Lena Raine: from Guild Wars 2 to Celeste and Minecraft

Selected works

• Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns (with Maclaine Diemer)2015
• Celeste2018
• Minecraft: Nether Update (new tracks)2020
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale2021
• Minecraft: Caves & Cliffs Part II (new tracks)2021
• Minecraft: Tricky Trials (new tracks)2024

The sound in a sentence

Electronic production combined with piano and live instruments, ranging from energetic synth-led tracks to quiet ambient pieces.

Seattle, Cornish College and six years at ArenaNet

Raine was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1984 and studied music composition at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Between 2010 and 2016 she worked at ArenaNet, the developer of the online role-playing game Guild Wars 2, as both a designer and a composer.

Online games are updated over many years, and their music has to work for players who may spend hundreds of hours in the same world. Her time at ArenaNet included co-composing the score for the expansion Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns (2015) with Maclaine Diemer. She left in 2016 to work freelance.

A role that combines design and composition is less common at large studios, where those jobs are usually separate. Knowing how a game is designed can help a composer decide where music should change, where it should drop out, and how it should support the pacing of play.

Celeste: a climbing game scored with synths and piano

Celeste was released in 2018. It is a precision platform game about climbing a mountain, with a story about anxiety and self-doubt. Raine's score combines electronic production with piano, and each chapter of the mountain has its own musical character, from bright synth tracks to quieter, more reflective pieces.

The soundtrack won the ASCAP Composers' Choice Award for Video Game Score of the Year in 2018 and was nominated at several other ceremonies, including the BAFTA Games Awards and The Game Awards. It also helped bring her solo work to a wider audience: she released her debut album, Oneknowing, in 2019, followed by a remix album, Reknowing, in 2020.

Celeste is a good example of how a small independent team can use layered and sectioned music to match difficulty and pacing, a topic covered in our adaptive music explainer.

Celeste was made by a small independent team, and its music became one of the main ways the game communicated its story of struggle and progress. Each chapter introduces new obstacles, and the score marks those shifts in setting and mood alongside the visual changes.

Adding new pieces to Minecraft's long-running soundtrack

Minecraft's original music was written by C418. As the game has been updated, Mojang has added new pieces by other composers, and Raine has written tracks for several updates: four for the Nether Update (2020), six for Caves & Cliffs Part II (2021), three for The Wild Update (2022) and five for Tricky Trials (2024).

Writing for an established soundtrack means adding new material that sits comfortably next to music players have known for over a decade, while giving new areas of the game their own character.

Minecraft has a long history in this area. Its music plays occasionally rather than constantly, leaving long stretches of quiet in which players hear only the world around them. New pieces are added to that system, which means they need to work as occasional, unannounced moments rather than as continuous background music.

Chicory, Deltarune and projects in development

Raine was the composer for Chicory: A Colorful Tale (2021), an adventure game about painting a black-and-white world. She also contributed music to Chapter 2 (2021) and Chapter 4 (2025) of Deltarune, the episodic follow-up to Undertale.

More recently she has been the composer on Beastieball, which entered early access in November 2024, and is developing her own game, Anothereal, a shoot-'em-up and role-playing hybrid announced in 2024. For more on how modern games treat music as a living, updated part of the game, see our adaptive and modern era page.

Taken together, her credits run from a large online role-playing game to small independent projects and one of the best-selling games ever made, a range that is increasingly common for freelance composers working across both independent and large studio projects.