Winifred Phillips won the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games, for her work on Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

The award-winning composer looked adorably shocked during her grateful acceptance speech: “I want to thank all of you for believing in music for games, for recognizing it, and breathing life and enthusiasm and energy into what we do. It means so much!”

This is Phillips’ first Grammy Award. She also won NYX Award Gold Winner and Telly Award for the Wizardry soundtrack.

The other game soundtrack nominees included Star Wars Outlaws, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Wizardry was by far the tiniest game of the bunch.

The Grammys added the video game soundtrack category in 2023.

Phillips has a lengthy career as a gaming composer dating back to the original God of War, with over 30 games scored, and dozens of awards.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a remake of one of the first video game RPGs, released in 1981. Like most RPGs, it was based on Dungeons & Dragons, and featured a full party of heroes as they explored the dungeons beneath a castle.

Wizardry was a revolutionary success, and spawned several sequels.

While the original was mostly text-based, the 2024 remake is a full 3D overhaul. Various quality of life improvements have also been made to the notoriously challenging RPG. Otherwise it’s still the same base party-based dungeon crawler, and still quite unforgiving. It’s developed by Digital Eclipse, and available on Steam PC.


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Eric has been writing for over nine years with bylines at Dicebreaker, Pixelkin, Polygon, PC Gamer, Tabletop Gaming magazine, and more covering movies, TV shows, video games, tabletop games, and tech. He reviews and live streams D&D adventures every week on his YouTube channel. He also makes a mean tuna quesadilla.