Interview with Austin Wintory
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Austin Wintory
American composer of game scores including Journey, ABZU, The Banner Saga and Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and of more than 60 feature films.
Source: Akash Thakkar on YouTube
These answers are taken from How to Succeed as a Game, Film, and Concert Composer | Interview with Austin Wintory on Akash Thakkar's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with composing music?
I was a gamer before I ever had any inklings of being a musician. I didn't pick up music in any capacity until I was about 10 years old, and I already had probably seven years of gaming experience by that point. I have memories of the NES and Commodore 64 from before I could talk.
The conductor Scott Speck and I met because a conductor friend of his recommended me, a guy I had met because I went to high school with his wife way back in the day, and she sang on my earliest pieces. In my first ever real recording, she was the solo soprano. So in true traditional form, you meet someone, and then someday that blossoms in an unexpected way.
What drew you to a career as a composer?
Way back in the early days of high school, my freshman and sophomore year, I wasn't convinced that I could actually do this, and I was also very interested in game design, so I started studying programming. My dream at the time would have been to go get a job at LucasArts or Sierra. I kept thinking my ultimate dream is to make my own games and score them, and also to find opportunities to score other games, but I thought I'd have to moonlight on those things while I work a day job in some kind of programming capacity. That was what 15-year-old me concluded was my most likely practical solution to putting food on the table.
But very quickly I realized I don't actually love programming anywhere near as much as I love writing music. And very sage advice came from my great aunt, my grandfather's sister. She didn't know anything about the music industry, but she said, if you want to be a composer, you'll never stand a chance unless it's getting all of your energy. And I realized that's probably true. I said I'd rather die trying.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I got very lucky that while in school I was able to meet Jenova Chen and the founders of thatgamecompany, and I was just by dumb luck able to get rolling right as I graduated. That had to last a number of years before things started to aggregate. And it's no secret that Journey represented a major turning point. It really shifted things quite dramatically. It also de-emphasized film in a major way. I was doing on average five or six feature films a year, and then they just kind of got crowded out by the game opportunities that I had. I still try to do as many films as possible.
On the concert side, it started with the Colorado Symphony, my hometown orchestra. They reached out about performing some music from Journey, but they were struggling to find other charts, and so I helped. Orchestras started passing my name around as a guy that would help them with these programs, and I'd go out and conduct my stuff, and then the orchestra would say, well, what else do you do? For me it's always about proactively engaging with people and saying, to steal a line from my agent Sarah, how can I be a solution to the problem that you don't know you have?
What advice do you have for new composers?
I get asked all the time how important is it that I be a gamer. Technically you don't have to be, but if I was a game developer and it felt like this person is not fluent in the language of the thing I'm trying to build, and they don't empathize with or even understand what my problems are, like why they are stressed about critical bugs, I think the lack of that seems like an unnecessary liability for yourself. I want people to feel encouraged to explore games, not discouraged to explore composing for games.
I encourage people not to step into a restaurant that you've never been to, and before you've even made it to the host station, find 50 things that need to change. Try just buying a meal first, or just observing for five minutes. I hate to see people feel cynical before they've even started. This industry is awesome.
You have to be at the right place at the right time, and you don't know when those are going to be, so you just have to keep showing up. The key is that the right place is usually more of a frame of mind than it is that you have to move to LA. Constantly celebrate other people's work, play their games, listen to their music. If someone is only interested in themselves, that's just intrinsically uninteresting.
Has your career as a composer progressed the way you expected?
I'm kind of perpetually locked into this mindset of feeling like hopefully the majority is still ahead. My earliest goal was I just don't want to have a side job. My definition of success was I just want to make music. I don't care if I'm barely getting by or if I'm living lavishly, as long as I'm one angstrom past the tipping point into not having to augment my income some other way. Even if it's ramen noodle living with five roommates. I was very lucky that I was able to achieve that, and only barely better than that for quite a few years. There were many times where my money in the bank was five or six weeks of buffer at best, and a couple of times where I had some unpaid invoices and the rent's due in three days. But I still considered myself successful.
To the extent that it has evolved beyond that, it's more personal stuff. I really genuinely want to do something I feel like I haven't done. I really want to push myself somewhere.
Describe your musical style.
Interactive music is one of my big obsessions as a composer in games. It's really not just throwing music over the fence and saying, here, enjoy my tracks. I don't write tracks. That doesn't even make sense for most games. Interactive music is this amazing frontier that I think is going to take its place as an art form in the 21st century with no precedent. If I could have my way, it would be the dominant form of musical expression of the 21st century, because it would be a reinvention, in a way, of music itself. By and large, games are the only place you're going to find a way to experience interactive music, where if I pick up my coffee cup a violin comes in, and when I put it down the violin goes away. Hopefully not that lame, but something along those lines.
People know me for the kind of serene and supposedly relaxing music. Imagine some psychotic horror thing, and they're like, "The Journey dude?" That's invariably how that conversation starts.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
At GameSoundCon I'll be speaking about this game that I put out last year called Erica. That was a particularly challenging score to put together from an adaptivity standpoint. It was just a crazy complex interactive task, and a total joy, even if there were times where I really wanted to just pull the rip cord and bail. It was the good kind. It was like having a very relentless personal trainer that's just becoming your enemy in service of you. That's kind of how that game felt in the end, and now I hold it as a very cherished highlight in my career and in my story.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
The Colorado Symphony said they'd love to do the main title of the Batman animated series, which was Shirley Walker's take on Danny Elfman's theme from the 1989 Tim Burton film. So I tracked down who the copyist was, and it was someone I knew, and I imagined it's just in a box, handwritten. It turned out Warner Brothers had cached that in a salt mine archive, and they didn't have the original anymore. They had a photocopy. The original was lost. In the interest of not just transcribing the piece, we literally sent someone into this salt mine to find this thing, and then they scanned it, and it was in just awful condition. So we basically used that and re-engraved it from scratch, made a fresh new set. Then the publisher was like, well, now we have a performable version.
And through a very bizarre set of circumstances, I am the only Austin Wintory on planet Earth.
In which area would you like to improve as a composer?
I'll intentionally seek out opportunities for projects that represent something really wildly outside of what I'm more known for. There have been times where I took a swing at something and they're like, you know, I think you're better at Journey stuff. And maybe they're right, but I'll still take those swings, because I'm sure that I have real limitations, but I'm always going to try to find them, or push them as best I can. Now it's like, okay, how do I just get better as a composer?
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
My current metric for success is just anytime someone does me the honor and graciously offers me the chance to do something that is kind of a leap of faith on their part. That's why I'm more than happy to demo. I'm more than happy to put my money where my mouth is and say, here, let's make this less of a leap of faith.
My goal is never to convince them that I'm the right person. My goal is to offer up something that makes their choice interesting. If I do something that is really definitively not what they want, I'm also helping them, by removing something from the list. So I try to be very divisive in these demos. I took a swing in a very novel and weird direction, knowing that I would either immediately get it or immediately not get it. I very rarely do what I think they want.
Austin Wintory's Full Biography
Curiosity and exploration lay at the core of 3x Grammy-nominated and BAFTA-winning composer Austin Wintory's career. Known principally for his work in videogames, his music can be heard in a wide range of titles: from the critically acclaimed innovators (Journey, ABZU, Stray Gods, The Banner Saga) to AAA blockbusters (Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Aliens Fireteam Elite, LEGO Fortnite, Towerborne).
After nearly a decade scoring independent films and games, Austin's career took a leap forward on the back of thatgamecompany's hit PS3 title Journey. The soundtrack album debuted on the Billboard charts higher than any prior game's original score, and in December 2012 became the first game score ever nominated for a Grammy. The music has been performed by orchestras around the world in concert, frequently with Austin on the podium and toured through the US as a complete playthru show called "Journey LIVE." In 2022, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, the entire score was reimagined by Austin, and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, London Voices choir and cellist Tina Guo (who was the featured soloist in the original as well).
On the heels of Journey, subsequent game scores of Austin's include The Banner Saga trilogy; Giant Squid's debut title ABZU and its followup, The Pathless; Ubisoft's Victorian-era Assassin's Creed Syndicate; the innovative FMV game Erica; the co-op squad shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite; Pocketwatch Games' indie darlings Monaco and Tooth and Tail; the remake of the infamous 80s romp Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded; Mike Bithell's strategy/action John Wick Hex, Epic Games' open world LEGO Fortnite; EA's mobile reimagination of the 90s RTS classic Command & Conquer, Rivals; and Sloclap's stylized martial arts debut Absolver. Austin also made additional contributions to major titles such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, The Order: 1886, Saint's Row Gat out of Hell, and Supergiant's megahit title Hades. In 2020 Austin wrote one of League of Legends' most popular champion themes, "Volibear: The Relentless Storm."
In 2024 Austin re-teamed with Supergiant Games' composer Darren Korb and contributed orchestral music to the forthcoming Hades 2, among multiple other recent releases: Giant Squid's Sword of the Sea, Yellow Brick Games' Eternal Strands, Stoic Studio's Towerborne, and Pocketwatch Games' Monaco 2.
Nearly 20 years in games has led to considerable, and deeply generous, peer recognition. In total Austin has garnered 2 BAFTA's (among 7 nominations), a historic first-ever videogame soundtrack Grammy nomination (plus 2 additional nominations), an Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences DICE award (among 3 other nominations), 19 Game Audio Network Guild awards (among 45 nominations), 2 ASCAP Composer Choice awards (among 7 nominations) and 3 nominations from the Society of Composers and Lyricists. His albums have received well over 100 million plays online, streaming millions of times per month.
In the world of film, Austin has scored over 60 features including multiple indie hits: Captain Abu Raed (2008 Sundance winner), Grace (2009 Sundance hit, starring Jordan Ladd), The Last Movie Star (Burt Reynolds' final film), A Little Help (the leading role debut of The Office's Jenna Fischer), Bullet Head (starring Adrien Brody, John Malkovich and Antonio Banderas), several acclaimed documentaries such as Tread and the EMMY-nominated Chowchilla (CNN films), and the continuous-take action films One Shot and One More Shot (directed by James Nunn, starring Scott Adkins). His TV work includes the Netflix international hit Thai Cave Rescue and Amazon's Big Dogs.
Recent work includes Clark Baker's 80's horror Test Screening, and Michael Russell Gunn's political drama Reykjavik (starring Jeff Daniels, JK Simmons and Jared Harris).
Also an avid podcaster, Austin's conversations across the shows The Game Maker's Notebook (for which he is a periodic guest host leading long-form chats with fellow composers and audio folks in games), Play Watch Listen (co-hosted with writer Alanah Pearce, and director Mike Bithell), Brushes & Keys (dissecting art / life topics with visual artist / wife Angela Bermudez), and You Gotta Hear This (a nerdy music analysis show with actor Troy Baker), all of which reach hundreds of thousands of listeners per month.