otakon in 2006, I wondered whether the audience of a predominantly anime-themed convention would be there for a panel on video game music. That year, I only managed to get my convention pass and make it into our panel’s room with 2 minutes to spare. As I ran as fast as I could to join the OCR staff on stage, it was only having made it 3/4ths of the way into the room that I noticed the room was packed. For a 750-seat capacity room, I’m pretty sure we had about that almost number of people. For any scattered empty seats, we had people standing or sitting on the side.
This year, I was able to preregister and get in immediately, so I spent much of the hour before our panel handing out glossy OCR fliers and plugging the pending festivities. “Video Game Music, 10 o’clock, Panel 4!” was heard by many people over and over again as they neared the escalator that would take them up to potential VGM bliss. As I went up at 9:50 (10 minutes before showtime) to refill on fliers, the room couldn’t have been more than 15% full, and I was worried that we had a complete bomb on our hands. I mean, what could have rationalized not having a full house this year compared to last year?
So I grabbed more fliers and made sure I continued pimping the panel. It was only at 9:55 when I went back up that I realized how much traffic was actually going into our room. That’s not to say the credit goes to me, but I was certainly relieved to know that we hadn’t lost our touch.
The panel itself was absolutely great. I’m not sure why the lights were low, but the atmosphere was also brighter last year. But it was the fans who came by to see us that really made everything click. The crowd was more independently enthusiastic last year, perhaps because it was our first time there, but once we got more interactive with the panel (including a Name That Tune contest), things really lit up and we connected with our audience more. Plus I’m a big fan of keeping things fun and loose in terms of presentation. A lot of panels are too dry, and I felt we initially came off that way, so cracking jokes made the time fly by and kept the presentation light.
After the formal presentation was over, we sold a lot of t-shirts and hoodies, as well as original CDs by SGX and zircon. The clothing was all non-profit and able to help pay for bandwidth costs and printing the gear in the first place. One thing we’ll definitely do next year with the presentation is upgrade things to more of a video format. We definitely don’t wanna have people staring at PowerPoint slides all day when we can do more to trick it out and give it a more entertaining feel. Feedback from OCR regulars as well as panel attendees encouraged us to make our presence felt at other fan conventions, so we’re now looking into expanding our con schedule, and hope to have some news in the next couple of months.
July 23: Briefly, besides the actual panel presentation, I had the great pleasure of meeting lots of OC ReMixers for the very first time, including old schoolers Dale North, Injury, MIDIman, and Xaleph as well as Final Fantasy Tactics/Breath of Fire V/Final Fantasy XII composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, Eminence concertmaster Hiroaki Yura and Electronic Arts’ Michael “Piano Squall” Gluck, who provided us on staff with copies of his MS benefit album GAME: Game & Anime Music Emotions. We had a great time getting OCR contributors to sign the brand new OCR guitar, part of pixietricks‘ costume as OCR-tan, our official mascot. After all was said and done, zircon and pixietricks killed time at the apartment of myself and The Lady, where Paige and I cooked a huge Italian dinner for 4 and shot the shit with them before I saw them off at Union Station that evening as they headed back to Baltimore.
As per last year, Otakon was huge success in getting the word out on OCR. As I mentioned, this year (along with the great reception last year), has motivated us even more to pursue other convention appearances and performances in the future. When we get idea of when that will be, we’ll certainly let y’all know over at the OC ReMix main page and forums. Thanks to everyone who turned out at Otakon to learn more about video game music and show their support for OCR. We look forward to seeing you next year!
As mentioned last week on Remix64, legendary Commodore composer Chris Hülsbeck recently released a new original album, Number Nine, available through synSONIQ Records. The official world premire of the album was at the Fifth Symphonic Game Music Concert, part of Games Convention 2007 this past August out of Leipzig, Germany.
