Just in time for the 10-year anniversary of its release, the now-classic video game Journey is back in the form of a release on Steam and a brand new album of its iconic music by composer Austin Wintory. Developed by thatgamecompany and published by Sony, Journey was released on March 13th, 2012 to rave reviews thanks to its evocative imagery, emotional story, and instant accessibility.
Of course, one of the biggest standouts from Journey is the score composed by Wintory. To this day, Journey's soundtrack remains the only videogame score to be nominated in the "Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media" category at the Grammy awards - a nomination which put Wintory up against heavy-hitters including John Williams and Hans Zimmer. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Journey's release, Wintory has re-imagined his original music for a larger ensemble and worked with the London Symphony Orchestra and London Voices Choir to bring it to life. Wintory spoke with Screen Rant at length about the role of music in the game, his work on adapting his music for full orchestra, and his deep appreciation for the Journey community.
Screen Rant: You're revisiting your work on Journey just in time for the 10 year anniversary of the game’s release. When did you first start thinking about making this album?
Austin Wintory: About six months ago. I was in conversation with somebody, and had one of those - “Back when Journey came out... seven, eight, nine, s*** that’s almost ten years.” And I just had one of those random little epiphanies that a significant milestone is around the corner. And even though I’m grateful that Journey has remained such a constant presence in my life since it came out - in the form of conducting it in concert, and the fact that the album still seems to get attention online, and people send me very nice notes on Twitter, and those kinds of things - I still felt like it would be nice to do something to kind of put a stamp on the rounding out of 10 years of this adventure, you know?
And so I asked myself, "What could be worth doing that isn’t just sort of mining the depths again of things that already exist?" Like, for example, maybe put on some kind of very elaborate concert of Journey live. But then I thought the disadvantage of those kinds of things, of any sort of live event, is even if you stream them, there’s such a bias for whoever can physically be there. Which means that a hundred, a thousand people at most are the real recipients of it. And part of my whole motivation is that Journey, remarkably, is an audience of many thousands. That’s just astonishing to me even still. Ten years, and I still struggle to accept how well-received it’s been. And so, I wanted to make sure pretty quickly as I thought about it that whatever I did was something that could easily go anywhere to anybody who would want it. So then I started thinking about the idea of somehow revisiting the music, and re-recording it or re-imagining it.
And then a kind of parallel thread that collided with this one is that I had been in talks with the London Symphony about finding a project to do together. They're every composer’s bucket list ensemble to work with; they’re the musicians who recorded Star Wars, you know? And Raiders of the Lost Ark. And not only that, but when Abbey Road was built, you know, a hundred years ago, and it was the first-ever recording studio that was built – like the first time in human history that someone built a space for the sole purpose of recording music there – the first people to take advantage of that space were the London Symphony. So they’re just this storied historic iconic ensemble, and they’ve recorded a bazillion film scores and video game scores. And of course, they’re most famously associated with Star Wars, but they’ve done a million. I had been in touch with them the last several years, and in fact, when I was at Abbey Road recording for this game The Pathless, their coordinator who plans their recording sessions had been in touch, and I said “Come by!” So he came and hung out during the session, and we had a coffee and the seed was planted. “We should do something sooner than later," and I didn’t know what the right thing for that would be; in part, because most of the scores that I write are a bit esoteric. For example, being there at Abbey Road doing The Pathless, I was recording a big group of percussion instruments, and then also this French horn ensemble where we had a bunch of horns on the left side of the room and a bunch of horns on the right, and they were kind of calling back and forth to each other like hunters and stuff. And that’s not traditional orchestral writing. There were no strings in the room, no timpani, no tuba. It was an esoteric lineup very purposefully chosen for what I wanted to do on that score, and that tends to be how I do all my scores.
And so, recording the London Symphony is in a way kind of a waste in that sense, because part of their magic is the traditional old-fashioned construction of the symphony orchestra. When you think of a Beethoven symphony or a Brahms symphony or a Stravinsky ballet, up through, you know, the tradition that John Williams was intentionally upholding with Star Wars and those kinds of things. The symphony orchestra as it had kind of evolved through the end of the Romantic era. And it’s a fun toy to play with, but I do it very rarely, because I usually think of something more weird than that in my scores. So it was this kind of like, “I want to find something to do with them that could actually leverage that slightly more traditional palette," and I didn’t know what that would be. And so that was going on in one half of my brain kind of ambiently for a year, because it was the beginning of 2020 that we met together in London.
Flash-forward to about halfway through 2021, and the two thoughts sort of merged, and I called them up and I said, “If I were to reimagine Journey’s soundtrack in its entirety, not just the theme or the ending credits or something, but the whole score as this big lush symphonic statement, would you be interested in recording it?” And to my great good fortune and luck, they un-hesitantly said “Let’s do it!” Then it just became planning and of course navigating around the madness of the pandemic, and the fact that we were kind of starting to glimpse the waning days of the pandemic. Not that they were waning, but that it was manageable just enough that a session like this could be plausible - Which of course meant everyone else was also doing that, so I had to like work around, you know, Marvel. Giacchino was recording Thor the same days as us, and there was a lot of competition for studio space and musicians, so it was a lot of planning.
Wow. Was there anything that maybe you couldn’t do the first time around due to time or budget constraints that you were able to do now that you had this huge orchestra at your back?
Austin Wintory: It’s weird. If I say no, it sounds like we had unlimited budget or something originally, which is quite the opposite; Journey was done very tightly. But the thing is, on my end with the music, and also thatgamecompany’s side - from art direction Matt Nava was doing, game design and the physics simulation, the particle physics of the sand, all of those things - every decision that was made was leaning into the limitations and kind of exploiting them for whatever kind of maximally creative solution can come out of having to make a lot out of a little. A good example of that from the design and art standpoint was that Matt had talked about how he was researching specific kinds of architectural styles that really fascinated him for the game, and something about the way the game engine was rendering the physical objects in the world made curves really really taxing from a CPU standpoint. It’s been 10 years, I might be remembering [the story] a little bit wrong, but I remember that they realized geometric shapes of all right angles and things like that were going to be the way that they could more efficiently leverage things, and so the architectural style started to come from that. And he had started doing research into certain kinds of Native American weaving - I think it was Native American, I don’t remember which specific kind of tribal tradition– they would use these looms that couldn’t really thread things along a curve, so these really beautiful designs came out of all these hard angles. And that was very inspirational for him in developing the visual language of the architecture, and the symbols that would come out of the character when they would chirp and those things. So, that’s an example where the limitation would generate a thing that’s pretty memorable and I think pretty iconic.
The goal with the music was always to do the same thing as well. One of the kind of little silly ways that I’ve been describing the difference between this and the original score was that part of how I really leaned into the minimalist nature of what I was working with, is that there was a handful of solo instruments that really formed the heart and soul of it. The Tina Guo cello solos above all, by far. But then, flute solos played by Amy Tatum, harp by Charissa Barger, Rodney Wirtz playing viola, and this very esoteric Renaissance instrument called the serpent played by a guy named Noah Gladstone. The five of them as the sort of nucleus of soloists, with a lot of textural electronic synth pads and designed sounds that I would put around them. And very carefully crafted reverbs, and that kind of thing, to really make it sound lush and full, even though at any given time it might be one or two musicians.
And then, very gradually, it sneaks in a very small group of strings that are like an orchestral string section, but a very tiny crew. Twenty-three people or something, which in string terms is on the very small end. We also had a very narrow window of time that we could record that orchestra in terms of our budget, so I only had a maximum of maybe fifteen minutes of the score that could actually use those strings. So I made it where they become emblematic of your distance from the summit of the mountain, and as you get a little closer, I bring the strings in a little bit more, a little bit more. Like, the very first time you ever hear the actual string orchestra strings is in the third level, the open desert that’s sort of the poster art part of the game. The green sky and the big open space, and there’s these kind-of meteors of the glyphs flying above you. When you go far enough into the level, one of them will actually kind of crash down and land right in front of you. You interact with it, and it lengthens your scarf, and that kind of thing. And when it first appears, there’s a little tiny flourish for a brief moment of the strings. Like this hint, and then they’re gone - you don’t hear them again for a little while. And then you get a little closer to the mountain into the next level with the surfing, and then the next time they really appear is during that classic parallaxing tunnel shot with the gorgeous sunset. The strings come in and you get them for another moment there, and then they’re gone again. And then you get little glimpses down in the cave below, and then a bit more as you’re rising up the vertical ruins, temple, quasi-missile silo level that follows. And then you get a pretty strong dose of them turning violent in the mountain, and then they really finally become the dominant sound in the end. So by doling it out, if you actually get rid of all the space in between and smash all the strings together, you breeze through that material in basically a session. It was actually two sessions, but it was a day of recording with the orchestra in Eastern Europe, in Macedonia.
So my way of regarding that in hindsight, and based on feedback I’ve gotten from people, it’s almost like the original is essentially a hopefully classy New Age album, where it’s very pad-like with a lot of reverberant melodies that just kind of bounce through space. A lot is done with very little. And even on this new album, in some areas it’s note-for-note the same, but by translating it into a lush symphonic statement with - you know, now it’s a 91-piece orchestra and 32 voice choir, and Tina Guo yet again, and a handful of other select soloists, a final total of something like 135 musicians - with that now as the palette, even when it’s the same notes, it goes from being a New Age to a Miyazaki-type palette. Like a Studio Ghibli kind of thing. I really particularly love the aesthetic of that studio, and Joe Hisaishi’s music, where it can be lush but intimate still because I didn’t want to take the Journey-ness out of it by doing this translation. It shouldn’t feel like the difference that you get between – like when there’s the acoustic cover of a metal song, and it’s so different that it’s basically something new now. That can be really awesome in absolute terms, but if your goal is to sort of revisit in a way that’s still got a strong dose of the familiar, it really needs to keep at least one foot planted in what made the original what it is.
I never wanted to let the size of the orchestra, and the sheer power that is capable of being summoned relative to the original, erase the heart and soul of what made the original; what defined it. And it was a challenge, I have to say. There were plenty of times when I’d get writing, and I’d just get excited and think “Oh, I can have this, and then I can build it up” and then I’d kind of step back and go “Oh, it’s not Journey anymore. I don’t know what it is. Maybe independently, someone might think this sounds cool, but it’s not Journey, and I’m kind of betraying my fundamental mission.” So I would tear it back down and start again. I spent months in between other projects I was working on, it was kind of my nights and weekends project, of just draft after draft after draft of these pieces. And also figuring out, "What material from the original do I really want to preserve pretty closely, what can I cut completely, and what can I expand and actually let breathe and go places?" Since the original is built out of the Lego blocks of the interactive music system that was designed for in-game, I had obvious limitations on what the album could therefore be, because I was using the ingredients of the in-game score. But now, obviously, it’s just whatever I put down on the page will be what it is. So there are sections where I thought, you know, "It would be nice to kind of let this part run a little longer and expand and flip, and then kind of meet back up with the main thread later down the stream than where it originally would have." It kind of felt like I was dancing with the original in a way. Occasionally we’d be close together and then we would drift apart, and come back together again, and just let it follow its own internal logic, whatever that seemed to reveal itself to be.
So, after all this time, is there a moment that are you are – either back then, or one that you’re reworking – that you’re specifically proud of, or that you hope people pay special attention to?
Austin Wintory: You know, it’s funny, I’ve always been one to really adamantly make sure that everything is all that it can be so that it’s basically impossible for me to play favorites, but this is obviously a little bit of a different scenario than anything I’ve ever done before because I’ve had ten years of essentially market research data to let me know what seem to be the most popular portions of the score. If Spotify numbers are my only metric – if only it was that – it’s clear that the bookends of the original album are the things that people have really hung onto the most, and they’re the things that I get asked to do in concert by far the most.
And so, that would be the opening kind of theme that we called 'Nascence," which, funny enough, is not actually in the game. It’s the thing that would play, in the PS3 it would play on the Xross Media Bar, which was kind of like the menu except that there is no actual menu in Journey. You just hit go and the game starts. So it’s like the menu-before-the-menu piece, and then the whole finale, that I called "Apotheosis," the flying through the clouds, and then the ending credits song that kind of takes over from there, called “I Was Born for This.” Those three pieces... the number of times that I’ve done concerts where we take those three and we make it into like a fifteen- or sixteen-minute continuous suite, I’ve done that a bunch of times with orchestras over the last ten years. So it was really clear that those were the ones that probably, as soon as people hear about this project, they’ll probably be most curious about how similar or different those parts are. And I’ll admit because they’re the most popular I found myself a bit hesitant to radically change them and totally re-think them, and it was more like “How can I add a degree of polish, perhaps?” Or, “How can I elevate them into something?” And there are definite changes, and I can break those down more specifically for you, but I thought since this whole thing is basically my thank you to the community of listeners and players and whatnot who have been so, so good to me and enabled my whole life, my whole career...
Everything about my life has, baked into the premise of it, “Oh, you’re the guy that worked on Journey.” Every job opportunity, every concert I’ve attended, every email with somebody, or every autograph anyone’s ever asked me to sign, all of that ultimately stems back. Even if it’s, you know, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Journey is what put me on the radar to Ubisoft, which is what got me that job. So everything traces back to this kind of like genetic ancestor of Journey basically, which ultimately leads back to Flow with thatgamecompany when we were students in university. I owe my whole life, basically, to this game and to the people who made it something that was noteworthy. It’s not like we declared “This is a classic game, and it’s decided.” Everybody puts out their best possible work in hopes for the best, and it’s up to the players to then engage with it and just – the aggregate behavior, like an emergent phenomenon of people just continuously seeming to care about it… that’s what makes something classic or noteworthy. I’m always hesitant to label it a classic, but you know what I mean.
I still get tweets every day, and I get emails and Instagram tags and all kinds of things, and so I wanted to make sure that those moments that I know for that community for whom I’ve made this. I mean, hopefully, new people will find this and maybe discover Journey because of this album, that would be wonderful, but first and foremost this is for those people that have already invested so much of their life in supporting it. Buying copies of it, vinyls, coming to concerts, coming up to me in the hallway at PAX, and saying “Hey, I really enjoyed that game." One that never fails to really resonate, like affect me deeply, is when people say things like “That game really came into my life at a moment when I really needed it. I was going through a hard time,” or “I lost a loved one." It’s astonishing the number of stories that have begun like that that I’ve heard over the years, and it always really stops me in my tracks. So, for all those people, this album is for them first and foremost, and anyone past that is a bonus that I’m grateful that they would join the party, as it were. So, because I know that that group seems to really gravitate the most toward those pieces, I wanted to make sure to honor that and really try to give it a fresh twist but not pull at a thread and make it this composer ego thing of “Ah, well, what did I know back then? Let me show you what I’ve learned since then.” It was like, I really wanted to make it sound different but deeply familiar. So as a result, this is my very long-winded way of actually getting to your question about what I’m sort of most proud of or what I would hope people might pay attention to.
Because I knew I had the pillars - it’s like the football goal poles on either side of the album - in the form of "Nascence" and "Apotheosis" and “I Was Born for This,” I felt at liberty to go a little bit more wild with the middle because it was the part that I thought people were less sort of emotionally invested in. I had more of a lease to get different. Especially in the most inner nucleus parts of the score, the underground parts that get a little bit scary, where you’re in the sort of – some people think it’s underwater - but the kind of dark cave with the sort of floating jellyfish kind of creatures. There’s some kind of weird stuff that happens in that part of the game, and a big giant orchestra is capable of some really wonderful colors and weird textures and things. So I really let that kind of breathe and take on a character that is in many ways really, really different from the original. Another aspect that’s pervasive through the whole thing is, because there’s no electronics now - this is a fully acoustic, totally lush symphonic kind of approach - all those places where I did have weird synth pads and stuff, I largely leaned on the choir for that because we had this huge choir too. I don’t have the choir singing words and things like that until we get to “I Was Born for This,” where they sing the various texts along with the soloists. But for these moments, like in the cave which on this new album I called “Descent" - “Descent” being the name of one of several tracks that cover that part on the original album - I have the choir kind of doing vocal effects and little *makes vocal sounds* little glimmers and things like that around the orchestra. To me, even though it’s not some abandonment of the original material, I did feel like I had permission from myself I guess to push those a little farther.
The other aspect of it is that the dramatic heights do get a little bit bigger just by virtue of the scale of it. Like at the very end of the cave, when you slide down and they start chasing you, and then the big giant kind of force field shoos them away, that corollary moment in the new album is really loud and nasty in ways that the original just didn’t have the horsepower to achieve. And similarly, the material that corresponds to when the player is at the maximum kind of gale-force winds on the mountain in the snow, that’s also a very violent moment in the original score, but the level of violence I was able to summon with this orchestra was just so exponentially more that I couldn’t resist kind of letting it fly off the rails. So, those are places where I know they’re off the beaten path of what people are just statistically likely to look for if they’re interested in the album, and so yeah, I gave myself some leeway which was really fun.
All that speaks to – another summary; while I was working on it, and I was trying to think of the perfect elevator pitch, someone tweeted at me the most magnificent elevator pitch for me by mistake. Periodically people go on Twitter and they say, you know, “What’s your favorite video game?” and I can always tell when somebody has had one of those tweets go viral because sometimes I’ll just get tags in my notifications of people that are like “Oh, check out Journey, with music by such-and-such.” And it’s such a generous thing that, in many cases, they’re not saying “What’s your favorite game soundtrack?” They’re saying “What’s your favorite game?” The fact that people would kind of rope me into their naming of the game… it’s one of those things that doesn’t seem like a big deal to do, but it’s a very big deal to be on the receiving end of that. And it’s just, again, this whole thing just comes from a place of gratitude. So anyway, somebody wrote on Twitter, they tagged me in a thread that had nothing to do with me, and wrote “Journey is my number one game that, if I could go back in time and experience for the first time again, it’s the game I would do that for.”
I’ve always loved that sentiment. I remember first thinking about that idea in 1997 when they were doing advertising for the Special Edition Star Wars trilogy re-release, and they were doing a lot of TV specials about Star Wars as part of the marketing buildup. And there was this one, just a bunch of famous celebrities reflecting on their experience of seeing Star Wars back in 1977. One of the people they interviewed in this random TV documentary was Patrick Stewart, and he said “It’s my number one movie that I would love to go back to 1977 and just experience again for the first time.” I’d never thought about that concept. “I’d love to watch that movie again and again" is different from “Go back to that first time, when all of it was fresh” And I’ve come to really find something special about that concept. What are the things that I would do that for? What games? What books? What movies? And so, when somebody made that comment about Journey, I realized this album is sort of the closest that I can offer to giving someone that experience. Where it’s familiar enough that it doesn’t stop being Journey, so it’s rooted in the thing that you already know, but it takes enough turns away from the original that you get to have something quasi-like experiencing it for the first time. And it was one of those where I was already on the path to making that the goal, but I hadn’t thought of it in that framing. So it was so exciting when this tweet showed up and I was like “Oh my God, this person has no idea the gift they’ve just given me while I sit here toiling away in Journey territory across the world from where they are located.” But it was the perfect elevator pitch; the chance to serve it up in a way that hopefully simulates the freshness of experiencing it for the first time.
What you were saying about getting tagged in comments about the game, I think has something to do with the fact that the game is so sparse and the music tells so much of the story, and that it's really what’s with people through the whole thing.
Austin Wintory: Yeah, we called it the Narrator sometimes. It was omnipresent and never had competition from voiceover, or even text on-screen - even if it’s not making any noise, if it just faded up some text, for example, it would still pull your focus to some degree. And the game doesn’t even do that. So I always had an unfair advantage, which is part of why I was just so grateful to the game, because obviously if the game had been something people didn’t respond to, then they certainly would never have discovered the score. Why would they?
Do you think that’s a big part of what has made the game so enduring and so special?
Austin Wintory: I would never take credit for that. The music is not why the game is so great. The music is like this loophole, like a cheat, where if you play the game and you really love it and you want to kind of bask in how it made you feel, you can go listen to the music while you go sit on a plane, or on the bus, or while you walk the dog. It drags the game back into your memory and in your heart, you know? And that’s one of those things that has always made soundtracks this kind of loophole to the more blunt force of having to just play the game again to experience that emotion. Or watch the movie again. It’s just one of those odd phenomena that’s very unique to the idea of the soundtrack album. There’s no other real equivalent to it in other arts. If there’s a Beatles song that I really really love, and I want to go and experience it somehow continuously apart from that, reading a printout of the lyrics is not going to do the same thing. That’s vaguely kind of analogous. Stripping out some component part of it as a way to hang onto it longer.
Music can be so emotionally full that even if you get rid of all the gameplay mechanics and the interactions and the visuals and sound design and all that, the music can smuggle in a lot of the experience and let you relive it. And that’s just one of those advantages that composers have always sort of been the beneficiary of. It’s nothing we created. That’s not our cleverness, it’s just a truism. It’s just a fact of reality, the dumb luck we get to inherit that fact as a truth of our medium. The result, though, goes both ways. If the game is s***, or if the game is unnoteworthy and just mediocre and unmemorable, who’s going to want to relish in that experience and listen to the score? It’s a very, very rare phenomenon. My all-time hero Jerry Goldsmith wrote a million film scores for bad movies, and people like me have come to really cherish these scores and never even bothered seeing the movie. You already know it’s bad, you go and read reviews and even just look at the cover and you’re like, “Yeah, I can skip this one.” And so there’s like an odd little fanbase of people that sort of know these are bad movies, and they kind of keep the legacy of his contribution to Hollywood alive through these scores and these albums and that kind of thing, but that’s a very rare, incredibly exceptional case.
That’s why John Williams is so unbelievably lucky in a way no composer has ever or probably will ever be; because he has scored so many of the all-time classic films. Whether it’s the Star Wars films or the Indiana Jones films, or ET or Jurassic Park or Harry Potter films, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, it’s a truly staggering lineup of movies where the quality of those movies made people pay extra attention to the score. He’s written a lot of great scores, including for movies that weren’t those hits, but because of the sheer number of hits, he gets to enjoy this status as like king of all cinema music. And I would never disparage that, but he is beholden to the quality of those films for the music to have that level of enduring legacy. So that’s why I say, while I am very very grateful that thatgamecompany and Jenova and Sony placed a level of trust in me that was truly outrageous when working on Journey, that the score was in a position to ruin the game, but I don’t think it was in a position to make the game. It had the potential as a limiting factor, and I just had to make sure that I was as good as they were. To this day, even that, I feel cautious about daring to say, because I think the game they made was so amazing.I was in such awe the whole three years that we worked on it. They were always finding new and interesting solutions and pushing themselves, and finding ways to make the game kind of troll-proof despite being a multiplayer game where you have random connections with people. You can’t join and play with your friends manually, and all that kind of thing. The fact that they managed to make something that was just so beautiful, and nobody... I mean even, I remember PewDiePie, like the king of irreverent… absolutely no kind of vulnerability in the way that he presents playing a game, even he was streaming it and was like “This is beautiful.” And that’s totally on them. My job was to just not be the thing that makes you go “This is really beautiful, although what the f*** with this music?” That was what I always considered my job to be, and I think I managed to not ruin the game by the skin of my teeth. Because it was not easy. Three years was what I needed as it turned out, to really get the music where it needed to be.
Obviously, there are plenty of composers like you who are putting in this incredible work on video games. Do you ever think about why there isn’t more representation of game composing at the Grammys?
Austin Wintory: I think it’s because we’re still so outnumbered by the people who live and breathe and only ever think about film and television because those are what invariably dominate. In recent years, you know, the category would be some mixture of a big movie, like a Star Wars film, or Game of Thrones, Mandalorian, Black Panther, I remember it [Black Panther] won the category for Best Score Soundtrack. That was an interesting bit of Grammy trivia as well because Ludwig Goransson won the Grammy for best score soundtrack and he also won for Song of the Year for "This is America," which he co-wrote with Childish Gambino. It’s the first time ever that someone has won two Grammys in one night for things that had nothing to do with each other. Two totally unrelated releases. I just thought that was awesome. He had a very good year that year because he also won the Oscar for Black Panther. I just think he’s amazing, and I love trivia surrounding him because it’s endlessly interesting. He’s very, very, good, and an incredibly nice guy, too, he’s the most humble – he’s 37 years old and he has achieved just ungodly amounts and he’s just the most humble and gracious person, it’s just lovely.
But anyway, I think it’s partially a numbers game. The communities, generally speaking, tend to be a little bit non-overlapping. It tends to be like, people that mostly do video games, and people that mostly do film and TV. And I’m one of the rare ones that tend to kind of bounce back and forth. Although I do overwhelmingly primarily work in games, I won’t certainly deny that, I’ve done my share of film and TV as well. But I started off in that world, so a lot of my longest-running friendships are people in the film and TV world because that’s very much where I had my home ten years ago. And so, I think that’s largely the answer why, but I do also think there might be lingering feelings of “Game music is inherently inferior.” The Recording Academy is like 10,000 people, and there are a lot of record producers, and people that play in bands, and things like that, that know very little about the soundtrack world in general. It’s not their world. It’s like “Oh, I know everything about blues,” or “I know everything about jazz” or “I know everything about country music.” The Recording Academy is full of these little enclaves of folks, and some of them are absolutely brilliant, but they wouldn’t know the first thing about our world.
And so, if some of them are also voting in this category, which they can, they have every right to, they’ll see like a Hans Zimmer or a John Williams and they’ll know that name, and probably not many others in most cases. And so, it’s not surprising that the sort of pyramid shape of it remains how it was. It makes it all the more baffling these ten years later that Journey somehow managed to have the sort of escape velocity needed to crack through that, because the other nominees were insane. Like, Howard Shore, John Williams, Hans Zimmer… in fact, my favorite part was the fact that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are who won the category that year, which meant that I was a co-loser with John Williams, Howard Shore, Hans Zimmer. We were equal losers! I was an equal of theirs in this very specific, esoteric way. We equally lost. And I’m almost happier that I lost as a result, because it would have actually been a weird crisis of conscience to think “I just beat John Williams for a Grammy? That doesn’t seem right.” Or Hans Zimmer, or Howard Shore? That’s a disturbance in the Force. So it was nice to instead be brief momentary loser equals, as it were. Not that there’s actual any sort of loser element to it.
I remember the nomination had happened like twenty-four hours before the Spike VGAs, and so it was a very odd phenomenon to be walking the red carpet. Journey was nominated there, and it was at the Sony lot - this was before it mutated into the Game Awards, and it might have actually been the last Spike VGAs, or second to last. And I remember Geoff Keighley messaging and being like “There’s a lot of press that are going to want to talk to you,” because the Journey Grammy news was like twenty-four hours old. It was a very wild experience to be surrounded on the red carpet by all these legends of the game industry, and I was getting more attention than I should have been.
It always kind of feels like I’m talking about somebody else when I tell these stories. And despite the fact that it’s been ten years, I haven’t been able to accept it more over time. It hasn’t sunk in, because none of this stuff was ever the goal. The goal was to just, like I said, not ruin Journey. Journey was so beautiful, I loved it so much, and I didn’t want to be the limiting factor. So when I think back and I have these moments like this that I really kind of think through all those things that happened – the game was just getting so many award nominations and the music was luckily subject to that. All the Grammy stuff, I mean the fact that people still ask about that. And the fact that no game has been nominated since then, either. Ten years after the fact, and still none have been nominated. It’s not like game music has been asleep at the wheel. There have been some incredible scores that have come out, and there were a lot of incredible scores that came out before Journey that would very much deserve that distinction. I mean, for God’s sake, Halo came out 10 years before Journey, and that’s still one of the most enduring pieces of video game music - the theme if nothing else, but the whole score really – that has ever existed, you know? Or Bioshock, it just goes on and on and on. And never mind if you start looking even further into the Mario, Zelda, all the endless piles of great JRPG scores, the Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross… the well is deep. How Journey wound up where it did is something I’m very grateful for, but it’s sort of almost objectively not deserving of.
It’s a special game and really special music. So, finally, once everybody has streamed the new album several times and wants your next project, what do you have coming up?
Austin Wintory: Typical answer I’m afraid. A lot of what I’m excitedly cooking away on, I’m not in a position to talk about. There is one that’s publicly announced. I don’t know when it’s coming out, so I don’t know if it’s this year, or next year, or a hundred years from now. It feels like there’s a lot of work to do still, so I don’t want to commit the team to a date, but a game that was announced a couple years ago that I’m really excited about is called Chorus by a new studio in Australia called Summerfall. David Gaider, who was the writer of the last few Dragon Age games, and I think he worked on Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate. A big well-known RPG, like branching dialogue specialist kind of guy. He and a guy named Liam Esler started this studio called Summerfall and approached me about making an interactive musical where it’s like a Bioware, dialogue-branching game, except through song. You think about a game like Mass Effect where, if I make this decision, that character dies and all the other characters now talk about remembering them and stuff, and the whole world will re-orient. It was like, “Yeah, let’s do that through song.” And I don’t want to do something that’s, you know, superficial where – you think of the classic Bioware model where there’s kind of like the red dialogue options that are the hardass, and the blue ones that are, you know, the kind-hearted angel… I said, “I don’t want to do the thing where it’s that dichotomy, and what it’s doing is like there’s a backing track and it kind of changes the lyrics over top, and it gives you this impression of agency over the experience, but in reality, you’re just kind of stepping through our game.” The emotionally meaningful decisions should happen through the choices that you make in these songs, and it has downstream consequences for the rest of the game.
And like a musical, sometimes the music stops and the characters talk, and then as soon as something important starts to happen again, the music fires up and we’re launched into a song. Then, the player will make choices that not only wildly alter the genre of the song and completely take it in a different direction than if they make a different choice, but on top of that, it re-orients the rest of the game from that point forward. So if I choose A versus B, there might be songs that only make sense if I had chosen B that now I’ll just never hear. The game is loaded with content that’s completely invisible to the player unless they just play it over and over and over again because it’s just this elaborate web of branching narrative. We’ve been working on this thing for years, and we’ve made some announcements about it. Laura Bailey plays the main character, and we’ve been recording some of her singing, and she’s just such a superstar. Troy Baker is directing the performances of it, and he’s like my best friend and he’s just a superhuman talent. And everything about it has been such a fun way to do something totally different than anything I’ve ever done. I could go for hours and hours and hours – it’s premature because we’re not finished obviously – but that is one that I’m really grateful is announced because I love being able to answer this question that you’ve just asked with that. The game is called Chorus. Summerfall created a Twitter account that posts updates when they’re available, and that one I can’t wait for. My songwriting has been one of those things that I’ve always enjoyed doing, but most of the time it’s not called for. And I don’t even know if it counts, for example, at the end of Journey, when the song for all intents and purposes plays at the end. It’s so kind of operatic that it’s hard to label it as a “song” in the way that most people mean it when they say that word, so it’s fun to like write real songs, as it were. And, yeah, that one’s been a blast. That’s my blissfully not NDA-masked answer to your question.
Thank you so much for taking the time and talking about Journey and everything else!
Austin Wintory: It is a real pleasure. Like I said at the beginning, I’m really grateful for your interest in talking about it, and signal boosting this labor of love and passion project. I hope if people find it and hear it, that it does what I’m fantasizing it does, and lets them kind of have old and new simultaneously in a way that works and doesn’t feel like cheap nostalgia-bait, but hopefully feels like something more elegant than that. Not a cynical play for their heartstrings or something. I hope it’s felt to all the people that hear it as the thank you to them that it is intended as.