10 best video game composers

In the recent countdown of the best movie composers, we touched on the snobbery that has made film music’s path to artistic recognition far longer and harder than it should have been. That pales in comparison to video game music’s plight.

As we’ll see, for decades, practitioners of this unique medium have been toiling, innovating and, most importantly, producing astounding music to thanklessly enhance the experience of millions of gamers. As we’ll also see, however, slowly but surely these individuals are gaining wider and more enthusiastic acclaim.

These ten masters of the field embody the greatness of this artful practice. They have toiled the hardest, innovated the most, and created some of the most (literally) game-changing music in history. Let’s give them their due. Presenting…
 

The greatest video game music composers
 

• Nobuo Uematsu
• Jeremy Soule
• Yoko Shimomura
• Martin O’Donnell
• Koji Kondo
• Harry Gregson-Williams
• Yasunori Mitsuda
• David Wise
• Jesper Kyd
• Michiru Yamane

Nobuo Uematsu

Ask anyone who knows anything about video game music to name the finest composers in the medium, and they’re all but guaranteed to utter 'Nobuo Uematsu’. Innovative, prolific and immeasurably talented, he is an icon of the art he practises and a tremendous testament to its under-acknowledged integrity and prestige.

A self-taught musician, Uematsu played piano from the age of twelve under the unerring guidance of Elton John’s inspiration. He first composed professionally for TV advertisements, before being recruited by Tokyo-based games studio Square in 1985, a chance move that put him on course to compose music for some of the most historic titles of the era. 20 years later, and with over 30 game soundtracks to his name, he went freelance, continuing to compose for Square (now Square Enix) while touring with his own bands: the Black Mages, and Earthbound Papas.

The beating heart of his musical legacy is Square's mammoth Final Fantasy series. Itself one of the great institutions in gaming history, the franchise played out to the enchanting strains of Uematsu’s music from 1987 to 2001, after which time a number of other composers began to contribute to this already-sprawling musical tapestry. Across almost 20 instalments, his work has acquired an incredible variety, ranging from sweeping orchestral soundscapes and synthesised edifices, to lilting piano ballads and speed-metal numbers. Final Fantasy’s popularity and longevity have served to propagate his much-imitated work on the widest of scales, and the series has done more than most to elevate the profile of video game music.

In 2013 the unthinkable occurred when his music for Final Fantasy took third place in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, an annual poll held by British radio station Classic FM. 200,000+ listeners voted that year, and their collective endorsement of Uematsu’s music marked a watershed indication of the rising stock of gaming soundtracks. Live performances of Final Fantasy arrangements - and not just by Uematsu’s own bands - are not uncommon, and numerous recorded interpretations of his work have emerged on YouTube and Spotify. 

This impact, and the enhanced status Uematsu is awarded relative to other video game composers - especially in his native Japan, a country that has made untold contributions to the story of gaming and where the composers of their soundtracks enjoy unmatched celebrity - speaks volumes for the importance of his legacy.
 

David Wise

Like Uematsu, David Wise is a composer who has served the video game community with distinction, imagination and prolificacy for decades. His catalogue, too, extends back into the years of old-school gaming in the 1980s and ’90s. And it was during this period that he fatefully supplied music for a series of instalments in Nintendo’s reboot of the Donkey Kong franchise, released 1994–7. It brought his already refined music to a massive audience, and tied his name to that of one of the most iconic video-game characters of all time.

In 1985 Wise started working at British game developer Rare, where he composed his debut soundtrack for the game Slalom, published the following year. He would go on to work on over 50 more games there before Rare produced the landmark Donkey Kong Country in 1994 - just eight years later. The title was published by Nintendo and released on their classic SNES console, which had only been available in Europe for two years. Typical of the era, this early music was MIDI-based and fairly restricted, but with the extra firepower that Rare put into the DK games - reflected in the co-composers brought to work alongsde Wise - it reached new levels of depth and variety. Wise demonstrated great versatility to engage with diverse styles, reflecting the colourful assortment of environments in which Kong and co. appeared.

After 1997’s Diddy Kong Racing, Wise’s output slowed in comparison to the frenetic activity displayed in the early years at Rare, but he stayed at the studio until 2009. In the intervening years, as the tech moved on, they gravitated away from the SNES and Wise scored titles released on Nintendo's subsequent platforms: N64, GameCube and DS. From then on he worked as a freelancer, setting up his personal studio from which he has continued to produce video game music to this day, often in partnership with his former Rare colleagues. 

In spite of that drop in prolificacy in the later years of his career, Wise’s work rate remains impressive, boasting music for almost 80 games in 38 years. Moreover, in a field that - especially nowadays - involves constant collaboration, the fact that he shares credit for music in just six games attests to his ability to produce under pressure. It's an invaluable asset in the gaming industry, but in any branch of composition, such intensity demands a level of craftsmanship and creativity that is not easy to come by.
 

Yoko Shimomura

Although classical music has seen particularly acute underrepresentaton of women in historical comparison to other fields, such as literature, the world of video game music sees the playing field move ever so slightly closer to level - numerous women composers have excelled in the video game industry, and not least the great Yoko Shimomura. 

Gaming may occupy a relatively esteemed position in Japanese culture, today, but in the late 1980s, it didn’t appear to offer a respectable - let alone secure - vocational path. For precisely that reason, Shimomura’s parents weren’t keen about the career she chose to pursue right after graduating in music. And while it wasn't the trajectory they'd envisaged, it soon proved to be a sound decision. She joined Capcom in 1988 and provided music for several of their successful combat games of the time, including Final Fight (1989) and Street Fighter II (1991). This work earned her real recognition, and her music even started to appear on separately released soundtrack compilation albums.

She later moved to Square in the hope of escaping what she saw as the tedium of scoring arcade games. There she graduated to the more expansive platform of RPGs, working on games for the new SNES, including the landmark Super Mario RPG 1996. Her first PlayStation title, Tobal 1, was also released in this period. These are two of the more notable games she soundtracked in what was a hugely busy phase for the composer. But the hard work paid off, and she distinguished herself alongside Uematsu as one of Square’s leading composers. The following years saw the continuing release of popular titles with Shimomura music - Parasite Eve in ’98, Legend of Mana in ’99, and the inaugural Kingdom Hearts title in 2002, the first in the long series that’s most emblematic of her legacy. 

Shimomura also took the freelancer’s path, leaving Square that same year but retaining an ongoing professional relationship with the firm that ensured her ongoing involvement on Kingdom Hearts games, and on other major titles from the developer such as Final Fantasy XV. She has also contributed to countless releases beyond Square, foremost of which are all the Mario–Luigi installments that bear her name. Although she names Romantic composers Beethoven, Chopin and Ravel as her biggest influences, she’s one of the most versatile composers in the field, as fluent in industrial electronica as she is in East Asian traditional music.  
 

Jeremy Soule

As with so many other art forms, the development of video game music has progressed in step with technological developments. Between the synthesised chiptunes of the first-generation consoles, via the kind of MIDI textures that Wise mastered, right up to the epic soundscapes of the 21st century, compositional methods, techniques and products have all come a long way. Few have steered the relentless exploration of new musical horizons the way Jeremy Soule has, though. Over the course of a quarter-century in the industry, he has produced some of the finest and most cutting-edge soundtracks in the history of the medium. 

Soule’s debut came in the shape of a rich ambient soundtrack to Secret of Evermore, the 1995 fruit of Square’s effort to establish a development studio in North America - which in spite of the game’s merits led to no further productions. After a string of unremarkable game scores in the late 1990s - with the notable exception of 1997’s Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score - Soule’s career reached a turning point with the 2000 release of Icewind Dale, developed by Californian studio Black Isle. The game’s music was named the year’s best by both IGN and GameSpot.

After this Soule’s output increased markedly in quantity and quality, as he was approached for more high-profile commissions. That year he and his brother Julian formed an independent music production company, Soule Media, where he produced the score for Icewind Dale. In the ensuing, prolific years he would become affiliated with a number of historic franchises that would seal his status in the industry: Harry Potter, Star Wars and - most significantly - The Elder Scrolls, magnum opus of Bethesda Studios. 

Of the last of those, Soule said that its epic sweep was especially ‘compatible with the grand, orchestral style of music’ that he enjoyed writing the most. From his first score in the series, for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to the most recent, V: Skyrim, he has supplied its fictional universe of Tamriel with an enchanting musical soundworld that for many fans is at the very heart of the Scrolls experience.

Between those major titles, and the lesser ones in the series, Soule has written scores for many of the most prestigious games of the modern era, participating in gaming franchises as prominent as Metal Gear, Dead Rising and World of Warcraft, and bringing to all of them some of the most progressive video game music in the world. Soule’s status as an all-time great has long been assured.
 

Martin O’Donnell

As with Uematsu and Final Fantasy, Jeremy Soule and The Elder Scrolls, Marty O’Donnell is yet another figure whose reputation will be lastingly associated with a giant franchise in gaming history: Halo, one of the most successful series ever, and the title that announced the Xbox as a serious player on the global gaming stage. For its enormous popularity, distinctiveness and impact on the evolution of modern video game music, O’Donnell’s work on the Halo series alone is more or less enough to catapult him on to this list.

O’Donnell was living in Chicago in the 1980s, composing mostly for television, and writing advertising jingles for radio. But he became dissatisfied with what he saw as ‘commercial’ music, later recalling that he was hoping ‘to find some other medium that would be new and cutting-edge and sort of the Wild West’. Impressed by the complexity of the music for the 1993 puzzle game, Myst (the best-selling PC game ever until The Sims broke the record), O’Donnell made the acquaintance of its developer, Cyan, and later worked there as a sound designer for the 1997 sequel, Riven. It was then while working at Cyan that he discovered the game Marathon, and more fatefully asked its developer, Bungie, for a job. He was quickly offered one. 

At Bungie he first produced music for 2001’s Oni but it was their other release of that year that made history. This was Halo: Combat Evolved. In that game and its sequels Halo 2 (2004) and Halo 3 (2007), O’Donnell would present and cultivate a sprawling and fantastical musical tapestry, combining electronically produced textures with symphonic constructions of mystique and majesty. But there was one signature sonic ingredient: Gregorian chant. 

This quintessential sound famously gave the Halo soundtracks an ‘ancient’ quality, which O’Donnell, when working on the original, felt would imbue just the sense of timelessness that the game called for. This is why, even though the narratives are set six centuries in the future, the choral sound fits no less well in the Halo universe as it does in historical fantasy games - not least Soule’s own Elder Scrolls. The proliferation of chant in various games in the years since certainly has something to do with the success of O’Donnell’s music. The first game’s soundtrack album would sell an impressive 40,000 copies, and would also feature in the Classic FM Hall of Fame in 2015. 

O’Donnell co-composed the music to Halo and the later Destiny titles (which are also phenomenal, award-winning scores) with Michael Salvatori, a regular partner since those early days in Chicago. Their creative partnership began when Salvatori offered O’Donnell use of his personal studio to produce the score for an independent film - the rest, as they say, is history. Plaudists for these achievements must also go to Salvatori, a tremendous composer in his own right. 
 

Koji Kondo

The name Koji Kondo is another strongly connected to iconic franchises. In his case those are Super Mario and Zelda. It really doesn’t get much bigger than these towering gaming institutions. Still, behind both of those names is of course an even bigger brand: Nintendo. The firm is responsible for not only countless exemplary titles but also some of the most pioneering consoles ever produced: SNES, N64, Game Boy, DS, Wii and Switch. Kondo will forever be remembered for being the beating heart of this musical universe.

Responding in 1984 to a recruitment call for composers and sound programmers posted at Osaka University of Arts, student Kondo was immediately hired by Nintendo. Wasting no time at his new employer, he produced the soundtrack to Punch-Out!! that year and worked on half a dozen more games in 1984–5, one of which happened to be one of the great trailblazing games: Super Mario Bros. Its short, segmented melodies designed to be endlessly recycled with minimal boredom, the game featured the chiptune ‘Ground’ or ‘Overworld’ theme that is now a staple of popular culture, and probably the single most famous piece of video game music ever. Not a bad accolade to place alongside Kondo’s name.

The rest, really, is history. He would go on to shape the sound of the Mario universe, not merely the Super Bros sequels but also the countless spin-offs of that breakthrough original. Released the year after Super Mario Bros. (in 1986), The Legend of Zelda initiated another historic franchise that Kondo would soundtrack, with the various compositions he produced characterising individuals and scenes within the game in unprecedented depth. 

After creating sound and/or music for over 20 Nintendo titles, Kondo’s final solo score fittingly came in 1998 with the Zelda instalment Ocarina of Time, regarded by many as the greatest game ever made. Moreover, through Zelda’s iconic ocarina, music became part of both narrative and gameplay, and Kondo’s compositions were elevated to the level of a truly fundamental aspect of the video game dynamic. This was revolutionary stuff. 

After 1993, Kondo continued to compose, arrange and produce music - collaborationg with other musicians - for the twin pillars of Nintendo’s service: six Zelda titles and a whopping ten Super Mario titles. Outside this more active, explicitly creative work, he has served as either advisor or supervisor on almost 80 Nintendo games. Again these are mostly Super Mario and Zelda titles, but modern classics such as Mario Kart and Wii Sports owe a sizable debt to his expertise. Kondo is nothing short of a legend in the field, and no list of the profession’s finest would be complete without his name.
 

Harry Gregson-Williams

Few composers successfully make the precarious jump between the world of gaming and that of film, but Harry Gregson-Williams has made a career out of it. That said, he isn’t just a great video game composer courtesy of his successes in more prestigious fields. Rather, his versatility and experience has endowed the games he's scored with an astonishing richness and, unsurprisingly, a certain cinematic grandeur. In this regard, his work in the medium is exceptional in its own right.

Gregson-Williams honed his craft at a series of historic English educational institutions. First training as a boy chorister at St John’s College School in Cambridge, before learning composition at Stowe School and Oxford University, he moved swiftly into film at the turn of the 1990s. Through that decade he would score near two-dozen films by directors as prominent as Nicholas Roeg, Tony Scott and Michael Bay. Some were scored alongside other great film composers Hans Zimmer, in whose studio he worked, and John Powell, a fellow graduate of that studio. 

At the beginning of the noughties - and as he continued to compose for film as well as TV - he was lured into the world of video games by designer Hideo Kojima, mastermind behind Konami’s Metal Gear stealth-game franchise. After achieving unprecedented popularity and innovativeness upon evolving into Metal Gear Solid - when the series went 3-D and found a new home on Sony’s PlayStation - all the highly acclaimed titles between MGS 2 in 2001 and MGS V in 2015 featured the intricate, visceral music of the high-profile Gregson-Williams. 

Catching the ear of developer Infinity Ward, the composer was invited to participate in yet another illustrious video game lineage, Call of Duty. Etching his name once and for all into gaming history, Gregson-Williams composed themes and produced the music for Modern Warfare in 2007 and, in 2014 Advanced Warfare, both of which are widely considered to be high-water marks of first-person shooters. 

Gregson-Williams’ extensive experiences in visual media have awarded him with a nearly unique perspective on the distinction between film and video game composition. In interview with IGN he had this to say: ‘With a movie, I’m constantly working in sync with the picture, and I score every moment very deliberately. In the MGS games that I’ve done, I have had to write all the music without any visual aid but from detailed, written descriptions given to me by Hideo outlining the mood, tempo, and atmosphere of various situations he was trying to create’. Few accounts will provide sharper insight as to the particular challenges of writing music for video games.
 

Yasunori Mitsuda

As we’ve seen with regard to many - but not all - of the previous seven individuals who’ve made their names in the world of video game music, getting recognition and rising to the top usually takes years of hard work, paying dues and accumulating an impressive resumé of titles. Even then, though, most gamers won’t be giving much thought to the music as they play. 

On the other hand, some composers achieve celebrity success all but overnight, and that’s pretty much Yasunori Mitsuda’s story. Another Square employee, Mitsuda started at the company in 1992. Initially he worked as a sound engineer, but soon became unhappy about the lack of composition work that was coming his way. He threatened to walk out, and in response Square’s president at the time Hironobu Sakaguchi assigned him to score Chrono Trigger, a project that Mitsuda took to with such vigour that he ended up hospitalising himself. None other than Uematsu had to step in to complete the final parts of the soundtrack. 

Released in 1995, the RPG was a roaring success, and the composer’s stock went through the roof. The music was well regarded in particular, which Mitsuda put down to his use of folk and jazz, instead of fashionable but stale orchestral material. He scored several more games in the second half of the 1990s, going freelance in ‘98 after his last project working full-time at Square: Xenogears, another wildly popular title. As a freelancer, he returned to his former employers once more to score the sequel to his magnum opus, Chrono Cross.

Mitsuda lost none of his diligence after departing Square, continuing to work hard, keep busy and produce top-drawer music, often teaming up with other composers. Many of his best post-Square scores are within the Xeno franchise, produced by Monolith Soft, founded by developers who broke away from Square in the wake of Xenogears. Mitsuda’s work is marked by the coexistence of prestige, A-list releases and lower-profile titles, which seem to receive no less care and attention from a conscientious composer who brings his very best to every project he takes on.
 

Jesper Kyd

If you thought Gregson-Williams took an interesting route into the world of video game music, prepare for something truly off-the-wall: Danish musician Jesper Kyd set out composing in the Demoscene, an international community of programmers, coders, artists and musicians that produce and share audiovisual presentations. But he quickly moved into gaming at the turn of the 1990s, co-founding the developer Zyrinx in the process. He scored a handful of games both for Zyrinx and other studios before his company dissolved.

Kyd turned crisis into opportunity when he went freelance, founding his own Nano Studios in New York. Not tied to a developer, he scored a variety of games through the 1990s before he found his feet and made his name through his involvement in the successful Hitman saga, developed by former Zyrinx colleagues who went on to found IO Interactive. Scoring the first four instalments in the franchise between 2000 and 2006, Kyd drew on a wide array of musical ingredients, imaginatively fusing digital sounds and orchestral–choral instrumentation, and recording with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and Hungarian Radio Choir.

Choosing his projects well, Kyd managed to get involved with some of the greatest series of the next decade, including Borderlands, State of Decay, and Warhammer. Most notably, though, he hitched his wagon to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Continuing to practise his trademark fusion, Kyd also exploited the varied historical and geographical settings in the series, drawing on a wide range of traditional and period styles - from Midde Eastern folk in the original to Renaissance polyphony in the sequel. 

In keeping with his hipster image, Kyd’s more leftfield musical influences include Ottorino Respighi, Igor Stravinsky and Jean-Michel Jarre, and many more. Their diverse musical styles intertwine in the Dane’s idiosyncratic work, flowing through that synthesis into the games that have now played an immeasurable part in the lives of millions of players for decades.
 

Michiru Yamane

In her three-decade career, Michiru Yamane has managed to assert herself not merely as a great video game composer but as one of the most distinctive in the field. As flexible a craftsperson as she doubtless is, adept at practising in jazz, techno and progressive-rock idioms, she has bossed the ‘Gothic’ corner of the gaming market, developing a classical vernacular with a characteristically macabre quality. It brings out the fear, horror and sense of impending doom in the games that she scores in a the most unmistakable, visceral way. 

Her long, winding journey in video game music began in 1988 at Konami, the developer of the Metal Gear franchise, and her early work there offers a masterclass in how to compose in the face of technical restrictions. Forced to use a device called the Famicom, which could only sustain three notes at once, Yamane, a classically trained musician used to the scope of a full orchestra, found herself frustrated by its limitations. But, taking inspiration from Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, which frequently utilise just two or three pitches at once, she began to relish the challenge posed by the hardware. In this period she scored a string of arcade games, sports games and shoot 'em ups, composing everything from brief victory jingles to highly synchronised underscore.

Demonstrating the last great composer–franchise partnership we’ll consider here, Yamane is best known for her work on the immense Castlevania series. The match made in heaven (or hell?) began in 1994 when, with several games in the franchise already released, Yamane wrote the music to Castlevania: Bloodlines, developed for the Sega Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). She collaborated very closely with producer Koji Igarashi to find the optimal musical accompaniment to the games’ vampiric themes. This would come in the shape of her signature, dark-orchestral idiom, which she integrated with the saga’s existing rock motifs. She effectively became the lead composer for the series, scoring eight more titles between 1997 and 2008, and making the most of the expanded recording possibilities brought by the upgrade to the technologically advanced PlayStation. 

In 2008 Yamane called time at Konami and joined the long line of video game composers plying their trade as freelancers. In the following years, in addition to noteworthy gaming commissions such as Skullgirls (2012) and two instalments in the Bloodstained franchise (2018–9) she has also worked on scores for film, television and anime series, and played a number of live concerts featuring arrangements of her game music, for which she will always remain most revered.
 

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Interested in similar articles? You can find them right here on the blog. Start with the series of ‘best composer’ articles mentioned above: find out about the greatest classical, medieval, women, modern and film composers. Best music composers compiles the best from each list - check it out to see if any video game composers were selected.