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Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord debuted in 1981 for the Apple II and very quickly became a hit, launching an acclaimed and influential series of RPGs that would persist throughout the 1980s and ’90s. A remake of that game dropped in 2024, and to our great surprise it was nominated for a Grammy Award in the “Best Score Soundtrack for Videogames and Other Interactive Media” category. And last night, to our even greater surprise, it won.
“We’re overjoyed for @winphillips on her well-deserved Grammy win for her soundtrack to Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord!” developer Digital Eclipse posted on Bluesky. “The album is downloadable for free from her Bandcamp page—congratulations, Winifred!”
As we said when the nominations were announced in 2024, Wizardy appeared to be a real outlier in a category dominated by big names. Other contenders for the award were:
- Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — Pinar Toprak, composer
- God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla — Bear McCreary, composer
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 — John Paesano, composer
- Star Wars Outlaws — Wilbert Roget, II, composer
But while Wizardry doesn’t have nearly the cachet of those other games, Phillips is a videogame composer of note, with credits across 33 games including God of War, LittleBigPlanet, Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation, Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and numerous others. Still, speaking after winning the award, Phillips said she didn’t expect to win (and seemed genuinely surprised she did).
OMG!!!! My Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord music won a GRAMMY!!!!! A million thank-yous to all you wonderful @RecordingAcad voters! Your support of Wizardry has meant so much! Huge thanks to @DigitalEclipse & Jeff Nachbaur! I’m thrilled!!! #GameAudio pic.twitter.com/z9morEPcMMFebruary 3, 2025
“I really didn’t expect it. The category was populated with so much brilliance this year, and I have so much deep respect for the other nominees in this category, so to have been recognized, it’s just a highlight of my career,” she said in an interview after collecting her trophy.
“We’re very supportive of each other and we do a very unique thing—we’re creating music that needs to accompany people who are having an experience and who are making choices and having adventures and living a grand story, and we’re kind of creating the music for that story. It’s such a wonderful privilege, because you feel like you’re collaborating with the players—like you know them and they know you, and it’s really very special.”
The Grammy Awards only added a category dedicated to videogames in 2022, and as we said at the time, some marks were maybe missed because of the way the nominating and voting process works. Submissions for consideration must be made by record companies or Recording Academy members, and any developer or publisher who doesn’t fall into one of those two categories is effectively out of luck.
That, as we noted in ’23, may have been part of why the best soundtrack nominations at the Grammys were so different from those of The Game Awards. The only crossover was composer Bear McCreary, and he was nominated for two entirely different games: Call of Duty: Vanguard at the Grammys, and God of War: Ragnarok at The Game Awards. (He lost the Grammy—the first winner was Stephanie Economou, for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok—but won The Game Award.)
But procedural issues notwithstanding, I’m genuinely really pleased that Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord won. It looks like it might be my kind of game, but more important than that, sometimes it’s just nice to see the underdog come out on top.
Kurt Indovina
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