By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
So happy you’ve joined us! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips, and one of my latest projects is my Grammy Award-winning music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the 3d remake of the classic 1981 RPG that remains one of the top dungeon-crawlers of all time! (Listen and download the soundtrack). I’d like to welcome you to the sixth and final installment of my article series based on the lecture I gave at the popular Game Developers Conference of 2025! In my lecture, “A Score for Wizardry: World-Building Through Music,” I explored my composition process for this Grammy Award-winning score. Since most of us would not be able to attend GDC, I was happy to arrange the content of my 2025 GDC lecture into this six-part series. In these articles you’ll find the entire substance of my GDC lecture, along with all the audio and video examples and a large assortment of the images I used during my presentation. If you’d like to catch up with 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
GDC 2025 A Score for Wizardry: Music of Sanctuary
In part five of this series, we discussed the use of recurring themes in areas of sanctuary, and how those themes lent unified musical identity to the perilous Underworld maze. Now, moving on from exploring the maze, let’s talk about fighting the awesome monsters in Wizardry.
This is the combat arena. It’s where our players feel powerful – where they strive to perform at their very best! So I leaned into that idea with heroic brass delivering emphatic punctuations and swells, supported by lush string flourishes and trills. Big builds of intensity lead into splashy crescendos, and breaking through all of this orchestral intensity… is the Wizardry motif! Calling back to earlier gameplay, the Wizardry motif proves a unity of vision across the entire score. Let’s check out what that was like:
While we’re on the subject, I’d like to take a moment to discuss another way I used combat music to help build the world of Wizardry. When players enter battles, they have two options – traditional martial attacks, and magic. Choose violence, and you have a single swing of your weapon with which to level damage. But choose magic, and there is a world of options at your command. There’s a reason why the game’s called Wizardry.
Over fifty spells can be cast from the Wizardry spellbook! And they have such fun names, too. Halito! Manifo! Milwa! Lorto! Dialma! Dialko! Plus, many of the spell names rhyme, and end in very useful open vowels. It felt like the game was trying to tell me something.
When we build a world with music, we integrate as many facets of that world as we can into the score we’re creating. Antique instruments and early music styles evoke a sense of history and culture. Recurring themes ccreate a feeling of identity for the world that players are inhabiting and exploring. So now I was looking at the spells of Wizardry, which are at the very heart of the game, and I thought, “What better world-building than to put that spell list right into the biggest combat track in the game?” That’s the idea that became my choral composition, “Wrath of the Wizard.”
While that feels fairly climactic, it isn’t the actual endgame track. For the game’s musical finale, we come to “Masters of Wizardry.” It’s the track that players hear during the game’s final credit roll – the traditional culmination of the player’s journey. I put the Wizardry motif dead center in the composition, but I also echoed a second theme. We already heard part of it earlier in this talk, and I chose to use it at the end of the game to emphasize its integral role in world-building for Wizardry. Having established the medieval culture, I wanted to extend that thread into this triumphant composition. We’re in the famous “Age of Chivalry,” when warfare and religion were inextricably entwined… and it suddenly seemed obvious to me that I absolutely had to include the theme from the Temple of Cant here. Let’s first remind ourselves of what that sounded like:
Now let’s see how that worked when I placed the Wizardry Motif and the Temple of Cant theme side by side:
So now we’ve talked about the original Wizardry from 1981 – a great game that nevertheless featured no sound and very few visuals. We’ve discussed how the Digital Eclipse experts remade the game to appeal to modern audiences. We’ve talked about the process of creating a musical foundation for a 43-year old game remake that needed a brand-new score. Even though this music didn’t exist when the game was first released, it would never-the-less have to feel like it belonged with the source material.
Creating brand-new music for such an iconic game from the 80s was a huge challenge. However, it was also a tremendous honor to weave the lore and magic of Wizardry into its music, and to use that music to help build its world.
So that brings this six-part article series to a close! I hope you enjoyed this exploration of the Grammy Award-winning music I composed for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! If you’d like to learn more about composing music for games, you can read my book, A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, published by the MIT Press.
