In Fall 2015, four undergraduate music students — David Dong, Dana Marie Chan, Brandon Paulson, and Alex Vargas — met in one of their music classes. Their shared interest in video game and anime music brought them together and they decided to form a student organization dedicated to playing their favorite music. As for the name, the word "Intermission" in fancy font on a UCSD Music concert program served as a sudden stroke of inspiration.

With that, they and a few other friends arranged some pieces and started recruiting more members in Winter 2016. Our first pieces included a The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening medley, "Time" from Inception, "Carrying You" from Castle in the Sky, a Pokémon Gold/Silver medley, and a few others. In May, we had our first gig performing at the first Triton Gaming Expo. By the end of Spring 2016, we had about twenty members and were ready for our very first concert.

When Fall 2016 rolled around, we doubled in size to about forty members and changed our name to The Intermission Orchestra to reflect our larger ensemble size. We held another concert at the end of Fall 2016 to showcase the pieces we had been practicing during the quarter. Since then, we have continued to prepare a new set of pieces for each quarter, rehearse every week, and show off our members' hard work at our end-of-the-quarter concert. Now, we're also a regular feature at on-campus gaming and anime events.

We hope to inspire passion for music inside and outside of our orchestra. Within the orchestra, we take pride in a different way of running things — since we're self-directed, all our members' inputs count. Any member has the chance to arrange and arrangers have the option to conduct their own pieces as well. By having more people involved in the process, we strive to foster more passion for music in our heavily STEM campus setting at UCSD. With our concerts and performances, we aim to bring music out from the screen and into tangible space, live. What was background music is now the feature.