Video games and musical theatre: 2023’s most unlikely crossover?

There has been a remarkable intersection between video games and musical performance this year, from villains lending vocals to their own theme tunes to interactive songs

Toward the end of Baldur's Gate 3, widely considered the most outstanding video game released this year, you can literally go to hell. If you do, you'll have a showdown with the game's equivalent of the devil, a charismatic yet demonic trickster who calls himself Raphael.

It's one of the toughest, most dramatic encounters in the game, the culmination of 150 hours of play. Naturally, developer Larian Studios wanted it to feel monumental. So they decided that the battle should be accompanied by a song, and that Raphael should be the one singing it. The idea for a song to be performed by Raphael himself came from our director Swen Vincke about six months before the release of the game," says Borislav Slavov, Baldur's Gate 3's music director. The team instantly loved it."