Hi! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this past September I traveled to Washington D.C. I’d been asked, as the current winner of the Grammy Award for Best Video Game Soundtrack, to speak in the Congressional Auditorium of the Capitol Building, at an event advocating for the importance of video game music. It was an enormous honor! Alongside a panel of fellow Grammy Award winners and nominees, we discussed the process of composing for games, sharing stories and memories while doing our best to help lawmakers understand the inherent creativity and expertise involved in crafting a video game musical score.
Participating in panels and discussions like this one has always been very inspiring for me. I’m grateful to be a part of this amazing professional network of game audio wizards, as they continually innovate and share ideas with boundless enthusiasm and generosity. Through a lively exchange of ideas over time, the game audio profession has built a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience that enriches the entire community. With that in mind, I’d like to use this article to share a collection of resources that I’ve gathered from across the internet, providing both educational enrichment and inspiration for game audio folks. We’ll start with a collection of informative conferences that include rich game audio content. Then, we’ll move to an assortment of music festivals and symphony concerts dedicated to music from video games. We’ll include a couple of awesome organizations that are serving the needs of game audio scholars and researchers. And finally, we’ll lay out all the vibrant online discussion forums and helpful communities ready to assist game audio practitioners. So let’s get started!
Delighted you’re here! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. In previous articles, I’ve shared the story of how I broke into the video game industry with my first project – the original God of War. This year, Sony Santa Monica is celebrating its beloved franchise with a special release of the God of War 20th Anniversary Vinyl Collection. The 13-disc limited edition vinyl set includes the music from the game that started it all – including my career as a video game composer. Sony Santa Monica has also released a special limited edition double vinyl that includes just the music from the original God of War. It’s all made me very nostalgic, and I’ve thought about my early days in the game industry a lot lately.
I’m amazed that this boxed set with my music from my very first game has released in the same year that I won the Grammy Award for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! 2025 has been an important year for me. I certainly know that my “big break” experience is not the typical career path for a game composer, but I thought it might be useful for those who haven’t heard it. I told my “big break” story during a Society of Composers & Lyricists seminar, and this video captured that portion of the event. My “big break” story starts 4 minutes and 20 seconds into the video:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
Last March I was honored to be a presenter at the Game Developers Conference 2025 — a top industry event where experts and leaders in game development present tutorials and strategies to their peers. My lecture was titled “A Score for Wizardry: World Building Through Music.” Each year, after I present my lecture at GDC, I transcribe the lecture into an article series (so that those who couldn’t attend the conference can still read the content). This article kicks off my six-part series based on my 2025 GDC presentation! In these articles you’ll find all of the discussion from my GDC lecture, accompanied by many of the videos and illustrations that I used to support the ideas explored in my talk. So let’s get started!
Welcome back! I’m game composer Winifred Phillips – my most recent game release is the original music of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord: the smash-hit 3D remake of the classic 1981 dungeon-crawler (listen and download my award-winning soundtrack for free). This is part four of my series of articles based on the content of the lecture I gave at the Game Developers Conference 2024! My lecture, entitled “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” explored how we game composers can adopt the audio assets and production techniques of sound design when we’re composing music for games. To allow everyone to access this discussion (including those of us who couldn’t attend GDC 2024), I’m happy to share the substance of my GDC lectures in an article series that incorporates the entire discussion, along with the videos and illustrations that were included in my GDC lecture!
In case you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you can find them here:
In part three of this series, we further explored how we can use animal vocalizations in eccentric ways, infusing our game music with lots of quirky character. So now that we’ve considered what the animal kingdom can do for our music, let’s tackle the next item on our list – The Diegetics of Science!
This is part two of my article series that presents the content of my lecture from the Game Developers Conference 2024. This year, my presentation, “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects,” explored how composers can employ sound design assets and techniques in their game music. Since not all of us can attend GDC, I make sure to post the content of my GDC lectures every year in a series of articles that present the full discussions, along with many of the videos and illustrations that were a part of my lecture. Last month I posted part one of this article series, in which we considered a list of categories wherein sound design assets may be sorted:
We began with a discussion of environmental diegetics, first exploring how short environmental sound design assets supports diegesis, and the ways in which we can make these sound design assets work in our musical compositions. So now, let’s explore that idea further.
Last March I was pleased to give a lecture at the Game Developers Conference 2024 — it’s a top industry event where experts in various game development disciplines share tips and techniques related to their fields. My presentation was called “Dial Up the Diegetics: Musical Sound Effects.” Every year, after I give my lecture at GDC, I include most of the lecture content in an article series (for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend the conference). So with this article, I’m kicking off a six-part series based on my 2024 GDC presentation! In these articles you’ll find all of the discussion from my GDC lecture, supported by many of the videos and illustrations that I used to support the ideas explored in my talk. So let’s get started!
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and last November I was delighted to be featured on the popular Game Show program broadcast on ABC Classic (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The show that was broadcast on ABC Classic featured lots of my music from my video game repertoire, along with clips from a longer interview we recorded shortly before the broadcast. Game Show is hosted by Meena Shamaly, who is an accomplished performance poet, composer, and producer of arts workshops and poetry slams. With this in-depth background in music and the arts, he brings a unique sensitivity and insight to the conversation, posing fascinating questions right from the top of the interview, and responding deftly to help the conversation evolve in revealing ways. While the broadcast from ABC Classic is no longer available, an audio recording of our full, uncut interview is hosted right now on the ABC Classic web site. I thought that readers of this blog might appreciate the transcript of the full interview, so I’m including that transcript here. In addition to the transcript, I’ve also included music examples to illustrate topics discussed during the interview, and links that expand on various topics that are touched upon in the transcript. This interview for The Game Show web site was quite long, so I’ll be dividing it into three articles. In addition to this transcript, you can also visit The Game Show web site, or visit the official ABC Classic site (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). So now, without further ado, here is part one of my interview with Meena Shamaly of ABC Classic’s Game Show!
Hi! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this past September I traveled to Washington D.C. I’d been asked, as the current winner of the Grammy Award for Best Video Game Soundtrack, to speak in the Congressional Auditorium of the Capitol Building, at an event advocating for the importance of video game music. It was an enormous honor! Alongside a panel of fellow Grammy Award winners and nominees, we discussed the process of composing for games, sharing stories and memories while doing our best to help lawmakers understand the inherent creativity and expertise involved in crafting a video game musical score.
Winifred Phillips is a video game composer whose latest project is her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game 
