By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hey there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and in March 2025 I presented a lecture at the Game Developers Conference about my Grammy Award-winning score to Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music” explored both the historical research and creative process that went into the composition of this medieval and Renaissance-style score. The Game Developers Conference is a very popular event each year, but since not all of us would be able to travel to San Francisco to attend, I’ve gone ahead now and included the entire content of my GDC presentation in this article series! These articles also include videos, audio files and images that I used during my talk. 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
GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: The Underworld
In part four of this series, we were exploring how to musically intensify trepidation while players explore the perilous Underworld maze beneath the Wizardry castle. The dungeon labyrinth is a treacherous place! But there are a couple of bastions of safety here.
Players can’t be attacked when they make camp. It’s a chance for them to heal party members and attend to equipment needs. Neither can they be attacked when they’re reading through the Bestiary, which is a history and compendium of all the awesome monsters they’ve fought, collected in a tome for easy reference. Both game states are sanctuaries, but it was important to maintain the most oppressive atmosphere possible within the Underworld dungeon, even during these periods of relative safety. When I was composing music for the Camp and the Bestiary, I structured the two compositions to be intrinsically related – including a common theme. Let’s now hear what it sounded like when players pitched Camp. Notice the medieval bowed lyre on the drone beneath, with a zither carrying the melody line on top:
By way of contrast, when players look through their Bestiary, they hear that same melody, but at half-speed. Plus, a lusher orchestral arrangement hits all the qualities that make the Gothic period famous (which is just what you’d expect while you’re paging through a monster compendium). Let’s check that out:
While we’re on the subject, here’s a behind-the-scenes commentary video I narrated, going into more depth on the composition of the music for the Bestiary:
Using a common theme between both Bestiary and Camping gameplay was a great way to bond those two game states together in the minds of players. Recurring themes are immensely useful for creating a sense of unified identity across an entire score. For instance, there’s a second melody in the Bestiary track that you might recognize as a variation of one we already heard. Let’s listen to the earlier track first, then will dip into that part of the Bestiary to see how they compare:
We’ve just checked out two variations of my Wizardry motif, first heard in the “Lord of the Castle” track from the Overworld, and then repeated in the Bestiary.
This is the kind of fun we can have with a recurring motif! Just like an expert practitioner in the wizard’s arts, we can magically transform our melodies to achieve lots of different effects. I incorporated my Wizardry motif frequently during dungeon exploration, making sure it appeared in new variations each time it recurred.
I’d like to emphasize the importance of this technique, so let’s look at a few more examples. Here’s a version carried by the low strings. The deep resonance projects a lot of foreboding while players are exploring the maze:
In another rendition of my Wizardry motif, I gave the melody a much sneakier feeling, emphasizing the inherent danger of the dungeon:
Now let’s check out a much less obvious appearance of the motif. Here’s a fragmented variation that still retains a lot of its character. This is a late game exploration track, so you can hear the elevated tension in the rhythm and arrangement:
In the sixth and final article in this series, we’ll be moving on from exploring the maze to discuss combat music in the Wizardry dungeon! In the meantime, you can learn more about game music composition in my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Thanks for reading!
