Austin Wintory on precursors to Sword of the Sea (Part 1)

Austin Wintory on precursors to Sword of the Sea (Part 1)

GRAMMY-nominated composer Austin Wintory shares his thoughts on recurring collaborations with soloists.

By Jerry Jeriaska of The Ongaku

Austin Wintory published the soundtrack for Sword of the Sea alongside the game in August 2025, featuring performances by frequent collaborators Tina Guo on cello, Kristin Naigus on drone flutes, and vocalist Malukah. It has since been nominated for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media at the 68th GRAMMY Awards. 

We spoke to him about the maturation of game development studio Giant Squid since its inception in 2013 in Santa Monica, California. In part 1 of the discussion, he reflects on the roles of participating soloists.

Sword of the Sea Original Soundtrack Album published via Austin Wintory's Bandcamp page

thatgamecompany's Journey was among the first video games to receive a Grammy award nomination from the Recording Academy when the category of Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media was introduced in 2014. It marked the first collaboration between Sword of the Sea staff members Austin Wintory as composer and Matt Nava as art director.

With the broad appeal of Journey's non-violent gameplay, coupled with an intuitive control scheme, thatgamecompany sought to foster widespread collaborative interactions over the PlayStation Network. Wintory comments that Journey "stripped down game mechanics to their absolute bare minimum."

Tina Guo's cello solos became a focal point of the music score's positive reception, imbuing that communal experience with emotional resonance. "Journey obviously traffics in its sense of isolation," Wintory says, "in the cathartic connection to a new person—a real human being you find."

Pre-orders are open for Sword of the Sea double LP, with a Laced-exclusive colour variant: https://lnk.to/sots-vinyl

flOw - A Journey for Solo Cello

Following Journey's launch, Sony published the soundtrack from thatgamecompany's previous title, flOw. Wintory added a bonus track featuring Journey soloist Tina Guo, combining elements of both projects.

He describes "Gratitude" from the album as "a Tina-centric cello version of music from flOw."

 

Guo, Nava, and Wintory collaborated on Journey, which began development in 2009

Serving as Giant Squid's founder and art director, Nava sought to differentiate the visual style of the studio's debut title Abzû from Journey, consciously maintaining that distance in the design of The Pathless. In his recent appearance on the Friends Per Second podcast, he said he went as far as "comically avoiding" use of the same colour palette.

Sword of the Sea's ambitions shrug off that anxiety of influence, boldly inviting comparisons. Stone monuments amidst the desert sand dunes evoke the visual design of Journey, while Guo's cello on the soundtrack is a further reminder of creative origins.

Of the cello's placement in Sword of the Sea, Wintory says, "It's nowhere near as central and it doesn't have a kind of symbolic role in the same way as the drone flute, or the piano, or the choirs. There were just a handful of places where I said, 'It would just be really nice to hear cello here!' That's kind of all it boiled down to."


flOw Original Video Game Soundtrack featured in PlayStation's 30th anniversary celebrations, featuring Tina Guo on "Gratitude"

thatgamecompany's motives were at times misinterpreted as something of a repudiation of the video game industry. Wintory posits an opposing view, and cites a moment in Giant Squid's Sword of the Sea in which the sound design consciously elaborates on that theme:

"In the aftermath of the initial release there was a bit of an assumption that somehow those of us that worked on it didn't like traditional games and that's why we made Journey.

"It all sprang from a kind of, 'What else is out there—what else can be done with this medium?' But that was coming from a broad love of the medium!

"I remember when we were working on flOw with Jenova [Chen] and Nick Clark, back twenty years ago, Jenova was saying that the only game that had the mechanics that he loved—that he was trying to figure out for flOw—was Grand Theft Auto. It was this idea of a kind of emergent difficulty based solely on how you behave, not based on going into menus and toggling difficulty settings.

"I feel like Sword of the Sea then says, 'Let's keep iterating on these kind of video gamey feelings and mechanics, and not feel afraid to go back into those.' There's a moment in the game, the first time you meet the merchant character—the vendor—you can hear the music that comes in there at the very tail-end. You kind of hear these very borderline chiptune sounds when we introduce that character.

"I loved that idea! That's why that's in there."

Abzû - The Kernel of a Theme

ABZU - Behind the Music - provides a glimpse into the recording process

In his blog post hosted on the Giant Squid website, Wintory describes a pivotal goal of his process—discovering the soul of the music score. He writes:

"When starting a new project, the first thing I tend to do is search for that kernel that forms the basis for everything that will come after."

Giant Squid's Abzû, launched in 2016, situates the player in the role of a diver, exploring waters teeming with aquatic life. A central mechanic involves paddling alongside creatures of the deep and occasionally hitching a ride. To situate the player in that underwater habitat, Wintory was drawn to the idea of "a big cluster of harps. We had seven of them, in the end.

"The choir was very specifically a very high-tilted choir—soprano, alto and upper voice tenors—so there was no 'bassy-ness' to it. Similarly, the harp has some low strings, but it's kind of a mid and high-range instrument by its nature.

"And, of course, Kristen Naigus playing oboe solos. From the very beginning I felt like oboe, for whatever reason—I don't have an intellectual reason for this—it felt like the oboe would be the equivalent to what Tina Guo's cello was in Journey. It's kind of a colour representative of the player, themselves.

"For the longest time on Abzû I was hellbent on only using that palette—I don't want to use anything orchestral. Then I just found there were a few places where nice big, lush strings and winds just seemed too right to ignore, so I finally caved.

"The original vision was something very restrained—literally just the harps, the choir and the oboe. There still are plenty of moments in the game that are essentially just that."

 

A custom-made traditional instrument featured on Sword of the Sea Original Soundtrack Album

"Because she plays hundreds of instruments, there's always a role," Wintory says of his collaborations with Kristin Naigus. "And usually she's a very important role.... She constantly is buying new instruments and sending me recordings of them. She started fixating on these multi-chamber drone flutes... And then she basically commissioned this instrument-builder to make her one."

For Sword of the Sea, Naigus recorded instruments associated with the character of the Wanderer—a former foe who crosses paths with the Wraith protagonist. The drone flute is "essentially omnipresent" in sequences where the central characters ride atop sea creatures, mirroring Abzû's celebration of aquatic life.

The Pathless - Familiar Foreign Tongues

Inside the layered, global music of The Pathless, via PlayStation Blog

Giant Squid's storytelling ambitions expanded in developing The Pathless, involving the recording of spoken dialog belonging to a fantasy in-game language. These lines were performed by voice actors Troy Baker, as the Godslayer, and Laura Bailey, as the Hunter.

Vocalist Malukah, previously featured in Wintory's score for The Banner Saga, performs lyrics in this same language over Sword of the Sea's end credits, intimating some shared history between the two game titles.

"To be clear, the language is mostly the invention of Matt and [producer] Patrick [Quah]," Wintory explains. "[Writer] Steve [Lerner] would write it in English and they would translate it... Matt was joking at one point, saying some of the phonemes for this language were developed to make the Godslayer sound maximally dangerous! It was interesting to then be bending those same phonemes into this more mythic sort of context."

Malukah previously collaborated with Wintory on The Banner Saga end credits theme "Onward"

In The Pathless, released in 2020, The Hunter and an eagle she befriends explore an open world environment, wherein progress toward completion of the game can be accomplished in an order determined by the player.

"There's boss fights," Wintory points out. "They're framed as cleansing a corrupted creature that's actually intrinsically beautiful and helpful, which is very much a continuity of what Abzû was getting at... The Pathless took those themes and imbued it with a much more traditional gameplay mechanic, and discovered that glorious sense of momentum in the process."

When The Hunter picks up speed, a "bounding layer" of percussion activates, yielding a more high-energy mix of instruments. Musical progression is reflected in the score upon purifying each of the island's plateaus. Separately, a soloist instrument is associated with each of the game's boss regions.

The interactive music system of The Pathless complements the open world design

Wintory mentions in his blog post:

"It should almost feel like a folk song from a culture we’ve never visited, and as a result, the melodies should feel as though they are settings of ancient forgotten poems."

To this end, Nyckelharpa, a Swedish instrument, is juxtaposed with "Turkish Oud, and a wide range of Eastern flutes and reeds." The Tuvan ensemble, Alash, performed the score's distinctive throat singing sessions—a symbolic tie to the traditional practice of Mongolian falconry.

Mirroring the dialog performed by the voice actors of The Pathless, Malukah's vocals factor into the game design as a manner of narrative exposition, as described by the composer:

"I love these kind of Greek chorus narrator roles. I did something similar on Assassin's Creed Syndicate, where every time we go up on the rooftop and you've passed a certain threshold in the story there's a chance of bringing in these soprano solos that are, essentially, explicitly narrating where you are in the overall story arc...

"I remember in one of those [Giant Squid weekly] meetings I said, "I have a kind of crazy idea—what if, at sort of the big chapter breaks and major moments, we use the music to augment that?

"I said [to Matt Nava], 'can you translate these kind of proverb-esque quasi-poetic lines from Steve? And I'd love to have Malukah sing them, so that she acts as a kind of overt narrator.'

"It was just one of those ideas that I thought could be quite cool. We see the character awaken, 'And from a drop of water a flame is lit.' It's an interesting image. And then she sings those exact words the moment you wake up."

Sword of the Sea features an array of vocals performed by three separate choirs. While the role of the piano can be viewed a stand-in for the player character of the Wraith, the choirs serve to dramatise the hero's journey. That dynamic will be the focus of Part 2.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Hades 2 has launched, featuring additional music co-composed by Supergiant Games Audio Director Darren Korb and Austin Wintory, with orchestral recordings conducted by Wintory at Abbey Road Studios. Towerborne by Stoic of The Banner Saga is currently in early access, featuring a music score by Wintory.

 

 

Austin Wintory is a composer and based in Los Angeles, California, and frequent collaborator of Giant Squid – austinwintory.com | Spotify Artist Page | X.com

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