By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow

Welcome back! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips – my most recent game release is the Grammy Award-winning original music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord!  Wizardry is the smash-hit 3D remake of the awesome 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download the soundtrack). This is part four of my series of articles based on the content of the lecture I gave at the Game Developers Conference 2025. My lecture (entitled “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music”) explored how music can help flesh out the world of a game by virtue of historical research and thematic construction. In order to make sure everyone can access this lecture (including those of us who couldn’t attend GDC 2025), I’m very pleased to share the content of this GDC lecture in an article series that includes the entire discussion, along with videos and some of the best supporting images.

In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:

GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music
GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: Medieval World-Building
GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: Medieval Style

In part three of this series, we heard a cross-section of the music I composed for the Wizardry Overworld, representing many facets of ordinary medieval life. Now, we’re about to move from the Overworld to the Underworld, and there’s nothing ordinary down there.

As we mentioned before, its a subterranean deathtrap: an underground meatgrinder where brutes (like this great guy we see pictured left) will chew up your adventuring party and spit them out in little pieces. As defined by its popular 1981 design, gameplay in the Wizardry Underworld consists of two well-defined parts: navigating the maze, and killing the monsters. We’re going to look at the maze first. But before we get there, let’s pause a moment in the Overworld to point out a subtle detail that becomes important later on.

We already listened to a portion of the “Lord of the Castle” track that players hear when they load their game and get ready to play. I’d like to point out a melody that shows up at the top of this composition. I call it my Wizardry motif – let’s check it out as it first appears in the game:

So that’s my Wizardry motif. It’s a straightforward statement that serves as a central component of the musical score for this game.

The Wizardry motif also undergoes some variation as things get more grim and violent… but let’s just put a pin in that for now, so we can depart the charming Overworld and head down into the dark and deadly dungeon. These are two very different worlds and I wanted them to sound different, so I departed from the small medieval ensembles in favor of larger orchestral textures here.

The Underworld is an intricate maze of stone-lined tunnels and wooden doors. Attacks can come at any moment, ranging from small creatures you can easily overcome, to huge monstrosities ready to take down your party in a single round of combat. Since nearly every encounter is randomized, players never know what they’ll be facing, which underscores the importance of trepidation and uncertainty in the dungeon.

So here’s one of the strategies I used to address this: slow, unsteady bass punctuations broken by pauses, and purposefully meant to feel like cringingly uncertain footsteps.

I surrounded these bass punctuations with orchestral surges, dissonances and unnerving effects, to throw players off-balance. Let’s see how that worked in the Wizardry maze:

That track was called Nightstalker, and I designed it to freak players out while they’re exploring the maze. One of the scariest parts of maze gameplay is how easy it is to lose track of where you are, which elevates tension during exploration. Maybe you’ll be ambushed again… or maybe you’ll employ your expert dungeon navigation skills to discover an arcane secret door, or a famous hidden treasure. There’s no way to be sure. Here’s another example of my dungeon music from Wizardry. Notice the uneven footsteps technique again, alternated with low rumbles, clustered tremolos and glissandi.

Finally, let’s take a look at a behind-the-scenes commentary video I narrated for “Spellcaster,” which is one of the dungeon exploration tracks in the Wizardry score:

In the next article, we’ll be exploring the use of themes in the Wizardry dungeon.  Until then, you can learn more about composing music for games in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.  Thanks for reading!

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.