Two-time Grammy Award nominated composer Austin Wintory made history when his score to the widely acclaimed Sony PlayStation 3 title, Journey, became the first video game score to be nominated in the Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media category. The soundtrack album to Journey broke the all-time record for highest charting original video game score on the Billboard Top 200 charts. Earlier this year, Wintory earned his second Grammy nomination with his score to the Alien: Fireteams Elite in the new Best Score Soundtrack for Video Game category. Wintory’s most recent endeavor is the ambitious and interactive video game musical, Stray Gods with Summerfall Studios, where he served as Composer, Songwriter and Musical Director.
Wintory’s other recent projects include Alien: Fireteams Elite from Cold Iron Studios, Game for Peace for Tencent (a collaboration with composer Brian Tyler), John Wick Hex from Good Shepherd Entertainment, the groundbreaking live-action film/game hybrid Erica, the final installment of the epic Norse-tinged trilogy The Banner Saga 3, Electronic Arts’ resurrection of the legendary Command & Conquer franchise and Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade for Ubisoft. Wintory completed a three year collaboration with long time creative partner Giant Squid on their open world adventure game The Pathless, released to rave reviews.
Wintory’s recent foray into television scoring is Netflix limited six-part series Thai Cave Rescue, a co-score with long time collaborator Susie Seiter. Steadily working since his career began in 2006 with thatgamecompany’s debut title flOw, Wintory’s other recent scores include Ubisoft Quebec’s Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and the massively successful ocean exploring game Abzû developed by Giant Squid, and the stylized real-time strategy game Tooth and Tail . His other games include The Bradwell Conspiracy, the remake of the cult classic Leisure Suit Larry, the action heist game Monaco, Portal creator Kim Swift’s Soul Fjord, the award-winning action adventure game Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians, Tale of Tales’ Sunset, Sloclap’s Absolver, Ready at Dawn’s Deformers and Funomena’s upcoming VR title, Luna.
Wintory has also worked extensively in film scoring over 50 feature films, notably the Sundance hit Grace, as well as the Sundance Audience Award winning Captain Abu Raed, for which he won a Hollywood Music Award for Best New Composer and was shortlisted for the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Original Score. His other recent film scores include the action feature, The Rendezvous, the thriller Standoff (starring Laurence Fishburne), Mercury Plains (starring Scott Eastwood and Angela Sarafyan), independent comedies A Little Help (starring Jenna Fischer and Rob Benedict) and Strangely in Love, and the dramas Leave (starring Rick Gomez and Frank John Hughes), and The Grief Tourist (starring Michael Cudlitz and Melanie Griffith). Wintory’s music can more recently be heard in the drama, The Last Movie Star, (starring Burt Reynolds in his final role, alongside Ariel Winter) the action thriller Bullet Head starring Adrien Brody, Antonio Banderas and John Malkovich directed by Paul Solet, and the documentary Tread. His more recent film scores include A Violent Man for director Ross McCall, One Shot for director James Nunn, and Clean, a collaboration with Adrien Brody and director Paul Solet.
Since childhood Austin was fascinated with music, and in high school taught himself composition and orchestration inspired by the work of Jerry Goldsmith, before going on to NYU and USC to study formally. It was while in school that he attracted the attention of Sony and scored his first major game (flOw) and has been quickly rising ever since.
Wintory’s upcoming projects include Pocketwatch Games’s Monaco 2 and feature film One More Shot for director James Nunn.