Jessica Curry: choral scores, BAFTAs and game music on British radio

Selected works

• Dear Esther2012
• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs2013
• Everybody's Gone to the Rapture2015
• So Let Us Melt2017
• Little Orpheus2020

The sound in a sentence

Choral and string writing rooted in English sacred and concert music, used to carry the emotional story of exploration-led games.

From film school to co-founding The Chinese Room

Curry studied at University College London and at the National Film and Television School. She co-founded The Chinese Room with the game designer Dan Pinchbeck, after he asked her to compose music for an experimental game project.

That project became Dear Esther, first released in 2008 as a free modification for the Source engine. It was rebuilt as a standalone commercial game released in February 2012, and for that version Curry re-orchestrated and extended her score, making it fuller and close to twice the length of the original soundtrack. In 2017 a further updated edition, Dear Esther: Landmark Edition, was released as a free update.

Dear Esther is a game about walking through a landscape and listening to a narrator. With no combat or puzzles, the music carries much of the emotional weight, which made it a prominent example of the indie and digital wave of the early 2010s.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and two BAFTA wins in 2016

Between those releases, the studio made the experimental game Korsakovia (2009) and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (2013), a horror game for which Curry also wrote the music.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was released on PlayStation 4 in 2015. It is set in a deserted English village in Shropshire, and its score draws heavily on choral writing in the tradition of English church and concert music. At the BAFTA Games Awards in 2016 it won two awards: Audio Achievement and Music. Her official biography also notes that MOJO magazine named it soundtrack of the year.

In October 2015 Curry reduced her creative involvement with The Chinese Room while remaining a director of the company, and has since worked on independent projects. These include So Let Us Melt (2017), a virtual reality game, and Little Orpheus (2020), released on Apple Arcade, whose score was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture asks the player to piece together what happened to a village by finding traces of its residents. Choral music, which can suggest both community and absence, suited that story. The score was released as a 28-track album in the UK by Sony Classical, an unusual home for a game soundtrack at the time and a sign of its crossover into classical listening.

High Score, Sound of Gaming and the radio audience

Curry's influence on how British audiences hear game music goes beyond her own scores. She created, wrote and presented High Score on Classic FM in 2017, which her biography describes as the first mainstream radio show about game music. From October 2019 she created and presented Sound of Gaming on BBC Radio 3, a series about video game music that ran across 2019 and 2020 as part of the station's wider set of programmes about music in different media.

She has also written choral and concert works, served as composer in residence for the London Oriana Choir, and released the album Shielding Songs with the vocal ensemble London Voices in 2025. Her music has been performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican.

Radio has been one of the main ways game music has reached UK listeners who do not play games themselves, and both programmes presented game scores alongside discussion of how they were written.

Honours from Women in Games, the GANG awards and Abertay

Curry won the Game Audio Network Guild's Rookie of the Year award in 2013. In 2018 she received the Outstanding Contribution award from MCV Women in Games, and in 2023 Abertay University in Dundee, known for its games courses, awarded her an honorary doctorate in music.

For a broader view of how game music reached concert halls and radio in the UK, see our concert hall era page and our guide to game-music concerts in the UK.