GC PRO ADVISORY BOARD: Tommy Tallarico

Tommy is a bundle of energy and a one-man marketing machine for the field of interactive audio. His intense passion and contagious enthusiasm draw you into his vision of where music for video games is headed. He should know; he’s been pushing the envelope for years. The insights he shares with us are invaluable.

Is he writing music? Playing a game? Bidding on action figures on eBay? Tommy's not telling, and we're not asking. "This is my life. This is all I do… live, eat, and breath video games and music. When I’m not composing music for video games, I’m playing video games. When I’m not playing video games, I’m doing a television show about video games. It’s all I ever do. It’s my passion." The Spiderman room of Tommy's unique house. Do you have a Spiderman room? We didn't think so. A small selection of some of Tommy's thousands of figurines and collectibles from games and movies. Our money's on Lara Croft to kick Tommy's ass. Sadly, Tommy was killed by a wandering velociraptor shortly after our interview. if your garage doesn't have an arcade, plush carpeting and a convertible Ferarri, you must be doing something wrong. Interior design tip: make sure your Tomb Raider dining room... ... doesn't get cluttered with your life-sized "Han Solo in carbonite" piece.

GC Pro: We’re sitting with Tommy Tallarico at his home studio in San Juan Capistrano. He’s been generous enough to take a little time and chat with us. Let’s start with a little bit of background. When did you get into music? How did you catch the bug? TT: Basically, my parents had a piano. And nobody played it. They just had it… they bought it cause it looked cool, and they always wanted one in the house. But the Tallarico family has a very musical background. From Italy, a bunch of Tallaricos came over together and – the most famous Tallarico you may know of is Steven Tallarico, who is Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. We obviously got something in our blood that draws us to music. One of the very first memories I ever had when I was a kid… I was three years old at the time. I remember sitting up at the piano bench, and I was eye-level with the keys. My first memory as a human was feeling frustrated that this thing, this amazing instrument was in front of me and I didn’t know how to play it. So, out of sheer will, I taught myself how to play the piano. My parents were a product of the Fifties, so I grew up listening to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. By the time I was five, I was banging out "Great Balls O’ Fire" on the piano, and "Hound Dog". I never had a lesson, just played by ear. I’d listen to the record, and play it on the piano. When I was about six, my parents brought in a teacher. They said, "Our son’s picked up the piano. You should teach him." I remember the day the lady came in, and she said, "Well, play something for me." So I’ve got my foot up on the keys, playing Jerry Lee Lewis, honky-tonk and rock-and-roll stuff. She said, "I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach him how to read music at this stage, cause he has such a good ear. We should let him develop it a little more." So, by the time I was like 12, I didn’t want to know from anyone, I didn’t want to take lessons. I taught myself a little bit…chord structures and all that kind of stuff, but I still considered myself pretty much a hot dog. When people say, "Who’d you study under?", I usually say, "Beethoven and John Williams," because that’s who I listened to. When I’m writing orchestral music, I’ll go back and I’ll listen to Beethoven’s Ninth, for example, and listen to what the cellos and strings are doing while the woodwinds are doing this. To me, that’s how I learned. I learned from what they did. When I was a teenager, I got into the whole rock-and-roll thing, Aerosmith and Van Halen. As synthesizers were coming in at the time, in the mid-80s, I started to learn how to play all the other instruments with my synthesizer. Anyone can bring up a trumpet sound, or they can bring up an electric guitar sound, right? But if you don’t know how to bend the right note, and which notes to play, or how to get from one note to another, what the ranges are and everything, it’s just a sound on a keyboard. So what I did is I went in and I would listen. If I had to do some horns, I’d buy all the Branford Marsalis and Wynton Marsalis albums and imitate what they were doing, on the keyboard. Or for guitar, I would imitate what Eddie Van Halen or Joe Perry were doing when they were doing solos and chords and riffs, then figuring it all out on the keyboard, with pitch bend and all that. So I was always kind of a purist in that respect, in that I didn’t use samplers to fake performances. I would learn the instrument, every single instrument. So then when I moved over to orchestral music when I was in my late teens, early 20s, the same thing I was doing for guitar and saxophone, I started doing for cello and violin and percussion and all that. That’s what got me into music. GC Pro: I had the opportunity to tour your house today. Obviously, the whole adventure/fantasy/video game world has been a big part of your life as well. When did that start? TT: Basically, my generation was the first to grow up on video games. So I was weaned on Pac Man and Space Invaders and Asteroids and Atari and Intellivision. That’s what I grew up on. As I became an adult, I never stopped playing video games. That’s the amazing thing about the video game culture of today. People who are in their thirties and forties now who grew up on video games never stopped playing. To us, comic books and video games are still pretty freakin’ cool. (laughs) And so what’s happened is that it’s evolved into our culture. Now that our generation is having kids, and they’re playing, it’s become a part of our society. GC Pro: And the games have evolved dramatically too. The games have kept up with the players. TT: Exactly. My story is really interesting, especially for this web site. Because if it weren’t for Guitar Center, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Basically, when I turned 21, I got in my car and I drove to California. That’s what you do. And I’d never been to California, didn’t know what it was about. I just knew, "I’m supposed to drive to Hollywood and get my record deal." So, I got in my car, didn’t have any money, no place to stay, no friends, no contact, no job… nothing. Just drove out to California in my two-seater car with my Roland keyboard and my TASCAM 4-track recorder, and that was it. Showed up on Hollywood and Vine, said, "Here I am! Where’s my record deal?" and took a look around and said, "What the hell is this place? This isn’t the way it looks like on television!" It was pretty scary! So there I am, 21 years old, my dreams are shattered. I’m like, "Oh my God, what am I gonna do? This is crazy!" so the only other thing I knew in California was Disneyland. So, I literally stopped a bum on the street – this is the first day I got to California – and asked where Mickey Mouse lived. He pointed me down to Orange County. So now I’m driving down to Orange County. I see the palm trees, the beautiful girls, the beaches, the fancy cars, and I’m like, "Oh! Well this is what California is supposed to be like." And I’m close enough to Hollywood. So I picked up a newspaper and I saw a job for selling keyboards at Guitar Center in Santa Ana, in Orange County. So I said, "Ah! I can bullshit my way through that job! I can do that!" (laughs) So I went down to Guitar Center the next day. At this time, I was homeless. I was either sleeping in my car, or sleeping under the pier at Huntington Beach, taking a shower on the beach, doing that whole thing. I went down there, and I got the job at Guitar Center in the keyboard department. I’d never sold a keyboard before in my life, but I did the whole East Coast thing – bada-bing, bada-boom – and they gave me a job. They saw raw talent, I guess. So I started at Guitar Center the very next day. I was in California two days, and I started at Guitar Center. The first day at work, I come in – I’m wearing a TurboGrafix t-shirt, which was an old video game system. The very first person who came through the door that day, happened to be a producer at Virgin. They were starting a video game company, and he saw my video game t-shirt and we struck up a conversation about video games. He said they were starting a new company, and said, "Why don’t you come down tomorrow and we’ll pay you to be a games tester?" So what I’d do is I’d work at this video game company called Virgin Games from 9-4, and then I’d be at Guitar Center at 4:30 ‘til close. And I’d work Guitar Center on the weekends. For me, what a great place it was… I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t have anywhere else to be, so what a great place to meet musicians and composers, and learn about gear, and meet people who do what I do. I was cutting demos after-hours at Guitar Center, using all the great gear and stuff! (laughs) Finally, I would bug the guy every single day. "Hey, can I do music? I want to do music for games." Back then, you pretty much had to be a programmer… it wasn’t about the musician, it was about the programming. GC Pro: All the audio, even the sound design? TT: It was all programming… zeros and ones, and typing out notes on a computer keyboard, you know? GC Pro: Right. TT: "C sharp…rest." It was ridiculous. And music comes from the heart, not the head. When I got there, I said, "Look, there’s this thing called MIDI." What we did was create systems through which I was able to hook up my MIDI keyboards, so I could play the game machines just like I would a sound module or a sampler. So I was able to create music and then record it on a sequencer, and just give the sequences, the MIDI files, to the programmer. That was a huge difference. So for the first time, a musician was creating the music instead of a programmer. That’s why it changed from (imitates beeps), "Do, do-doo, do-doo, doo", simplistic stuff that sounded like a merry-go-round back then. When I was getting on there, I was doing rock and blues and orchestral music and dance. My whole theory back then – this was in the late 80s, early 90s – my whole theory was, "Look, I love video games but I hate video game music. Why is it sounding like it’s all child music?", you know? And now here I am, 21, 22 years old, I want to hear the music that I would in a film, or hear the music that I like to listen to. So I was doing all this music that no one had ever heard before in a video game, which was simply just rock, or dance music, or techno or whatever. GC Pro: But composed for the game and to the game. TT: Exactly. That’s how I made my name. It was easy for me because no one had ever done blues on a video game before. No one had ever heard rock before. And then when CD-ROMs hit in the mid-Nineties, I was the first guy to ever record a live guitar and put it in a video game. Stuff like that. I was a musician doing video game music for the first time. I think I had a great advantage over everybody else who was just programming. GC Pro: You helped pioneer a real revolution. It’s now blossomed into an industry that has matured dramatically. TT: Huge. GC Pro: You’ve been a major factor, along with some other key people in the industry who’ve really raised the level of scoring and sound design, dialog, everything in video games. Where do you see it now, and where do you see it going? TT: We’ve come so far in the last ten to 15 years. We went from bleeps and bloops to live orchestras, you know? It took the film industry 50 or 60 years to get were we are today, but the technology is changing so quick, we’re actually surpassing the film industry now. Using multiple streams and interactive 5.1 crossfades. Things that movies aren’t even capable of giving you, because it’s a linear experience. That’s what keeps this all exciting to me, and I’ve worked on over 250 games. What keeps me excited is that every year, there’s something new that no one’s ever done before, that the technology allows for. It’s really exciting for me, because I’m a video game player too. I’m not just a composer. I’m in this. This is my life. This is all I do… live, eat, breath video games and music. When I’m not composing music for video games, I’m playing video games. When I’m not playing video games, I’m doing a television show about video games, you know? (laughs) It’s all I ever do. It’s my passion. That’s what’s cool. The video game industry allows composers, sound designers, whatever… the technology allows us to do something interesting. Every six months, there’s something new. GC Pro: There’s a whole new cutting edge. TT: That’s what’s cool about it. That’s kinda the reason we formed G.A.N.G., Game Audio Network Guild. It’s a non-profit organization that I founded two years ago. Audiogang.org is the URL. It’s basically for people who are looking to get into the video game industry. There’s three huge things that, to become successful, that you need to focus on. One, there’s the creative element. Two, there’s the technical aspects, and three, the business aspects. Because our technology is changing, for example, we want to make sure that everybody out there who does what we do has all this information, and has all these resources and education. Aside from educating from within our organization, the other big thing that’s important is educating the publishers and developers and designers and the producers of these video games. Because they’re the ones who hold the purse strings for us, and they have to understand that, "Hey, we can do live orchestral music. Just put it in the budget," you know? And it will make a quality difference as opposed to doing it all in MIDI. Because of this organization, we’re furthering the video game audio industry, which is really cool to see us making such an impact. That’s the great thing about the video game industry… we’re like the wild, wild west. We’re not like film and television, where there’s these strict rules and guidelines and boys’ club and all this stuff. We’re exactly the opposite. We’re like the wild west. There’s no right, no wrong way to do stuff. We’re making the rules as we go. That’s why all our stuff is so cutting-edge and so out of the box. We’re not pigeonholed into these guidelines. We’re just making up as we go. GC Pro: That’s an incredible thing about G.A.N.G, the sharing of information. You share everything with the entire membership. TT: It’s so opposite of the film and television industries, where everyone keeps their cards to close to their chest, and don’t want to share anything because they feel the competition is going to get an advantage over them. With us, there are 2,000 new video games that come out per year, and there are about 500 of us in the world doing this. And we want more people to… our objective is to promote excellence in interactive audio. We want to teach film composers and television composers and all these talented people out there. What we do is different, but those things can be learned if you have a general passion for video games. GC Pro: You just used the term "interactive audio", and you were playing me some examples earlier of different pieces you’ve written. When you apply those to the video and the action and as you’re getting closer and further from characters, the intensity and the whole tone of the music changes, and it’s like an entirely different thought process and art form than composing music for anything else. TT: Film is very linear, whereas video games are interactive, so you don’t know what the player is going to do next. It’s a lot more challenging and a lot more rewarding as a player to hear music change when you do something. The important thing about composing, doing audio for video games is that there’s no set way to do anything. People say, "Well, how do you do music for games?" Technically, you can do it a thousand different ways. That’s what makes it fun is that every single project I approach is approached completely different because of the technology, because of the creative aspect, because of the engine. There’s the programmer, all that stuff comes into play. It’s part of the composer’s job to figure out how exactly to pull off what you’re trying to accomplish. That makes it fun. Even the words ‘interactive music’ can mean so many different things. Sometimes you could do like MIDI branching for interactive music. Or taking one piece of music and transitioning it to another piece of music at a certain time in the game, a certain event gets triggered, that’s interactive music. It can be as simple as that, or as complex as adaptive audio, which every little thing in the game is hooked up to a MIDI channel or something. Because we can have all these massive amounts of streams available to us, like on the XBox and Playstation,and now PC, and these great big hard drives, we’re able to take lots of data and have it all be streaming at the same time. Even in 5.1 if we want it to. It enables me to write music, even for a live orchestra, I can write different variations and different intensity levels of the same song, and record it all with live orchestra, and then crossfade in between those. Set up flag points so that the programmer always knows what part of the song he’s in, where he’s at. As the scene changes, I can then crossfade into different variations and intensity levels of the song. Man, that’s super cool. GC Pro: And that’s only recent advances in technology that’s allowed that, right? TT: Exactly. We used to do it in very simplistic form, with like 6-voice MIDI tracks that could change. But now we’re able to do it with live music, with real music, and that’s cool. GC Pro: Where do you do most of your composing? What is your process in terms of gear? TT: I’m right about to switch over to Nuendo 2.0. The guys over at AMD, Charlie Boswell, were gracious enough to hook me up with a superhuman computer to run Nuendo on, which is awesome. I’ve always been a PC guy. Never really got into the Mac thing too much. A lot of the tools I use for my sequencing… I use Cakewalk. We use Sound Forge on a daily basis. Sound Forge is really our tool of choice as far as sound design and sound creation goes. It’s unbelievable. It’s unmatched. If we’re building movies, a lot of times I like building stuff on my laptop, really simple. Most recently I did the new DTS theatrical logo trailer for the motion pictures, and I did the whole thing on my laptop using Vegas. I was just blowing in sounds and creating them. We ended up doing the final mixes in Nuendo. GC Pro: That becomes like an outline, a sketch, and then you go in and do it with an orchestra or whatever you’re going to use? TT: Exactly. I can do the small stuff right off a laptop, so I can compose anywhere. But normally in my studio I’m using Cakewalk and Sound Forge for sound design and sample editing. I’m just recording it onto a hard drive. Currently, I’m mixing on a Mackie 32o8, but now that everything’s switching over to 5.1, with the help of GC Pro, I’m creating a 5.1 sound experience in my home. GC Pro: It’s not about the gear. You’re not a gear guy, you’re a composer and a creative guy. TT: Exactly. If I need to record voiceover up in Hollywood, I’ll use a studio, I’ll rent a studio for $125 and hour. They have the $5,000 Neumann mics and the preamps and the $2 million consoles and whatever. I’ll pay $125 an hour for that. I’d rather spend my money on Ferraris and 12-foot Velociraptors in my backyard. Or my Spider-Man comic book collection. Call me crazy. It’s all about a simplistic thing. I kind of got into a rut in the late 90s where I found myself reading more manuals than I was composing, because I was trying to keep up on all the latest gear and the technology. Now, really, it’s all about the latest plug-ins and software, which is kinda cool. But I kind of threw it all away in the late ‘90s and said, "you know what? I’m sick of this. If my sequencer has ‘record’ and cut and paste, I’m good." So I’m using this really old version of Cakewalk and let’s keep it simple. For me, it’s about the music writing and the composition itself. The way I do live orchestras is, I play the game with no sound. I might go downstairs on my piano and work out some melody. But then I get this thing going in my head, and I’ll come up to my studio, and I just figure out what I’m hearing in my head. And then I just start playing those instruments and recording them into MIDI. Then, if I’m dong an orchestral thing for example, then I just start adding, and blowing it out, and making counter-melodies, and adding percussion. Enhancing this basic thing that I had in my head. That’s how I compose. So I’ll do every violin one at a time, or every cello, each separately, as a real one person would. I don’t load in the string section sound and just start playing chords. Every violin player is going to have his own nuance, and maybe he’s not going to hit in exact time with everyone. He’s not going to stop with everyone. GC Pro: That’s why it sounds much more natural, more musical. TT: More real, exactly. What I find I’m doing a lot is actually using a live orchestra. Doing my synth MIDI mock-ups, but then they sound so rich that I’ll record live orchestra to the click tracks and then I end up using a lot of the MIDI stuff and blending it together to get an even fuller sound, especially with percussion and strings, and choir. GC Pro: Right. The drama and the scale of the stuff you played me earlier was like that, and that was all just MIDI stuff. TT: That was MIDI. We’re recording live orchestra in April, and so it’s gonna be twice that. GC Pro: Wow. That’s incredible. What are your favorite sound libraries? What do you use for your string sounds? TT: The Garritan Orchestral Strings are really good. And the Sonic Implants one. GC Pro: You’re doing a TV show now. You’re a veritable video game expert. So, you receive all the titles, try them out and then talk about them on TV. TT: Basically, we do two television shows. One of them is called "The Electric Playground". It’s been on the air for seven years. We’re currently shooting our thirteenth season, and we won a Telly award a couple of years ago for "Best Entertainment Cable Program". In the US, it plays on the G4 Network, which is a new 24-hour video game television network. Up in Canada, it’s on MTV and Tech TV, and the Space Channel, and syndicated worldwide. Our even more popular show is a show called "Judgment Day", where me and my host from Electric Playground, Victor Lucas – who I’ve been with for seven years now, doing the shows – it’s basically like "Siskel & Ebert" on acid. We review all the latest games that come out, but we have no problem saying, "Ah, man, this game sucks!", or "the graphics really blow!", so we argue with each other, we have shouting matches. Sometimes we bag on the games, other times we agree. It’s really dynamic. We have no scripts, no cue cards. We don’t even know what the other person is going to give the game until the cameras start rolling. It’s all very natural, real, and I think that’s why it’s become one of the top-rated shows on the network. That one’s also on G4 in the US. GC Pro: Sounds like a lot of fun. You’ve done a huge amount with G.A.N.G., and other people have done a huge amount to take interactive audio to a new level. Do you think the industry is getting it? It’s obviously growing, but is there still a lot of resistance? Are there people in the industry at the corporate level that don’t get it? TT: Um, yes. But it’s changing rapidly. One of our big initiatives now is getting these video game publishers to start publishing the music, copyrighting and publishing the music so that the composers and publishers can get paid ASCAP and BMI. So we’re working with ASCAP and BMI on educating the publishers on how they can collect ancillary money, which again, because it’s a new industry, they don’t kinda get that whole thing. But yeah, just in budgets alone, three years ago before G.A.N.G., the average budget for a video game was probably fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars- GC Pro: For the whole thing? TT: For the entire thing… music, sound design, voices, everything. Now, an average budget for a video game is $200,000 to $250,000 for the audio. The music’s probably about half that. Now, if your project is fortunate enough to have live orchestra, you can probably double that budget. GC Pro: And those titles are two million dollar games? TT: Yeah, an average game is about three million dollars to create, for a big title. But for the really big titles, the serious ones, the triple-A… all your EA stuff, all your "Enter the Matrix"… those games are ten, fifteen million dollars. GC Pro: Wow. TT: Some of those titles have one million dollar audio budgets. So it’s finally gotten to a place where budgets… we’d like to think that it’s due in part directly to G.A.N.G. going to all these publishers and telling them how important it is to use union talent for voice acting. To use Hollywood guys to create sound effects and things. To use super-mega-talented composers, and to use live orchestra and live players and stuff. They see the difference. The good news is that they’re not putting their nose up to any of this. It’s just education. They’re just not aware of how important it is. GC Pro: Just like Henri Mancini and others did with film. TT: Yeah, in the sixties in film, exactly. Video games, I think it’s Spielberg or Lucas that says that audio is 50 percent of the movie-going experience. In video games, it’s like 30 percent. Thirty percent being the visuals and the graphics, the other 30 percent being programming, level design, gameplay and interaction. But is audio looked at as 30 percent important in the project? No. Do we get 30 percent of the budget? (laughs) No. Do we get 30 percent of the programmers’ time? No. And again, it’s not because they hate audio. It’s because they need to be educated on how important audio is to the experience. The great news is over the last couple years, people get it. EA gets it. These big publishers, Sony, gets it. Microsoft understands. Bill Gates, he talks about all the time how important he wanted the audio to be in the XBox when they created the platform. And let me tell you something… the audio engine and the chipset that they have for the audio is literally ahead of its time. It’s amazing. It’s 256 tracks at 48khz. 5.1 out of the box. GC Pro: What are some of your outside interests? Games and music is pretty much what your life has been about, but what are some of your other things that you’re good at, or enjoy doing? TT: I’m a big comic book collector. I like to be creative yet, sometimes get away from music and video games. So I do a lot of creative art stuff. You can see around the house… I like building movie props, whether it’s a "Tron" light cycle, or the diva from "The Fifth Element", or a life-sized Leeloo action figure statue. All the rooms in the house I’ve created. GC Pro: Describe some of the themes. TT: You have the Egyptian Tomb Raider dining room, inspired by the video game Tomb Raider. I painted it all, gold-leafed all the wood. Little creative side projects. I have the Jungle bedroom, complete with waterfall and the fertility idol from "Raiders of the Lost Ark". The garage is a full-on arcade, of course. You have to have the arcade. GC Pro: Carpeted, with a Ferrari convertible in it. TT: It always helps get the creative juices flowing. GC Pro: Right. Can you jump in it like "Magnum P.I." used to do with his Ferrari in his carpeted garage? TT: Absolutely! That’s why I got the carpeted garage, because of "Magnum P.I.". I always wanted one of those. And then outside, I’ve done this Hawaiian jungle kind of vibe, with life-sized dinosaurs, and pillars and arches, things like that. Kind of a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" vibe, with a castle, a pool, the Italian statues. And then we have the Spider-Man room. Every home should have a Spider-Man room. There’s lots of Spider-Man things in there. GC Pro: Including a life-sized Spider-man and hundreds of figurines- TT: Thousands, I think. GC Pro: And all his little nemesis characters that he has to battle against. TT: Yeah. And then a home theater, of course. I have about three home theaters in the house, but the big one is a ten-foot screen, 7.1, 200 watts per channel, M&K 5000 subwoofer. That’s like the full movie experience. Oh, and the Houdini bathroom. Gotta mention the Houdini bathroom, and the New York Yankees office. The reason I create this is because I’ve made my home my studio, my place of work, which some people can’t deal with. Some people like to separate the two. But as a composer, I don’t know what part of the day I’m going to be creative. I don’t go 9 to 5 and expect myself, "Oh, at ten o’clock, I’m going to start writing music." For that reason, I wanted to build my studio in my house and work when I want to work. If I feel inspired at 3:00 in the morning, then I’m gonna go upstairs in my studio and start writing. All of these kind of visual and creative things – it’s kind of like a mini Disneyworld here. It inspires me, and it gets me in the mood. Like I said earlier, I live, breathe and sleep video games, and I want to be around that all of the time. GC Pro: And you literally wake up in a video game. TT: Exactly! I feel like I’m put in a game and living the lifestyle. Aside from creating all this kind of cool stuff, another hobby I have is playing baseball. I travel the country with tournament teams and play all over the United States. Real baseball, not softball. That’s something I’ve always done as well, growing up as a kid. GC Pro: I see lots of baseball memorabilia, and the Yankees-themed office. But you’re a Boston guy, right? You’re not a New York guy. TT: That’s a funny thing. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Red Sox fans are going to hate me for this, but I’m a die-hard Yankees fan. My parents were from New York, right? And my grandparents, all I heard about growing up were stories about Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. How do you tear yourself away from that legacy? It was rough, growing up in Massachusetts, being a Yankee fan. Especially in 1978. GC Pro: Are you into other sports? TT: Baseball is my main thing. I’m into it so hardcore that I wouldn’t be able to devote time to football or hockey or soccer. GC Pro: For us guys who didn’t grow up on video games, what would be your top three titles for someone like me, who doesn’t really know much about video games? Galaga was the last thing I played. TT: And that’s a great game! That would probably be in my top ten list of all time! GC Pro: I liked that game. TT: It’s a great game! And the funny thing about the game industry is that that game is still around. They’ll do a Game Boy Advance version, or a cell phone version. Or they’ll come out with the old classic arcades… Galaga just came out this Christmas again, for the XBox. They’ll put like 30 of those old arcade games on one disc. It’s great. Some of my favorites of all time are Golden Eye on the N64 machine. I have different favorite games for different platforms. For the Playstation 2, Ico was an amazing game. It’s one of my favorites of all time. And there’s been some incredible stuff that’s come out this past year. Anyone who has a Playstation 2 or an XBox, they need to pick up Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil… anything, really from EA, is really incredible. And I haven’t worked for EA in a couple of years; I’m not saying that cause they’re one of my clients. They’re stuff is really phenomenal. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is one of the most amazing video game experiences based on a movie translation that anyone has ever done. I’ve worked on some great games in my career, like Aladdin and Terminator, so I know how hard it is to take a movie title and make it great. GC Pro: How about Tony Hawk? TT: Yeah, some of the more popular titles that I’ve worked on which would be good are Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Spiderman, the James Bond franchise. Madden Football. Earthworm Jim is probably one of the bigger ones. Disney’s Aladdin. The Unreal series. Time Crisis. Pac Man World, which was the 20th anniversary of Pac Man. GC Pro: Let’s wrap this up and take some pictures of the Tallarico theme rooms so we can share that with our viewers. Thanks Tommy. TT: And thank you to Guitar Center for making my career possible! (laughs)