By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Hey everybody! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest projects is the Grammy Award-winning musical score for the video game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! (Listen and download the soundtrack.)

Last March I was honored to be a presenter at the Game Developers Conference 2025 — a top industry event where experts and leaders in game development present tutorials and strategies to their peers. My lecture was titled “A Score for Wizardry: World Building Through Music.” Each year, after I present my lecture at GDC, I transcribe the lecture into an article series (so that those who couldn’t attend the conference can still read the content). This article kicks off my six-part series based on my 2025 GDC presentation! In these articles you’ll find all of the discussion from my GDC lecture, accompanied by many of the videos and illustrations that I used to support the ideas explored in my talk. So let’s get started!

My GDC 2025 talk focused on my Grammy Award-winning music for the game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Before we begin, let’s take a quick look at some gameplay, accompanied by some of the music I composed for it:

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was released in May 2024. It’s now a critically-acclaimed bestseller. This lecture will be a classic deep-dive into the process of preparing and composing the music for this smash-hit video game. But Wizardry is anything but typical, so this discussion will begin with a story.

Once upon a time, there were two magnificent nerds. Both were Cornell University students in the late seventies, back in the heady days of the Apple II. One was a computer science graduate student with ideas about creating a computer game based on the tabletop RPG that he loved. The other was a psychology major who also happened to like making computer games. He’d just finished a space wargame called Galactic Attack and was, coincidentally, dreaming of making a computer RPG of his own.

Joining forces, these two brilliant nerds worked tirelessly from 1979 through 1980, making their dream game. The result was Wizardry: Dungeons of Despair!  But another popular roleplaying game system also used two big Ds in its name, and they didn’t much like this “Dungeons of Despair” title. So the two Cornell University students changed the name of their game to Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! And the rest is history.

The game was officially released in 1981, and unlike most computer games of its time, it didn’t come in a sad little ziplock bag – oh no! It came in a snazzy box with an awesome red dragon on the cover. Better yet, it actually had an elaborate printed manual complete with great illustrations by a cartoonist from Dragon Magazine and The Dungeon Master’s Guide… a move that was clearly not trying to remind people of that other famous RPG with the two big Ds in its name.

But the big draw of this landmark computer RPG was the gameplay itself. Wizardry was heartbreakingly brutal. Soul-crushingly difficult. It featured a first-person perspective, 3D dungeon packed to the gills with deadly creepy-crawlies, toothy beasts, terrifying phantoms, and undead horrors. It revolutionized computer gaming with its party-based dungeon-crawler design. Most importantly, the adventuring party in Wizardry could (and likely would) suffer Total-Party-Kills with Permadeath, and no quick-save system existed to rescue them. Players were on the edge of their seats. The game was an instant hit. Wizardry was an unmitigated triumph of game design and play mechanics. And here’s what Wizardry looked and sounded like in 1981:

Yes, the dungeon of Wizardry was a simple wireframe. The rest of the game world consisted of blocks of text, and the game was silent. No sound effects, no music. Yet, this game set the gaming world on fire. It’s still remembered as one of the most important RPGs in the history of gaming, heavily influencing game franchises like Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Quest, Might and Magic, and Final Fantasy. Then, 43 years later, developer Digital Eclipse took on the huge task of adapting the original Wizardry for modern gamers and hardware. I’m not sure who else would have had the courage to climb this particular mountain, but Digital Eclipse may have been the only developer up to the task. They specialize in remaking landmark classic games – they’re renowned for this. They pour love and respect into these remakes. Wizardry was in good hands. Which brings us to the question – how do you provide a new musical score to a game that had no music, and still stay true to the original game?

I was brought into the project back in March of 2023, and at that time nothing was musically established. We were in blue-sky territory. We knew we had a very scary dungeon full of very scary monsters, and a party of fantasy warriors hell-bent on slaying them all. The idea seemed pretty hardcore – almost Viking levels of righteous savagery – so we thought first about a Nordic musical style. Super dark. Lots of ominous drones.

But then I started reading the printed manual that accompanied the original Wizardry game back in 1981. Let’s take a look at that.

Does this look like a party of blood-soaked Vikings carving out a path across a corpse-littered hellscape? No, it feels whimsical. Like a fairy tale. Nevertheless, the gameplay was going to focus on tons of violence, so we clearly needed a happy medium. I suggested to the team that we’d have to acknowledge the lighter elements here, and we began discussing a broader orchestral approach. That’s when the idea of medieval and Renaissance music occurred to me. So let’s start by listening to an excerpt from my “Lord of the Castle” track – which is the first music you hear when you load your game.

You can hear the more optimistic tone that’s being conveyed by this initial track, and the historical elements in the instrumentation. They work together to build a world consistent with the vision of the Apple II game. One of the points of pride in this remake is its fidelity to the original version from 1981. The Digital Eclipse game is built in the Unreal Engine, but it’s sitting right on top of the Apple II Pascal source code. Capturing the feel of the original Wizardry requires us to honor its structure, not alter it!

So that wraps up part one of this article series on the music composition process for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord!  We’ll be exploring the musical score in more depth over the course of the series.  As a preview, here’s a behind-the-scenes video I narrated, discussing some of the musical selections from the Wizardry score!

You can read more about video game music composition in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.

Winifred Phillips is a video game composer whose latest project is her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (listen to the official soundtrack on Spotify).  Her Wizardry soundtrack has also won a Society of Composers & Lyricists Award.  Phillips is known for composing music for games in many of the most famous and popular franchises in gaming: Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, The Sims, LittleBigPlanet, Lineage, Jurassic World, and Wizardry.  Her music for Sackboy: A Big Adventure garnered a BAFTA Award nomination.  Phillips’ other awards include the D.I.C.E. Award, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards (including Music of the Year), and four Hollywood Music in Media Awards. She is the author of the award-winning bestseller A COMPOSER’S GUIDE TO GAME MUSIC, published by the MIT Press. An interview with her has been published as a part of the Routledge text, Women’s Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound, which collects the viewpoints of the most esteemed female composers in film, television, and games.  Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.