FEW COULD have predicted that the bleeps and bloops of early video game music would become classics for a nostalgic generation reared on Nintendo or Sega - even fewer that they would one day be performed by symphony orchestras to audiences of 20,000 people.

This week, a multi-media extravaganza called Video Games Live is coming to the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, an event that will see the Royal Scottish National Orchestra playing "hits" such as the Super Mario Brothers theme tune accompanied by high-octane visuals, a stage show featuring famous characters and a light show.

The touring event, which has never been to Scotland before, is the visible face of a subculture with a following large enough it attracted an estimated 20,000 to a free "U2-esque" performance on the streets of Toronto last night.

Tommy Tallarico, presenter of the show, described it as "a new kind of opera for the 21st century", received "like the second coming of The Beatles" by the growing following of video game theme tunes.

He said: "People who grew up in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s revere this music as the soundtrack of their lives and have all of these great and positive memories. Our show takes them back to their childhood. When people hear the themes to Mario or Zelda played by a huge orchestra it brings a tear to their eye. I'm not saying that lightly: people cry during our show. Have we encountered cynicism? Abso-freaking-lutely. But for many of us, this is the classical music of our generation."

Tallarico, a cousin of Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, is featured in the Guinness Book Of Records for composing 275 video game soundtracks.

His Video Games Live project has gathered enough credibility to warrant a release on EMI Classics, which he sees as a vindication of his opinion that "games are great art".

He added: "Wherever we go in the world, video games have become this universal language for a younger generation. Consider this: in 10 or 15 years there will be a president that grew up playing video games and will probably play them in the White House."

For the RSNO, playing music that most of its usual audience is unlikely to have heard of is a significant change of tack.

Chief executive Simon Woods hopes it will draw audiences into the Concert Hall that would otherwise not have considered going to see a live symphony orchestra. He said: "It's going to be wild. We want to break down the barrier about what an orchestra is and what it can do and we'd like as many people in Scotland as possible to feel they have some ownership and relationship with their national symphony orchestra. If we're going to do that, we've got to play to as many audiences as possible. At Video Games Live we certainly won't be playing to the sort of people that come along to see Beethoven and Brahms."

Contrary to expectations, classical music buffs are loath to criticise new forms, wary of being seen as stuffy and atavistic. Bill Sweeney, head of music at Glasgow University, encourages his students "to make room for the unexpected" and said that, in time, video game music could gather enough of a fanbase to become a genre in its own right. He expressed doubts about "the crossover effect", the hope that attracting audiences to staging unconventional shows would create more classical music lovers.

He said: "Real music of any sort isn't just tunes, things you can get an immediate ident and then whistle along to. Music has to exercise all sorts of intellectual and emotional areas and mesh them together into something that stretches you beyond where you've been. If what this chap is doing succeeds in that, then congratulations."

According to Tallarico, about a third of the audiences for Video Games Live are women. Video game music fan Fraser Smith, 17, a student from Motherwell, disagrees. He said: "I would put a bet on right now that men will be 10 to one against women."

He is such a fan that he imports CDs of game music from Japan, where tracks sometimes make it into the pop charts.

Smith added: "Video game music is like film music and more melodic than any other form of music that's coming out. Nowadays you get orchestras playing really amazing melodies; it's not like it's back in the old days when it was just a beep coming from a box. Game music has advanced to such a level that it's competing with other forms of entertainment."