Winifred! I’ve been following your career for a while, and I am so excited to have you with us.  As a gamer, I am very familiar with and excited by your work.  I also really admire your work ethic and visibility in the industry.  Could we start with your background- how did you get started in music?

That’s very kind, Connor!! Honored to be highlighted in the AWFC Membership Spotlight! I got started as a media composer at National Public Radio, for a drama series called Radio Tales. The series adapted classic works of literature, such as Beowulf, The Odyssey, Arabian Nights, and so on. Each episode featured wall-to-wall music, so it was a great way for me to learn and grow as a composer, using music as a tool for aural storytelling. After over a hundred episodes, the series came to an end, and I started thinking about what to do next. I’d always been an avid gamer, and around this time it occurred to me that I could combine my favorite hobby with my passion for music and pursue game composition as a new career! So I started reaching out to game companies, and I happened to connect with the music producer at Sony Interactive right when they were building a composer team for the original God of War. My background at Radio Tales demonstrated my experience using music to tell larger-than-life mythological stories, and it was a really good fit for the project. So that’s how I became a game composer!

You have a massive range to your music- genre/style/purpose. Can you elaborate on where you find inspiration for your new projects? And, are you able to speak to your wide range of abilities in the composing realm?

I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to compose for such a diverse array of projects, and it may be a result of the way my career began. Right around the time I joined the composer team for God of War, I also got hired for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the tie-in game for the Tim Burton film. Both games were released at around the same time. So my introduction to the game development community consisted of music for a violent hardcore rated-M game, and a whimsical family-oriented game rated-E for everyone! That seemed to point my career in a two-pronged direction. Developers who knew me from God of War approached me to compose music for dark adult-oriented franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Total War, Homefront, Jurassic World, The Da Vinci Code, and Wizardry… whereas those who knew me from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were asking me to compose music for franchises like LittleBigPlanet, Shrek, Speed Racer, and The Sims. I really love that I get to swing back and forth between light and dark projects, because it keeps my work constantly challenging and inspiring, and allows me to grow as a composer from project to project. I’m always learning, researching, and exploring new ways to tell stories through music!

With such a prolific career, I presume you are quite busy all the time. I am curious if you have practices away from work that help you when you return to work?

I’m very grateful for the vibrant game audio development community! Keeping up with all the developments in game audio has been a wonderful way to stay inspired. In addition, I write a regular blog that shares my thoughts about creative and technical challenges facing game composers. Sharing these blogs has been a great way to stay connected with the community. I also use it to challenge myself and others to think about game music composition in new ways.

I use your unparalleled book “A Composers’ Guide to Game Music” as part of my curriculum for my collegiate teaching in media composition- can you tell us about how you conceived of this text? Truly, it is game changing.

Thanks so much – that means a lot to me! At the time that I wrote “A Composer’s Guide to Game Music,” there weren’t any books directed solely at game music creators. The game audio books available at the time were much broader in scope, assuming that a game audio practitioner would be supplying all the audio a game needed (including both sound effects and music). As a result, the books didn’t explore music composition issues with any depth. I’d bought and read all of those books early in my career, and was grateful for the technical and logistical guidance, but I yearned for a discussion of the creative issues that face dedicated game composers. That’s why, when I pitched my book to MIT Press, I titled it “A Composer’s Guide to Game Music.” I wanted my book to feel inviting to composers. I wanted it to specifically address their questions and concerns.

Your latest game score for “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord” is now Grammy nominated! Congratulations! Would you mind telling us more about the process for creating this work, and maybe a bit about the game too for those who haven’t played?

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was originally developed in 1981. It’s widely considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made – it established the party-based dungeon crawler genre. It was developed for the Apple II by two Cornell University students, and it revolutionized video gaming and had a profound influence on huge franchises to follow, including Baldur’s Gate, Might and Magic, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy. The original game had no music at all, so when Digital Eclipse decided to remake the game in the Unreal Engine, they contacted me to compose the score. So tremendously exciting to create a brand new musical score for a game that’s incredibly important to the history of video gaming! In preparing for this project, I decided to favor a medieval musical approach, hearkening back to traditional tabletop fantasy gaming. By including lots of medieval and Renaissance instrumentation, I worked to immerse the game environments in a sense of ancient history and culture.

Game music is quite different from film/TV work- it requires a great variety of assets in bulk and function. What do you like about making music for games? What challenges do you face?

I enjoy the complexity and challenge of game music composition! The work is constantly intriguing, presenting new puzzles to be solved. I enjoy the chance to grow as a composer by embracing nontraditional composition methods and dynamic music structures. I also love the larger-than-life narratives and adventures in video gaming. It’s a broad, colorful world of amazing characters and epic stories!

Is there anything you’re currently working on that you are excited about and can share with us? Or anything in general you’re excited about or inspired by lately?

I’ve composed the music to the upcoming RPG “Flint: Treasure of Oblivion,” developed by Savage Level and published by Microids. This project gave me the chance to compose pirate music! Such tremendous fun! The game and its official soundtrack album will be coming out at the end of this year, so I’m excited about that!

Interview by Connor Cook

Check out the AWFC Directory for Winifred here!