Primer: Super MAGFest (Music and Gaming Festival) is an annual event that happens in National Harbor, MD. Over 22,000 people attend the festival to game together, attend concerts, go to panels, and more. It’s always one of the high points of the year—Jen and I have been going for 11 and 10 years respectively!

To cut to the chase without any additional context, just check out the video of our performance:

The Show

Ever since I started writing video game music arrangements - long before The Hard Modes were formed, even - I had dreamt of playing MAGFest. When I was actually able to get the band together, that dream became a tangible goal, and we applied for the first time in 2018 (in fact, our Cemetery Session EP was recorded as a demo to have prepared for that application). Though we didn’t make the cut that year, we tried again in 2019, snagging an appearance at the Belvedere Lobby Bar concert stage!

We got our confirmation in November, and by that time a few core members of our group were already booked. Luckily, our original drummer, Garrett Moore, was available, and we were also able to recruit keyboardist Nathan Hittle, who we frequently play standards gigs with (and who had played a couple of THM tunes on the fly at some of those gigs).

The performance was one for the books. First off, a huge thanks to the MAGFest staff and tech team, our friends, and everyone who showed up. Also, can’t not thank the band: To Garrett and Nathan for learning a lot of difficult tunes, most of which were brand new to them, and to Brandon and Andre for spending the time to hone the stuff that they already crush at every gig (and for sticking around and hanging the whole weekend!).

While it doesn’t have the gravitas of the main stage, the Belvedere was actually the perfect stage for us in that it provided an intimate space for our music. The bar was packed with people and the audience’s energy was infectious—that’s the vibe that allows our music to really thrive.

Words won’t capture anything near to what the video of the performance does, so definitely check it out! I so hope that we get the chance to do this again for as many years as they’ll have us.

Also, check out these incredible photos that Michael Dinh took during the show! Thankful to them to let us use them freely. Check out more of their work here.

Other MAGFest Goodness

There’s so much more to unpack from MAGFest aside from just our show.

The journey to National Harbor in January actually started in Mexico for Jen and me. We vacationed to Aguascalientes and Mexico City for our friends Pablo and William’s wedding, and while visiting Teotihuacan we decided to do a little guerrilla marketing.

We ended up getting to the Gaylord around 12:45am and hit the sack immediately after we got our badges because I had to be up and ready for a rehearsal at 10am x_ x In 2019, composer/arranger/horn extraordinaire John Stacy wrote music to accompany a speed run of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time called “How to Save the World in 20 Minutes or Less”. He tasked us with performing this beast chart live with only one rehearsal, which was nuts, but we delivered and it was a ton of fun.