Bear McCreary admits something most composers probably wouldn’t. When he was working on God of War, he sometimes wrote music he secretly hoped players wouldn’t notice too much. Not because it lacked quality, but because it was too powerful. Some of those softer character themes were so heavy with emotion that, if you really noticed them, they had the power to eclipse everything else happening on screen.
His teacher, film composer Elmer Bernstein, had left him with one simple question that never went away: What do you want the audience to feel? In games, McCreary discovered, the answer isn’t straightforward. Sometimes the goal is to make players feel something without ever realizing where that emotion came from.
The 33 Coziest Games on the PS5
The cozy genre has grown over the years with several new additions, and these are the best cozy games for the PS5.
That sleight of hand is exactly what PlayStation | The Concert flips inside out. All those hidden threads, the background textures designed to live beneath conscious awareness, suddenly step into the spotlight. What comes out of this thought process is neither a traditional symphony nor a nostalgia show. It’s part concert, part immersive installation, part communal therapy for people who’ve spent years carrying pieces of these characters around in their heads.
Premiering in New York City on October 11, this national tour will bring this awesome experience to 90 cities across the United States, giving fans all across the chance to witness a unique celebration of PlayStation's musical legacy.
How Game Music Learned To Read Players
Chuck Doud, the Head of Music for Sony Interactive Entertainment, has been watching this transformation for thirty years. He remembers when composers had thirty seconds of looping sound to play with and had to pray it didn’t drive anyone insane. Now he oversees games with more composed music than a Wagner opera.
The limitations of the early days forced an unusual style. Music had to be modular, endlessly recombinable. A battle track needed to fit whether you were outnumbered, cruising through an easy fight, or barely clinging to life. Composers became architects of mood, building emotional Lego pieces that the game could snap together on the fly.
Here’s the paradox. Game music is at its finest when you don’t notice it. You see, the more conveniently it glues itself to the gameplay, the less you consciously register it as this separate entity that exists outside the world of video games. So how do you put that on stage without breaking the spell?
Most game concerts dodge the question. They strip out the catchiest themes, arrange them for performance, and lean on nostalgia. That’s usually enough. People cheer, hum along, and leave feeling validated.
PlayStation wanted more. They rebuilt the context itself. Rather than pulling melodies into a vacuum, they staged environments that re-created the emotional climates where those scores lived. And boy oh boy do they have something cooking.
Nine Emotional Worlds
The evening takes us through four main chapters: The Last of Us, God of War Ragnarök, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. But describing them as “chapters” doesn’t really do justice to how they feel. Each one is less like a setlist and more like stepping into a climate system that you inhabit for twenty minutes. Then again, these are just four of the nine PlayStation titles featured in the show, each carefully selected to showcase different facets of the PlayStation musical experience.
Santaolalla’s guitar for The Last of Us has always been fragile, and deliberately so. On stage, with live instrumental swelling behind it, that fragility overwhelms. The visuals sketch its emotional terrain: abandoned cities as monuments to loss, greenery reclaiming ruins as a quiet hymn to resilience.
McCreary’s God of War section carries a different burden. The music had to live in two extremes: mythic violence and tender fatherhood. It had to be thunder and whisper at the same time.
Ghost of Tsushima is a little trickier. Ilan Eshkeri wrote for stealth and duels, hot springs and battlefields, honor and betrayal. The score blooms from noble restraint into uneasy transformation, mirroring Jin’s descent into moral ambiguity. And then Horizon Zero Dawn. Joris de Man had to span two worlds: tribal earthiness and futuristic ruin. In concert, that duality becomes a meditation on belonging. It’s about discovering that the world is larger than you thought, and still trying to carve out a place in it.
Technology Takes A Step Back
Yeah, there are giant LED screens and full surround sound. But the real trick leans more into the psychological than the technical. The whole setup counts on the fact that you already know these characters, already feel something for them, and then it just plays with that.
So everything that you see on the screens is abstract -- spreading fungi, collapsing buildings, colors that won’t sit still. They don’t replace your memories, they poke at them. And the sound wraps around you, like the wind at your back in Tsushima. And when it clicks, which is most of the time, you stop thinking about speakers or screens. You’re just… somewhere else.
About fifteen soloists carry the performance. Calling them “soloists” feels wrong, though. They’re more like emotional engineers. McCreary has spoken openly about writing phrases that work almost like Pavlovian triggers -- notes that, the moment you hear them, unlock entire character arcs in your memory.
The concert underlines just how far interactive entertainment has come. These works don’t need the games to justify themselves anymore. The music alone can carry a full evening of emotional experience, and that’s a lot of cultural validation.
Walking Out Different
By the end, you don’t feel like you’ve “replayed” anything. You feel like you’ve been shown the hidden blueprints of experiences you've already lived. The music that once worked invisibly beneath your choices now stands alone, and it turns out it never needed the scaffolding of gameplay to hit with full force.
McCreary and his peers have spent years learning how to make you feel exactly what they wanted you to feel. In concert, unshackled by game mechanics or technical limits, they finally get to wield that knowledge directly.
The result is proof that game music isn’t background at all. It’s some of the most emotionally sophisticated compositions being made today. Chuck Doud has seen the whole arc, from a small Sony audio team three decades ago to a global operation rivaling Hollywood. “We’re bumping up the quality across the board,” he says. And the concert makes it obvious that music isn’t just keeping up, it’s leading.
For anyone who ever caught themselves humming a theme weeks later, or felt blindsided by unexpected emotion mid-game, the PlayStation Concert offers recognition. The music was always shaping those feelings. Now, for once, you get to see and hear the machinery doing its work. In case you're interested in catching this live, head on over to the official PlayStation website and grab your tickets now!
36 Video Games With The Most Heartbreaking Endings, Ranked
Heartbreaking endings to poignant stories aren't reserved for movies and television. Some video games have incredibly sad endings.