Did you know that soundtrack concerts are among the most popular for touring orchestras? A full third of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's first-time audience members are coming to the concert hall via their favourite series and movies – and video games. It is a huge cultural growth area, and one that may have gone unrecognised by the general public. "It is impossible to ignore video game music now," says Tommy Pearson, founder and artistic director of the inaugural London Soundtrack festival. "The sheer creativity and artistry in games is incredible, and it's been fascinating to see so many composers blossom in the genre."

Existing multi-instrumental datasets tend to be biased toward pop and classical music. In addition, they generally lack high-level annotations such as emotion tags. In this paper, we propose YM2413-MDB, an 80s FM video game music dataset with multi-label emotion annotations. It includes 669 audio and MIDI files of music from Sega and MSX PC games in the 80s using YM2413, a programmable sound generator based on FM. The collected game music is arranged with a subset of 15 monophonic instruments and one drum instrument. They were converted from binary commands of the YM2413 sound chip. Each song was labeled with 19 emotion tags by two annotators and validated by three verifiers to obtain refined tags. We provide the baseline models and results for emotion recognition and emotion-conditioned symbolic music generation using YM2413-MDB.

Caroline Grace has always enjoyed vintage technology. An IT tech in the Mid-Ohio Valley, they collect retro games, laser discs and cassette tapes, but mostly, vinyl records. Their collection is in the thousands, and hundreds of those are video game soundtracks. "I've been a big fan of games all my life," says Grace. "Some of my earliest memories are playing games like Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap and Goof Troop with my dad and brother. I get positive feelings from listening to the Wonder Boy III music now. I have a lot of pleasant memories of playing it with my family back in the day."

Horse Jumper of Love is a rock band from Boston that makes the kind of music you might want playing in your hyperbaric chamber if you were stuck in there for a while and really wanted to lean into the experience. One of their best tracks, 2019's "DIRT," is built around a piercingly plonking guitar riff and the phrase "And there is dirt and there is juice / and I am mixing up the two." I don't know what it means. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. The strange slowcore formulations of their new album, Natural Part, is full of similarly perplexing songwriting.

Its fellow countdown – run by ABC Classic – usually does not. As its name implies, the Classic 100 is typically a more subdued affair. Unlike its boozy, bombastic cousin, the ABC's classical music station broadcasts the top 100 over multiple days. And since its inception in 2001, the annual countdown has been themed around certain genres or forms, asking listeners to vote for their favourite operas, symphonies and, one year, French compositions. This year, though, the Classic 100 might sound a little different.

After graduating from the Osaka College of Music in 1988, Yoko Shimomura was torn between career paths. Classically trained since the age of 3 and raised in a family of piano players, Shimomura had studied to become a piano teacher. But when she wasn't studying or playing the piano, Shimomura was popping coins at her local arcade or stomping on Goombas in Super Mario Bros. It was Koji Kondo's infectious melodies in the original Super Mario Bros. that first piqued Shimomura's interest in video game music. Not long after, Koichi Sugiyama's classical score for the RPG Dragon Quest inspired her to marry her love for video games and classical music.

Eímear Noone got into composing and conducting video game music by accident. One day, while studying music at Trinity College Dublin, a fourth-year student came to the bar she was drinking in with members of the college chapel choir and offered them a few quid to help with the orchestration on a project of his. "I have a vivid memory of sitting on a studio floor somewhere in Dublin writing choral parts with my pals and then singing them," she says. "Six months later my brother calls me in a complete tizzy and says, 'Did you work on Metal Gear Solid?' I was like, 'No!' He says, 'Well, I'm looking at your name on the screen credits right now.' And sure enough, the session she had contributed to for beer money was the soundtrack to Hideo Kojima's blockbusting adventure game. "Years later I was at the Bird's Nest in Beijing at the Olympic Stadium conducting this very piece of music," she says. Noone is now a hugely successful film and video game composer, having contributed scores for directors such as Gus Van Sant and Joe Dante, and for games, World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Hearthstone. In November, she's presenting her second series of High Score, Classic FM's agenda-setting programme dedicated to game music. Underappreciated outside of game fandom for years, the genre is now huge business with dedicated orchestras playing sold-out global concert tours. And Noone is a passionate advocate – very keen to explore and explain the unique elements of the art form. There is, of course, a foundational similarity between game and film scores – they are both composed to accompany and accentuate screened action. But while a film score needs to accompany a two-hour linear experience with specific cues and events, video game music must be there for many hours of play. Most open-word action adventures, the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins, Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV, offer over 100 hours of narrative, but many players will spend much longer exploring. Music scores also have two different roles in games: they accompany the non-interactive cinematic sequences that set up the story and occur throughout a game – sort of like short animated movie sequences; and they provide background music while you play. "Cinematic are scored very similarly to a movie or an animated film.

Radio 3 is launching a new weekly programme dedicated to video game soundtracks. Running from Saturday 26 October, the hour-long show will be presented by composer Jessica Curry, who won a Bafta for her work with UK studio The Chinese Room and created and presented Classic FM's video game music programme, High Score. "[BBC presenter and journalist] Tom Service and his producer Brian Jackson came to interview me for Radio 3 at Chinese Room a couple of years ago, and we all really hit it off," said Curry. "Tom's an avid gamer and there was a definite feeling of excitement about the gaming scene and the music that's being composed for games. "Lots of people think that it's all battle music and aggression.

In early 2018, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker was a guest on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, for which one of his chosen recordings was Jonathan Dunn's theme for the 1988 Game Boy game RoboCop. In May, the Royal Albert Hall hosted PlayStation in Concert, at which the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played music from games made for PlayStation consoles from the original in the 1990s through to the current generation. The event was hosted by Jessica Curry, composer for games such as Dear Esther, which recently had its own series of concerts in which a narrator and musicians performed to cues triggered by someone playing the game live on stage. Video game players love music. Even a track not made for a game can get a boost from association with one; Eminem's 2002 song Till I Collapse re-entered the UK charts in 2009 after it was used in an advert for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. And music that is composed especially for games finds other outlets, too; a television show called Rich House, Poor House, in which families from opposing ends of the wealth spectrum swap homes for a week, has used music from The Sims, a series of life sim games about the capitalist fantasy of happiness through financial gain.

The world premiere of PlayStation in Concert took place this week, featuring PlayStation game music from the 90s to today, arranged by Jim Fowler and performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The Royal Albert Hall was opened by Queen Victoria in 1871, seats more than 5,000, and has hosted events such as the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest, the 100th anniversary of the Royal Variety Performance and the BBC Proms each summer. So what does it mean for video games that they're now being presented in these hallowed halls? And what if a budding composer sees how far video game music has come and wants to get involved? And what is the future of this industry?