By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi! I’m videogame composer Winifred Phillips, and in February of this year I was thrilled to win the GRAMMY® Award for my musical score for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord! My Wizardry score won in the category of Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. Every year, the Society of Composers & Lyricists (in collaboration with Electronic Arts and White Bear PR) organizes an online seminar entitled GAME CHANGERS. The seminar features all of the nominees in the video game category of the Grammys that year. Discussions during the seminar range from expert analysis of composition best-practices, to sources of inspiration that fuel the creation of the Grammy nominated scores. I remember participating in the GAME CHANGERS seminar as a nominee for Wizardry. It was one of the most awesome online seminars I’ve ever participated in, and I was really honored to be a part of it!
Now, I’m thrilled to share that as the current Grammy winner in the video game category, I have been invited this year to serve as the official moderator for the seminar! On December 16th, I’ll be interviewing all of the nominees for next year’s Grammy Awards, and I’m really looking forward to exploring their creative process in composing their Grammy-nominated video game scores. It should be tremendously inspiring! Only current members of the Society of Composers & Lyricists can attend this popular online seminar (more info here). However, everyone can enjoy the Grammy-nominated scores composed by these celebrated video game composers! With that in mind, I’m happy to share their work in this article. I hope our readers will be inspired by the creativity and skill on display in these nominated soundtrack albums!
If you are a current voting member of the Recording Academy, you’ll find the following details helpful as you decide how you’ll vote in the video game category. And if you’re not yet a member… why not consider joining the Recording Academy? Any Recording Academy member can submit their soundtrack releases for Grammy Awards consideration. Let’s get the video game composer community involved! After all, the Grammys are famous for being ‘Music’s Biggest Night,’ so the video game music community should be a big part of it! More information about joining the Recording Academy can be found here.
So now let’s explore these currently nominated soundtrack albums for the Grammy Awards! I’ve listed them alphabetically by game title. For each nominated score, I’ve provided a biography of the composer at the top, followed by a Spotify playlist of their nominated soundtrack, and a no-commentary gameplay video demonstrating the game for which the music was composed. Enjoy!!
Hi! I’m video game music composer Winifred Phillips, and sometimes my game music shows up in places I never would have expected. A little over a week ago, while I was eagerly watching an awesome trailer for the just-released blockbuster Avengers Endgame, I was suddenly stunned to hear my own music in it! (I’ve embedded the Avengers Endgame trailer that features my music at the end of this article.) What made this moment even more jaw-dropping for me was that I had originally composed this music for the video game Spore Hero (a game from Electronic Arts’ popular Spore franchise). Just as a reference, here’s what the characters look like in Spore Hero:
A successful career as a video game composer involves much more than our day-to-day challenges in our music studios. In addition to our role as music experts, we need to be well-rounded business people and great members of a creative team. As a speaker in the audio track of the