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Video games can be a great way to escape the stressors of real life, especially cozy games that focus on tasks like farming or making friends in a community.
Music can play a big part in how those games make us feel, too. One such cozy game that features a wide range of music is Stardew Valley, created solely by Seattle-based video game developer and musician Eric Barone (known professionally as ConcernedApe). To celebrate the game’s music, Barone partnered with SOHO Live, a company that produces concerts based on media franchises, and venues across the world to present Stardew Valley: Symphony of Seasons, an event featuring a 35-piece orchestra performing music from the game. It comes to Seattle’s Benaroya Hall Aug. 29-31.
Barone started working on the game in 2012, and it was released in February 2016, going on to sell more than 41 million copies as of December 2024. The game features all four seasons, and each season has multiple musical themes, on top of different locations, characters and events having themes as well.
The Seattle Times spoke to Barone ahead of the concerts about creating Stardew Valley, his background in music and how the tour came to be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is Stardew Valley?
Stardew Valley is a farming RPG (role-playing game). … It’s a game where you play as someone who inherits a farm from their grandfather, and you move to Stardew Valley, which is a small rural community, and you kind of are a total outsider. You don’t know anything about farming, but over the course of the game, you learn how to farm, how to live off the land, and you make friends with everyone in town and kind of create a whole new life for yourself.
What was the process like of creating the game and the music entirely on your own? Did you always intend to do it that way?
Well, I never really intended to make a game at all. I graduated from (University of Washington) Tacoma with a computer science degree, and I was trying to get some jobs, doing some interviews. I wasn’t having success. So I was like, I’m just going to start making a game, just to kind of maybe put something on my portfolio, get better at programming, learn some skills. And so I started making this game that was kind of inspired by a game that I really loved as a kid called Harvest Moon. At first, I thought it would just be a really quick project, maybe a couple months, have something to throw on my résumé and whatever, move on. But as I started working on it, my ambitions grew. I started to realize this could actually turn into something cool.
In terms of doing it solo. I think a lot of that was just, not only was I kind of like a solitary person in general, but my main thing before even getting into computer science or programming was music. That was my No. 1 passion. So, of course, I would want to do the music myself. I was also always into drawing and art, doodling, so I wanted to do the art myself. I liked writing, so I wanted to do the writing, and then I knew how to program. So I was like, well, I’ll just do it all. That way, I have full control over everything, it’s exactly the way I want it.
What’s your background in music?
I never had any formal training, really. My parents got me a little electronic keyboard when I was a kid, and I really loved that. … When I got a little older, I started getting into computer music, and I also started playing guitar. And all of that was self-taught. I did take a band class in middle school, so that was my only formal training. … (I) learned how to do computer music, and that’s really what I used then to make the soundtrack for Stardew Valley.
Is there something that made you want to give the game such a breadth of music, as opposed to a few themes or songs?
I think a big part of it was that it was fun (for me), but I also just wanted to express a wide variety of my musical ideas in the soundtrack. … And then, there are so many different characters and events. And sometimes I just feel like, oh, this event needs a certain kind of music … to generate the emotions that you want in the player.
How did these concerts come to be?
We actually had the first concert tour last year, and it was such a success that we’re like, all right, let’s do a second concert tour, bigger and better than the first one. … This production company, SOHO Live, they’re the producers of this, and they reached out to me, and I was like, you know, a concert tour does sound cool.
The arranger (of the music), he lives in Thailand, and he takes the music that I made for Stardew Valley, and then arranges it for … a 35-piece orchestra in this new tour. There’s some artistry involved with that. Because I didn’t make the soundtrack thinking that an orchestra was going to play this music … I just picked random instruments. There are synthesizers, all kinds of stuff. So then the arranger has to figure out how to translate that all to a traditional type of orchestra.
Anything else you want people to know about the shows?
It’s going to be a fun time. It’s cool to have an opportunity to have so many Stardew Valley players under the same roof, in the real world. It’s one of the only times where that happens … and there are people cosplaying, and I usually get to meet some of the players at these events, which is nice for me.
It’s a reminder that Stardew Valley really does touch real people, and they appreciate the game. I think for me personally, going to these shows is going to be like a boost. It’s going to make me feel like, yeah, this is why I’m doing this. This is why I’ve devoted my life to this.
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