The score was termed by Gamespot as "one of the best-produced musical scores ever put into a game". Tallarico wrote a complete orchestral score for Advent Rising performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which won Best Original Score from IGN.com, Mania Music, and Play Magazine. His studio has been involved in several games since, including Spider-Man, Time Crisis, Sonic and the Black Knight, Tomorrow Never Dies, Madden NFL '95, and Metroid Prime, which was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Sound. His friend, David Perry, formed Shiny Entertainment at the same time, and the two new studios worked together to create classics such as Earthworm Jim and MDK. Tallarico continued working with Virgin Interactive as head of music and video division until 1994, when he went on to found Tommy Tallarico Studios. Released by Capitol Records and titled Virgin Games Greatest Hits, the first volume appeared in 1994, and the second volume was released in 1996. Tallarico was the first composer to commercially release album compilations of video game music around the world. Several games he worked on received awards for their music. Tallarico worked on a number of other titles while at Virgin Interactive, including The Terminator, Aladdin, Cool Spot, The 7th Guest and Global Gladiators. Tallarico advocated for more space on cartridges being devoted to audio, and became an early pioneer in bringing real sampled sounds of instruments into video games. "The main focus of writing video game music back then was it had to be simple and have a great melody," Tallarico said. Given the constraints on video game cartridges, Tallarico focused on making catchy-but short-MIDI melodies that could be looped repeatedly. The resulting music, a "plodding, ominous synth" as a soundtrack, impressed Virgin enough that they let him continue to make music, making him head of the audio division six months later. Tallarico's first musical project at Virgin Interactive was for the Nintendo Game Boy version of Prince of Persia. Since he had never produced video game music before, Tallarico offered to write the music for free in his spare time. While play-testing, Tallarico often petitioned his bosses to let him create video game music. Tallarico was then given a job with Virgin to be their first play-tester. On his first day, Tallarico caught the eye of an employee of the new video game company, Virgin Mastertronic, because he was wearing a TurboGrafx T-shirt. While homeless and living under a pier, Tallarico took a job as a keyboard salesman at the Guitar Center in Santa Ana, California. However at 21, Tallarico went to California to try and obtain a job in the video game industry. Tallarico attended Cathedral High School, and later Western New England University for a year. He would splice the tape into background music, and then perform guitar over the result for his neighborhood friends. Tallarico would take his father's tape recorder to the arcade to record the songs. He and his father played Asteroids and Space Invaders. Tallarico was introduced to video games as a child. Tallarico would attend his cousin’s concerts as a kid and grew a desire to become a musical performer. Tallarico was also inspired by his cousin, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. He taught himself to play piano and guitar, and at the age of ten, Tallarico cites John Williams's score for Star Wars and Bill Conti's Rocky score as inspirations, and becoming "hooked" on classical music. His parents took him to see Springfield Symphony when he was 9 years old. As of this writing, it has received $194,452 in pledges from 3,841 backers with three days remaining.Tallarico was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on February 18, 1968. Tallarico launched the Kickstarter project for Video Games Live: Level 3 last month, hoping to raise $250,000 to back production for and release an album including classical arrangements from games like BioShock, Portal and Tetris. SO MANY incredible songs in one game! It's mind blowing!" It also has THE MOST impressive Mario music in the entire franchise in my opinion. "A lot of people always ask me what my favorite video game of ALL TIME is," Tallarico wrote, "and I always say Super Mario World! I think from a design, control and gameplay standpoint it is the perfect game. Tallarico hopes that the "computerized mockup" will inspire Nintendo to give him permission to include it on his final project. The symphonic medley of music from Super Mario World made its debut this morning on the blog, before even Nintendo heard it. Super Mario World's score has been given a classical music makeover in a track that Video Games Live creator Tommy Tallarico premiered this morning in a Kickstarter blog post.
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