Kate Remington

Many musicians have said that life as they knew it ended when the COVID-19 quaratines began. The Videri String Quartet has come up with a unique way to relfect these times. They're welcoming arrangements for string quartet of music from video games that relate in some way to a plague, post-apocalyptic times, or a disruption of everyday life in some way, with a competition they've titled Quarantets.

Gears Tactics is set twelve years before the original and now iconic Gears of War. Cities on the planet Sera are begininning to fall prey to a terrible threat emerging from underground, and it falls to reluctant hero Gabe Diaz to command his squad to defeat the Locust Hoarde. Tactics composer Edward Patrick White says his memories of playing the first Gears game, in a nearly-empty flat save for his Xbox and a kitten, infused his soundtrack.

Down the Rabbit Hole, a new virtual reality game by Coretopia Studios, takes to Wonderland before Alice ever visited, and it's just as strange! Composer Michael Gordon Shapiro says creating a musical signature for the game as well as the beloved characters was a really satisfying challenge. 

Composer Ian Chen says writing the soundtrack for the Chinese mythology-inspired Fantastic Creatures by Blue Callisto Studios was a dream project because he combined his love of traditional Chinese instruments with the myths he listened to as a child and his love of real-time strategy games.

He enjoyed the challenge of combining traditional Chinese instruments with Western ones to bring out the best qualities of both.