By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Last March, I gave a presentation at the very first online Game Developers Conference. My talk was entitled “From Assassin’s Creed to The Dark Eye: The Importance of Themes” (I’ve included the official description of my talk at this end of this article). This coming August, I’ll be participating as a speaker in the upcoming GDC Summer online conference. My session this August will be a wide-ranging Ask-Me-Anything Q&A, and I’m really looking forward it! In anticipation of that conference session, I thought it might be useful for me to share the content of my March GDC talk in a series of articles. I’m happy to now begin a five-part article series based on my GDC 2020 presentation in March!
In my GDC 2020 presentation, I discussed musical themes, and I shared some stories about my work composing music for lots of great game projects. I’ll be sharing the same stories here. Those projects include Assassin’s Creed Liberation (Ubisoft), God of War (Sony Interactive America), the LittleBigPlanet franchise (Sony Interactive Europe), Homefront: The Revolution (Deep Silver), Speed Racer (Warner Bros Interactive), Spore Hero (Electronic Arts), and The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes (Wild River).
But before we start digging into practical examples, let’s take a quick look at one of the best and most iconic themes in the history of music for media. I’ve included a short excerpt below. Notice how we hear a melodic phrase once, then we hear it again, and it’s exactly the same as before. So the melody is saying, “hey – you liked that? Here, have another!”