Yesterday the Krakow Film Music Festival was opened by Critical Hit, a Symphonic Rock Band performing covers of Video Game themes, reaching from Super Mario, Zelda and Kingdom Hearts to World of Warcraft, Halo and Dragon Age. Founded by Warcraft composer Jason Hayes, Critical Hit toured the US already with its award-winning musicians that usually record for video games, movies, and TV shows and perform live at The Emmy’s, Cirque Du Soleil, American Idol and symphony orchestras worldwide. You can read more about the artists on the official website here.
Now for the first time in the history of the band, Critical Hit performed outside of the United States and was the perfect opener for the 5 day long festival in Krakow. Sold out in only 3 hours, the concert was highly anticipated by the audience in the Kino Kijów Centrum. Starting off with Tetris and Pokémon, the concert brought back oh so many memories and you could feel the positive vibes in the audience. A great light show throughout the concert, that proved again how much everyone at this festival loves their job, was accompanied by great visuals on the screen with a lot of love to the detail honoring old and new games alike while embedding the performing artists constantly in the graphics. Additionally, Co-Founder and Executive producer Michael Gluck did a great job of getting everyone pumped for every single next track and it was a great joy to watch all these incredibly talented artists rocking on stage to all of these video game classics. Furthermore many of the featured composers from all over the world had recorded a video message for the audience appreciating their attendance.
Just like Agata Grabowiecka, head of the festival’s programme planning department, told us before, it was really nice to see many parents with their really young children enjoying the show, showing how video games and music can connect generations. Personal highlights for me were “Pokémon”, “Bowser’s Castle”, “Nate’s Theme” and the Diablo Cinematic Suite as well as Kingdom Hearts and Heroes of the Storm. Standing ovation after the last piece showed that I wasn’t alone with so many favourites.
You can watch the official video from the live performance of ‘Bowser’s Castle’ below:
Before that Michael Gluck had invited everyone to meet the band after the concert and a big crowd was waiting outside for them showing how much everyone enjoyed their performance.
To give you an impression of how everything looked, here are some images we took yesterday for you. You can read more about the festival in our frequently updated Live Ticker.
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