The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony Concert

Last Tuesday I went to the Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony concert. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a huge geek, and whilst I’m pretty selective about which games I will and won’t play, Zelda is one of my all-time favourite series.

I was so excited when I found out that the concert was going to be held in London; I’d had a sneaking suspicion that they were going to choose Germany for the European leg of the tour as it’s the biggest market and Nintendo has quite a significant base there. I just booked the tickets as soon as I found out and then asked my sister if she was free. She was (well, it was a Tuesday night a month in advance after all), and so I booked a hotel and train tickets…

…next thing we were in the hotel getting ready! (Myspace style – I’m on the right):

We did get lost quite a bit in London; let’s just say that I’m not good with directions. You can guarantee that if I have a 50/50 choice, I will pick the wrong way to go. If I have Joe on the phone giving me directions, Google Navigation in my hand, and my sister asking people in the street, you can still pretty much assume we’re going to be lost for another hour. In my defence, the roadworks and the signs literally pointing the wrong way didn’t help. But eventually, we found this:

I was overwhelmed by how many geeks were there, I mean, I work with computer geeks, I live with gaming geeks, my family are rapidly becoming more geeky, but when you’re surrounded by over 3,600 other people interested in Zelda and gaming, it’s pretty crazy. We didn’t dress in costume, but lots of people did. I honestly thought we would be in the queue for hours, but it moved really fast once the doors opened, despite the too-small venue. It was one of the most fun queues ever due to the fact that everyone was geeking out and bumping into each other on Street Pass (the 3DS thing where if you walk past someone/stand near them, you can meet them and they can give you jigsaw puzzle pieces and help you complete a quest). I’ve finished all the puzzles now, and I’ve almost finished the RPG quest game.

Soo, we got inside and there were posters and t-shirts for sale, so we got a couple, and then we headed for our seats. There were lovely Zelda touches everywhere; huge framed pictures with the dates different games were released, consoles with the different games in glass cases, demos of the soon-to-be-released Skyward Sword game…it was great.

Once we got to our seats – after being handed a free programme each: bonus! – we settled down and waited for the orchestra (the London Philharmonic) to filter in and tune up:

After an intro song had been played, we were introduced to the conductor, and our host Zelda Williams. There were also a couple of welcome guests in the form of Koji Kondo and Eiji Aonuma.

Needless to say, the night was truly amazing, and I’m definitely going to get tickets for next year. The orchestra was insanely talented, and the videos they had playing in the background even caused some laughs in parts (it was amusing to see the baffled orchestra trying to figure out what was funny; they were pure on-screen in-jokes). It was easily one of the best performances I’ve ever been to – I didn’t want to leave!

At the end we were treated to a song from Skyward Sword. Forget the whole Apple idea of standing in front of a presentation screen to launch an overhyped product in front of non-plussed people. This was a crowd of thousands listening to what will be an iconic piece of music played by some of the most talented people in one of the world’s best orchestras. That’s pretty special.