Gareth Coker: Ori, Halo Infinite and a Royal Academy training

Selected works

• Ori and the Blind Forest2015
• ARK: Survival Evolved2017
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps2020
• Immortals Fenyx Rising2020
• Halo Infinite (with Joel Corelitz and Curtis Schweitzer)2021
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (with Mentrix)2024

The sound in a sentence

Emotive orchestral writing with prominent solo lines, often combined with instruments from outside the Western orchestra.

The Royal Academy of Music and three years in Japan

Coker was born in 1984 and studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He then spent three years living in Japan, where he studied a range of ethnic and traditional instruments. That interest in instruments from outside the standard orchestra shows up repeatedly in his later scores.

His early game work included music for a series of Minecraft mash-up packs themed on Chinese, Egyptian, Greek and Norse mythology, where each pack needed its own musical identity drawn from a different culture's instruments and scales.

Coker is one of several composers on this site who trained at a UK conservatoire before working in games; Grant Kirkhope studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. That route is one of many into the field, as our guide to getting into game music explains.

Scoring the two Ori games around a single theme

Ori and the Blind Forest was released in 2015. It is a 2D platform adventure about a small forest spirit, and its orchestral score gives prominent lines to solo instruments and voice. The music follows the emotional arc of the story closely, from quiet opening scenes to large chase sequences.

The score won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Audio in 2015, the D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition in 2016 and the SXSW Gaming Award for Excellence in Score in 2016.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps followed in 2020, developing themes from the first game. It won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Video Game Score in 2021 and another SXSW Gaming Award for score. Our page on leitmotifs in games explains how recurring themes like these are reused and transformed across a story.

Platform games like Ori ask the player to repeat difficult sections many times. A score for that kind of game needs music that stays bearable on the tenth attempt as well as the first, which is one reason chase sequences in the Ori games are written as tightly structured set pieces.

Survival, myth and science fiction at large studios

Alongside the Ori games, Coker scored ARK: Survival Evolved (2017), an open-world survival game, and Immortals Fenyx Rising (2020), an action adventure based on Greek myth. Large open-world games present a particular challenge: players may spend dozens of hours in the same regions, so music has to change with location, time and danger without becoming repetitive.

He was one of three composers on Halo Infinite (2021), working with Joel Corelitz and Curtis Schweitzer on a series whose earlier music is covered on our Martin O'Donnell profile.

Halo Infinite was developed by 343 Industries and released in 2021, twenty years after the first Halo game. Writing for a long-running series means deciding which earlier themes to bring back and how much new material to introduce, a balance that applies to many modern sequels and remakes.

In each case the music has to support exploration as well as combat, and to signal changes of region or threat without the player needing to look at a map.

Shared scores: Sparks of Hope and The Lost Crown

Coker co-composed Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (2022) with Yoko Shimomura and Grant Kirkhope. That score won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Video Game Score in 2023, his second Ivor in three years. In 2024 he co-scored Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown with the producer Mentrix.

Co-composed scores are increasingly common on big projects, with different writers taking different areas, characters or styles. Our explainer on recording a game score explains how such projects are usually organised from writing to final mix.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and released in January 2024. Pairing an orchestral composer with an electronic producer is one way to give a score two distinct sound worlds that can be mixed differently in different parts of a game.