Austin Wintory: Journey, the cello and a first Grammy nomination

Selected works

• flOw2006
• Journey2012
• The Banner Saga2014
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate2015
• Abzû2016
• The Pathless2020

The sound in a sentence

Orchestral writing built around a small number of themes and solo instruments, designed to respond closely to what the player is doing.

Denver, USC and a first score for thatgamecompany

Wintory was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1984. He started the piano at around ten after being introduced to the music of film composer Jerry Goldsmith, and later studied at the University of Southern California.

His first game score was for flOw (2006), the first commercial release from the Californian studio thatgamecompany. flOw is a short, abstract game about a small organism growing in water, and its music had to suit a calm, open-ended experience rather than a story with fixed beats. That working relationship led to the studio's later and much larger project.

Thatgamecompany's games are known for short, wordless experiences that rely on mood rather than dialogue.

How the Journey soundtrack follows a single traveller

Journey was released on PlayStation 3 in March 2012. The player crosses a desert towards a distant mountain, sometimes meeting another anonymous online player along the way. There is no spoken dialogue, so the score does much of the storytelling.

Wintory built the soundtrack around a solo cello, played by cellist Tina Guo, representing the player's character, with the wider orchestra supporting it. He worked with the game's sound designer, Steve Johnson, so that the music would respond both to the player's actions and to sound effects from nearby objects in the world. That close link between music and sound design is a theme of our explainer on sound design versus music.

At the 2013 BAFTA Games Awards, Journey won five awards, including Audio Achievement and Original Music. The same year, its soundtrack was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, the first video game score nominated in that category. It did not win, but the nomination is often cited as a milestone in mainstream recognition for game music.

From The Banner Saga trilogy to Abzû and The Pathless

After Journey, Wintory worked across very different projects. Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine (2013) is a heist game with a piano-led score. The Banner Saga (2014), The Banner Saga 2 (2016) and The Banner Saga 3 (2018) form a Norse-inspired tactical role-playing trilogy. Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015), set in Victorian London, was a large studio production.

He returned to collaborators from Journey for Abzû (2016) and The Pathless (2020), both from Giant Squid, a studio founded by Journey's art director. He also scored Erica (2019), an interactive live-action thriller. He contributed orchestral arrangements to Darren Korb's music for Hades, a collaboration noted on our Darren Korb page.

Across these projects, a recurring idea is that a small number of themes are developed and reshaped over the course of a game. Our explainer on leitmotifs in games looks at that technique in more detail.

Moving between independent studios and large publishers in this way is now a common pattern for freelance game composers.

Writing music for games that change from player to player

A recurring thread in Wintory's career is music for games where no two players have exactly the same experience. In Journey, for example, the player may travel alone or alongside a stranger, and may linger in one area or move quickly through it. The score has to feel complete either way.

His scores also tend to be released as albums, and pieces from Journey and other games have been performed in concert. Arrangements such as Woven Variations, an orchestral set of variations on the Journey material that Tina Guo has performed with him, adapt game music for the concert hall, where the music has a fixed shape rather than responding to a player.

That difference between a fixed concert version and an interactive game version is one of the central ideas in game music. Our explainer on adaptive music shows how a score can be built from parts that a game combines in real time, and our UK concerts page explains how to find performances of game music near you.