Video Game Pianist

Martin Leung ( born October 18, 1986 in Hong Kong), also known as The Video Game Pianist or The Blindfolded Pianist ( the Pianist with the blindfold ) is a pianist of international fame by playing music from popular video games gained.

Life

Leung was born as a child of Japanese and Chinese parents and moved to California three years. He began to care for the piano when he heard his sister play, and began the re-enactment of easy pieces. His parents finally had him take piano lessons.

1998 and 2000 he won the International Liszt Competition in Los Angeles in 2002 and third in the Oberlin Piano Festival. 2003, at age 16, Leung became for the first time at Carnegie Hall, where he performed Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1.

For the first time in 2004, he combined his preferences piano and video games and created an arrangement of the theme music from Super Mario for Piano. The video, which he had created along with a friend, and on which he played Super Mario blindfolded, was released on 2 July 2004 on eBaum 's World.

After the first video, which was viewed by Leung's estimates of more than 40 million people, he began to perform more pieces of video games, including The Legend of Zelda, Sonic, Halo, Earthworm Jim and Final Fantasy. When he published more videos with music from video games, this also appeared on the video services iFilm, MSN Video, Google Video, Albino Black Sheep, YouTube and Muchosucko.

In February 2005 he was invited by Tommy Tallarico, to play at the scheduled tour Video Games Live, after he noticed the skills and the growing awareness Leung. Previously, he was asked by Tallarico, to play at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. In May 2005, he was hired by Brady Games to play at their booth at E3. On 6 July 2005 at its premiere at the Video Games Live, he played piano arrangements from Final Fantasy, "Prelude" and "One Winged Angel", before 11,000 fans at the Hollywood Bowl. Among them were Hideo Kojima, Koji Kondo ( via pre-recorded video), Lorne Lanning, Yuji Naka, Martin O'Donnell and Ted Price.

On 12 and 19 November 2006, he led in the Video Games Live in Brazil once again a "Final Fantasy" medley as well as the music from Super Mario Bros. (the latter blindfolded ) to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

During his appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas on 13 October 2005 he was asked by the audience about 21 encores.