By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Welcome back! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest game projects is the Grammy award-winning music for the smash-hit 3D remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! (Listen and download the soundtrack.)

In this article, I’m presenting the second part of my article series containing the substance of my lecture, “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music,” from the Game Developers Conference 2025 (a top industry conference for game developers). Many of us in the game audio community can’t attend GDC, so I post the content of my GDC lectures every year in an article series that presents the full discussions, supported by many of the videos and illustrations from my lectures. Last month I posted part one of this series, in which we considered the history of the Wizardry video game and the factors that led to medieval and Renaissance musical choices for the structure of the Wizardry score.

Speaking of structure, let’s now take a moment to talk about the premise of the Wizardry game. The world of Wizardry centers on a medieval castle in an unnamed feudal kingdom led by a cruel and insane ruler.

As the game progresses, we learn that a powerful arcane amulet, once owned by this mad overlord, was stolen five years ago by a Wizard of great power and malice.

Tapping into the magic of the amulet, the Wizard crafted an elaborate dungeon directly beneath the castle, filled it with terrifying monsters, then hid at the very bottom of the maze.

The overlord, in his madness, decided that this subterranean deathtrap would be the perfect proving grounds in which to test prospective members of his elite guard.

That’s the premise of the game. You assemble expert adventurers willing to slice their way through this underground meatgrinder. If they aren’t all killed, they can return to the surface to rest, resupply, recruit new members, grab some training, and then head back into the maze.

So Wizardry is built around two worlds – the Overworld and the Underworld. The Overworld is a charming slice of medieval life, and the Underworld is a bloodsoaked murder tomb. But here’s the thing – the underlying gameplay mechanic from 1981 is still at play here. When you visit a shop in the Overworld, you’re looking at a series of menus. When you wander through the ominous passages of the Underworld maze, you’re seeing walls and doors, with some occasional skeletons on the floor. If these places were going to feel like living, breathing environments, the music would have to help them get there. So let’s start first with the music of the Overworld. This is where the fun begins.

The medieval period lasted from the late 400s A.D. to the mid 14th Century. It’s best known for the famous Golden Age of Chivalry, the Crusades, feudalism, and the construction of huge Gothic cathedrals. This is the period of history that I turned to when I started researching musical styles for the Wizardry Overworld.

Medieval music is an embarrassment of riches. It’s sophisticated enough to be entertaining to our modern ears (particularly as you move into the late medieval period) but it’s also got this alien vibe that makes it intriguing. Part of that weirdness rises from the emphasis on two intervals: the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth.

In modern music, we lean on triads. We think they’re beautiful. But medieval musicians thought triads were ugly. You could use them as passing tones, but if you’re coming to rest, it’s on a lovely, consonant 4th or 5th. Let’s listen to how that principle applied to my music for Wizardry.

Here’s some of the music I composed for the Training Grounds, where you prepare your adventurers for combat. Since the Training Grounds would have been pretty physically active, I employed some late medieval dance rhythms. This one is inspired by the popular Estampie – literally the “stamp.” I also used consistent 4ths and 5ths in the musical construction here, with thirds appearing only in passing:

Aside from this fundamental difference of harmonic opinion, medieval musicians had a ton of awesome instruments to choose from – so let’s take a look at a couple of instruments from the previous example. As a salute to the Viking conversations we had at the beginning of the project, I investigated Nordic instruments and settled on two nice Viking-style choices that wouldn’t have been out of place in the medieval period:

The nyckleharpa (a keyed fiddle, pictured right)
The talharpa (a bowed lyre, pictured left)

You just heard those two instruments prominently in the music of the Training Grounds. They worked exceedingly well together for drone-based compositions. Paired with the viola da gamba, these instruments firmly situated the score in an early historical period.

So that wraps up part two of this six-part article series on the music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord!  We’ll be continuing the discussion of the Overworld music in the next installment.  In the meantime, here’s a behind-the-scenes commentary video I narrated, discussing the Training Grounds music in more detail:

If you’d like to learn more about composing music for video games, you can read my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (published by the MIT Press).

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.