My Favourite Game Tina Guo

The classical musician on working with Austin Wintory, catching Pokémon, and the link between Atari and cheese

Tina Guo is a cellist, composer and published poet. Alongside her own creations, Guo has made a name for herself performing on a wide variety of TV, movie and videogame soundtracks, including Diablo III, the Call Of Duty: Black Ops games, and Journey. More recently she has released Game On, an album of videogame covers.

What led you to create Game On?

Video gaming has always been a part of my life. My first experience happened when I moved from China to America. I was five years old, and my little brother – who was already in America – had an Atari system and we played this Tarzan game. Actually, I remember the day I first played that, I also tried cheese for the first time! After that my brother had a SNES, and we played a lot of Zelda, Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, and the music in those games is so iconic, so that’s always stuck with me.

Anyway, I grew up and moved to LA, and I started working on a lot of scores – movie, TV and videogame soundtracks. It just kind of happened naturally, like everything fell into place. Over the past ten years I’ve released a lot of different albums – originals and covers – and I previously did an album of covers of music from TV and movies. So naturally the next thing to do was videogames.