Our Visit to Magnificon Expo and Kraków Film Music Festival

If you enjoy independent indie game coverage, consider supporting Indie-Games.eu on Patreon. It helps keep the site independent.

May is truly busy time for us in terms of events – it’s not only when one of the largest B2B events for the gaming industry in all of Europe, the Digital Dragons Conference takes place, but it’s also a time filled with numerous festivals also dedicated to video games. This year, we once again took part in Magnificon Expo, a convention packed with treats for all pop culture fans, and we also had the chance to attend the Kraków Film Music Festival for the first time. You can read about our experiences at both of these major events in this brief report.

Music that brings worlds together

We kicked off our May events with the Kraków Film Music Festival, starting with the concert “The Magic of James Newton Howard,” in which the composer himself conducted and provided narration centered on the music he had created. The next item on our list was the FMF International TV Series Gala, during which many soundtracks from the most interesting TV series of recent years were performed.  

It was also an opportunity for us to hear the distinctive sounds made by the Xenomorph –well known to players of Alien: Isolation – which were featured during the performance of the suite from the series “Alien: Earth”. To wrap things up, we attended a screening of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with a live musical performance, and themes from that score can also be found in Hogwarts Legacy.  

Even after the festival had ended, a pleasant surprise awaited us: during the awards gala at the Digital Dragons Conference, representatives of the Kraków Film Music Festival announced that the next edition of the event would feature a large amount of video game music, including the soundtrack from the title that won an award at the gala. In light of this announcement, all we can do is look forward to the program for the next edition, which will be memorable not only for its gaming theme but also because it will mark the festival’s 20th anniversary. 

A kaleidoscope of experiences 

This year’s Magnificon Expo also provided us with many memorable experiences across a wide range of fields. Here, too, we had the opportunity to listen to live music: we attended concerts by BABYBEARD and Lotus Juice, which broadened our musical horizons to include genres we hadn’t even known existed before. Other performances also took place on the main stage – as is the case every year, there was a team dance competition, and this time, as part of the event’s opening ceremony, there was a lightsaber battle demonstration, followed by an opportunity for participants to try their hand at it in the Star Wars zone. 

Of course, our visit wouldn’t have been complete without some gaming touches. The event was both educational and entertaining: first, we attended lectures on survival horror genre and titles created with RPG Maker, and then we played some of the games available on-site, including Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, and REPLACED.  

In addition, we had the opportunity to meet guests closely associated with the gaming world, such as Maul Cosplay, known as the official Geralt collaborating with CD PROJEKT RED, and Prince de Guzman, who has official projects with Riot, Blizzard, and Garena. We were able to speak with the latter, and you can find the results of that conversation in the interview on our website. 

Magnificon Expo once again gave us the chance to try out new things from the world of gaming and beyond. Since the winter edition of the event has already been officially announced, we, too, will be looking forward to its arrival and another round of experiences that we’ll be able to share on our website.