Winifred Phillips: interactive scores, a textbook and a Grammy

Selected works

• God of War (co-composer)2005
• Speed Racer: The Videogame2008
• Spore Hero2009
• Assassin's Creed III: Liberation2012
• A Composer's Guide to Game Music (book)2014
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord2024

The sound in a sentence

Orchestral and electronic writing organised into modular layers that can be added or removed in response to play.

Radio drama before game scores

Phillips was classically trained in keyboard and voice, through school music and private composition lessons. Before working in games she was a composer, producer and performer on Radio Tales, an anthology series for National Public Radio in the United States that adapted classic literature, which ran from 1992 to 2003. She created the series with her long-time producer, Winnie Waldron.

Writing music for radio drama involves supporting a story that the audience cannot see, which has clear parallels with scoring games in which the music must react to events the composer cannot predict.

Radio drama also taught many composers to work quickly and to fit music around spoken voices, both of which remain everyday skills in game scoring, where dialogue, sound effects and music all compete for the same space.

God of War, LittleBigPlanet and more than thirty scores

Phillips was one of the composers on God of War (2005). Her later credits include Speed Racer: The Videogame (2008), Spore Hero (2009), SimAnimals (2009) and Assassin's Creed III: Liberation (2012). She also co-composed music for several LittleBigPlanet titles released between 2011 and 2020.

Her scores are often discussed for their use of modular layers. A piece is written as a set of parts that can be combined in different ways, so that the game can add intensity, strip the music back or switch emphasis as the player's situation changes. That is the vertical layering technique demonstrated by the Layer Mixer on our adaptive music page.

Layered scores have practical advantages. A composer can write one long piece and let the game decide how much of it to play at any moment, rather than writing many separate tracks with transitions between them. The trade-off is that each layer must sound complete on its own and in every combination, which places strict limits on harmony, rhythm and instrumentation.

Many of her projects were for established series or licensed properties, where the music also has to fit an existing brand and audience.

A Composer's Guide to Game Music and teaching the craft

In March 2014 MIT Press published Phillips' book A Composer's Guide to Game Music. It explains how game scoring differs from writing for film or concert performance, covering interactive structures, working with developers and the practical side of the job. A Japanese edition followed in 2015.

The book is widely used by people starting out in game audio. If you are considering that path yourself, our guide on how to get into game music sets out the practical first steps for UK readers.

The book's subject matter covers the creative side of scoring, such as how music can be structured to respond to gameplay, alongside professional topics such as working with development teams. Because it was written by a working composer rather than an academic observer, it is often recommended as a first textbook in the field.

The 2025 Grammy for Wizardry

The Recording Academy now has a dedicated Grammy category for game music, Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. At the 67th Grammy Awards in 2025, Phillips won it for her score for Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Digital Eclipse's remake of a 1981 role-playing game, which was fully released in May 2024.

She has also received multiple Game Audio Network Guild awards and Hollywood Music in Media Awards. For more on how awards and concerts have changed the status of game music, see our concert hall era page.

The Grammy win was notable because it went to a remake of one of the oldest computer role-playing games. Phillips' score was newly written for the remake, rather than an arrangement of the original game's very limited music, which reflects how much the expectations for game audio have changed since the early 1980s.