The Map Redrew Itself

CRAFTED / Where the score went, Part 1 of 3

A composer on the year the Grammys and BAFTA finally admitted that serious composing talent now works in video games, and the same year's Grammy ballot that showed they still don't know how to judge it.

Los Angeles. The first of February. Austin Wintory walked up to collect a Grammy for Sword of the Sea, Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media, a title so long it sounds like an apology. The category didn't even exist the first time he was nominated for one.

He didn't spend the moment on himself. He used it to name the score everyone loved that hadn't even made the ballot. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the most loved game music of 2025, was left off entirely.

The winner stood up and pointed at the gap in the list he'd just topped.

Rewind. 2013. Wintory's score for Journey became the first game soundtrack ever nominated for a Grammy. There was no games category then. It went into the general field and competed against film and pop and lost.

It took until 2023 for the Recording Academy to actually create the category. Stephanie Economou won the first Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games, for Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök, the only woman in the inaugural field. The category has run every year since. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Winifred Phillips for Wizardry. Now Wintory, thirteen years after the first nomination.

I write music for a living, and it's the timeline that actually gets me here, not the trophy. A decade and a half of this craft being watched and respected without ever competing for the largest honors, and then, in one ceremony, both a real category and a friend who still didn't make the list.

The ceiling moved, and not just at the Grammys.

In 2025 the BAFTA Fellowship, the academy's highest honour, the lifetime one, went to Yoko Shimomura. First game composer ever to receive it. Not a games prize. The fellowship. The same prize as the directors and the screen composers everyone agrees are serious.

And the traffic started running the other way. Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won the Oscar for Joker and the Emmy for Chernobyl, wrote her first game (Battlefield 2042) with Sam Slater in 2021. She didn't take it as a side errand between films. EA's president of music, Steve Schnur, called the finished score an absolute game-changer for the medium. A composer at the absolute top of screen scoring walked into a game and treated it as seriously as her on screen work.

Here is the part that should embarrass the trade. The academies have conceded. The Oscar winners have crossed over. The category is in its fourth year. And the business press still files game scoring somewhere down the page, after the catalogue deals and the streaming numbers, in the section nobody screenshots.

The work moved up. The filing didn't.

Trophies aren't the real measure of prestige here. The real measure is the composers, the ones who could work anywhere, are actually choosing to write for games now.

Trade coverage hasn't caught up with that shift, for two reasons. First, habit: most people writing about the music industry built their careers on film and TV, and still treat that as the serious side of the business by default. Second, game scoring is hard to cover well if you're not a gamer. Most jounalists reviewing the score wont be playing the game, they'll likely be listening to it in isolation from the picture. For that reason most coverage stays surface-level, a release date, a vinyl variant, a number of streams, rather than the actual craft.

What the snub was actually about

Wintory didn't spend that moment being gracious. He used it to point out exactly what the academy still didnt understand.

The Recording Academy built the category because it could no longer pretend the work wasn't happening. But building a category and understanding a craft are different jobs. The voters know how to hear a film score. They have been doing it for sixty years. A game score asks them to judge something most of them have never played, scored to a picture that changes every time someone picks up the controller. Clair Obscur was adored by everyone who actually sat with it. It missed the ballot anyway, because the ballot is filled by people voting on a thing they experienced as a soundtrack album rather than as the system it really is.

Where this goes

Here's what the next two parts actually cover. Part two is about the craft itself: why writing music for a game is a fundamentally different job to writing music for a film, music that has to respond to what a player does rather than play out the same way every time, and why composers looking for a real technical challenge are drawn to exactly that problem. Part three is about the money and the risk: what top studios actually pay for a game score, what a breakout score can go on to earn once the game itself is old news, and what generative AI means for a discipline that's already built on systems and rules rather than just melody.

So here's the one worth sitting with before part two: the academies clearly rate this work enough now to hand out trophies and fellowships for it. Do they actually understand it well enough to judge it?

CRAFTED is THE BRIEF's first-hand column on the act of making. Composers, producers and artists on process. Written from inside the room.

Next in the series: Writing a system, not a cue.