(Warning: This article contains mild video game jargon which may be unintelligible to some parents.)

Pong; Pizzicato.

Tetris; Triangle.

OutRun; Orchestra.

Game over.

There's a little more to it, but that's the general cheat code for Video Games Live, the multimedia riff on video games playing two shows Sunday at the Kimmel Center.

The format marries two unlikely cultural phenomena: the very old and struggling-for-relevance symphony orchestra with the small and inscrutable glowing box you can't seem to pry from your 9-year-old's hands.

For 21/2 hours, an orchestra sits on stage accompanying images of video games blown up large on screens, with an interplay between the two that comes in chunks apportioned for a restless attention span.

"The reality is, we've created over 60 segments, and we've played the show 150 times around the world and we've never played the same show twice," said Tommy Tallarico, the "veritable video-game industry icon" (his bio) who codeveloped the show with conductor Jack Wall. "We played Philly in 2006, and if those people come back they're going to get a 95 percent different experience."

Composer John Cage might have loved the format, so dice-rolling it seems.

Sometimes, the show communes with a video-game player pressing the thumbs from a remote location. An audience member might come up on stage and play a video game while "the orchestra is changing it on the fly depending on what the person is doing on stage," Tallarico says.

A preshow Guitar Hero competition carries the prize of playing the popular game with the orchestra during the show for four or five minutes.

Video Games Live takes the loner interior world of gamers and expands it into a very social and participatory concert, marries old and new, and blends art and commerce.

Which commerce, specifically?

We don't want to name all the video games referenced in the show since that would be turning over this column to Big Video.

(OK, they are Mario™, Zelda®, Halo®, Final Fantasy®, Warcraft®, Sonic™, Metal Gear Solid®, Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Trigger™, Chrono Cross™, Myst®, Tron, Castlevania®, Medal of Honor™, God of War™, BioShock™, Civilization IV, Tomb Raider®, Harry Potter™, Beyond Good & Evil™, Advent Rising, EverQuest® II, Monkey Island, Earthworm Jim, Pac-Man, Conan, Headhunter, Splinter Cell®, Ghost Recon™, Rainbow Six®, Jade Empire, Metroid, Contra, Guitar Hero™, and many, many more.)

But Tallarico says art doesn't sell its soul in the process. We're doubtful, but he insists this is a case in which video games become a point of entry to classical music.

"I can tell you we get so many letters and e-mails from parents who will say after the show, 'My daughter said to me, I want to start taking violin lessons so I can learn the music to Kingdom Hearts.' It has that much of an impact."

The video-game medium may be the conduit for this particular cultural transfer, but the phenomenon of new media opening the door to classical fans is nothing new. The same thing happened to Tallarico in 1977 when he was 10 and saw Star Wars for the first time.

"It was the first time I had paid attention to a symphony orchestra, and I said, 'Wow, what's that?' I come from a kind of rock-and-roll family - Steven Tyler from Aerosmith is my cousin - and when I heard Star Wars, that's what got me interested in classical music," Tallarico said. "And then, once I heard Beethoven, it was all over. Just as pop culture had an influence 30 years ago, video games are having the same kind of impact on kids of the 21st century."

Video-game composition is an art form in its own right, or at least a highly sophisticated craft that has evolved from something more than background music.

It used to be, for example, that composers got a list of cues from video-game makers that were simply plugged into the game.

"It's just now getting to the point where a composer can play the game, write music specifically for the game, and the director gets to say how it gets put into the game," says composer Jack Wall. (His credits include Myst III: Exile and Dungeon Siege II.) "Back in 1996 when I first started, you couldn't do any of that. I work with an audio director at the game company - it's like spotting a film - and the audio director is responsible for the dialogue, the sound effect, the music."

The big difference between film scoring and video games is that films are linear and play the same way every time. Video-game composers have to anticipate all kinds of twists and turns.

"It's all about transitions - whether you're exploring around, if there's an enemy you need to shoot," Wall says. "The elegant transition is what makes the music seem really well done. It's funny, you can plan it out, but you have to get into play-testing the game. I might not anticipate that you could walk up the mountain and jump off and that would be the end of the game. So you'd have to go back and write a cue for that."

Children of our age, of course, will experience Video Games Live as a knowing audience. But video games are now old enough that this generation has parents who played video games, and the show can be powerful for them in surprising ways.

"It might sound silly, but it's an emotional connection for a lot of people," Tallarico says. "I get people saying, 'You know, when I saw Mario and Zelda up on the screen, I had tears in my eyes because it took me back to my childhood. Because I played it with my dad.' "

Contact music critic Peter Dobrin at 215-854-5611 or pdobrin@phillynews.com. Read his blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/artswatch/.