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:
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.
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:
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.
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!
Hey everybody! I’m video game music composer Winifred Phillips, author of the book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music. Since the publication of my book by the MIT Press, I’ve maintained a monthly series of articles designed to expand upon the content of that book and enable further exploration of related topics. Inspired by my more recent video game projects in popular franchises such as Jurassic World, Lineage, and Sackboy, these articles have delved into subjects ranging from interactivity, to music theory, to business and networking.
The sheer number of articles has necessitated the inclusion of a navigation tool, so I now include an annual “Big Index” that can assist us in finding our way through the content that’s accumulated over the years. What follows is that index, organized by general subject matter. New to the index are articles from the past year that have engaged in more detailed and technical discussions of music theory-related topics, with deep dives into non-diatonic construction that included atonal and polytonal composition. I’ve also included the transcripts of my interviews with National Public Radio and the BBC that took place in 2023.
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. In March of 2023, I gave a lecture entitled “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops” during the Game Developers Conference 2023. This lecture was named one of the most popular presentations at GDC 2023, and is currently nominated for a Game Audio Network Guild Award for Best Game Audio Presentation. Every year, after I present at this popular yearly conference, I release the complete content of my lecture in a series of free articles. This is the sixth and final article in the series based on my GDC 2023 presentation. As before, I’m including all the substance from my GDC presentation in this article series, along with all of the videos and sound files, and many of the illustrations that I used during my GDC talk.
During these articles I’ve been sharing my process composing the musical score for Jurassic World Primal Ops – it’s the video game from Universal Games and Behaviour Interactive. Jurassic World Primal Ops came out in the summer of 2022, right alongside the theatrical run of the latest film in this famous franchise: Jurassic World Dominion.
Hey everybody! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and I’m happy to welcome you to the fifth installment in this series of articles based on my Game Developers Conference 2023 lecture, “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops.” I’ve included the content of my GDC lecture in these articles, accompanied by all of the included videos, sound files, and many of the illustrations from my GDC 2023 conference presentation.
During the previous four articles in this series, we learned about Jurassic World Primal Ops – the latest video game in the popular Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise. We discussed how the strategy for this game’s musical style was driven by the concept of Chaos Theory. This chaos-inspired musical composition philosophy attempts to increase tension through the use of some of the most unpredictable composition techniques, employing these unconventional strategies in the effort to create subversive and disturbing effects.
By devising a musical style that avoided a conventional structure, the music of Jurassic World Primal Ops was able to support and sustain emotional unbalance during lengthy action sequences. You’ll find these unconventional techniques discussed in detail in these four articles:
We just concluded our discussion of the role that polytonality played in the musical score of Jurassic World Primal Ops. Polytonality is an uncommon musical device that helps us to break away from harmonic conventionalism. But harmony is just a piece of the puzzle, and it certainly isn’t the only way we can introduce chaos into our game scores.
Hello there! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips. Welcome to the fourth article in my series based on my GDC 2023 lecture, “Chaos Theory: The Music of Jurassic World Primal Ops.” Before we continue with the article series, I’d like to share some related news – the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts just awarded my music for Jurassic World Primal Ops with a 2023 Gold in the W3 Awards! This is the 18th year that the AIVA has recognized “heroes of digital creativity,” and I’m thrilled that my music for this project was recognized by the AIVA!
So happy to be discussing my Jurassic World Primal Ops music in this ongoing article series! In these articles, I’ve included the substance of my GDC lecture, augmented with the videos, audio files, and some of the illustrations from the visual presentation that accompanied my lecture.
During the first three articles, we considered the world-famous Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise, and the release of the Jurassic World Primal Ops video game in concert with the theatrical run of the latest movie, Jurassic World Dominion. I shared what it was like composing new music for a game in this famous and immensely popular franchise. By creating a musical score that emphasized unpredictability and chaos, I was able to enhance the tension and anxiety of playing an action-driven game featuring bloodthirsty dinosaurs on the loose in the modern world.
You’ll find all these ideas discussed in detail in these three articles:
We’d just finished discussing the fantastic utility of both the Octatonic and Whole Tone scales, which are particularly useful when we’re pushing our music away from a classic harmonic structure and towards atonality. But now let’s take a moment to step away from atonality altogether, and consider its close cousin – polytonality.
Winifred Phillips is a video game composer whose latest project is her Grammy® Award-Winning original musical score for the video game 
