By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my most recent releases is the Grammy Award-winning musical score for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Wizardry is the awesome smash-hit 3D remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download the soundtrack). In March of 2025, I gave a presentation at the Game Developers Conference entitled “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music.” This is part three of my series of articles presenting the content of that lecture. In order to best make my GDC discussions as widely accessible as possible, I share the content of my GDC presentations every year, including the full lectures, videos and illustrations from my GDC talk.
If you haven’t read the previous installments from my Wizardry lecture, you’ll find them here:
- GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music
- GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: Medieval World-Building
In part two of this series, we explored how medieval and Renaissance musical structure and instrumentation were used for the music of the Wizardry Training Grounds. So let’s check out another example: the Adventurer’s Inn, where party members get rest and manage their equipment. For this composition, I wanted to evoke the idea that other adventurers might be gathered around the hearth, swapping stories. So I decided to model the instrumentation and style around those popular troubadours of 13th century France, who were famous for setting gallant adventures into song. You’ll notice the bowed lyres and keyed fiddles providing an underlying structure for this composition:
In the above example you also heard some of the early percussion I used for this project, which focused on several sizes of frame drum. Elsewhere in the score I used pronounced tambourine rhythm. It’s particularly featured in Gilgamesh’s Tavern, which also included lots of wooden flutes (for that charming pastoral flavor!) While I was composing the music for Gilgamesh’s Tavern, I studied selections from the medieval Codex Buranus for inspiration.
The Codex Buranus is a 12th – 13th century collection of songs for traveling minstrels, and there’s this great section dedicated just to drinking songs of the medieval period (very inspiring!) So let’s listen to some of my Tavern music, shall we?
We’ve talked about woodwinds, percussion and bowed strings. As far as plucked strings go, I had a ton of variety in my medieval arsenal, from dulcimers and zithers, to gitterns, mandolins and lutes. For instance, the music of Boltac’s Trading Post included lots of lute and mandolin. The Trading Post is where our adventurers can purchase powerful items, and sell off what they’ve looted from the dungeon. I pictured an exotic marketplace full of rare and precious curiosities from around the world. During composition for this track, I spent time studying techniques from music contained in a medieval Tuscan manuscript.
As a result, a bit of Italian flavor definitely crept into the composition, along with more worldly rhythms that might have been influenced by the Crusades. Let’s get a taste of that:
Up to this point, we’ve looked at four top points of interest in the Overworld:
- The Training Grounds
- The Inn
- The Tavern
- The Trading Post
Last but not least is the Temple of Cant, which is our only hint of the power of religion in the medieval period.
Medieval religion wasn’t known for its expert powers to raise the dead… that was actually a bit of a no-no.
So I decided not to evoke a stereotypically liturgical sound here. Instead of the expected Gregorian choir, I turned to the crystalline shimmer of dulcimers, zithers and particularly psaltery.
Figuring prominently in the 13th Century of Geoffrey Chaucer (pictured below), the psaltery was described in his Canterbury Tales as an instrument for religious music.
So let’s listen to the psaltery in my music for the Temple of Cant:
Now we’ve heard a cross-section of the music I composed for the Wizardry Overworld, representing many facets of ordinary medieval life. In the next article, we’ll be moving from the cheerful Overworld to the menacing Underworld! Until then, you can learn more about composing music for video games in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music (published by the MIT Press).
