Noted video game composer Austin Wintory is celebrating his birthday by making the entire contents of his Bandcamp page free from now until Monday. The composer is known for the likes of flOw, Journey, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and the recently-released ABZÛ.
Wintory’s catalog was already a great deal. He offers a pretty unique $25 subscription that gets his entire back catalog of projects, along with everything he does for the next year. But for the rest of the weekend, you can pick up his collected work on a pay-what-you-want basis, even if what you want to pay nothing.
It says a lot about Wintory and his work that most of his music winds up in contemplative, almost meditative games. It also says a lot that he’s in many games that feature music in an enormous way by design. In addition to awards within the game industry itself, his work has won wide acclaim in the world at large. His score for Journey marked the first time ever that a video game score was nominated for the “Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media” Grammy. He was nominated for a BAFTA for flOw, and won two of them for Journey. As perceptions of gaming slowly change in the public eye, Wintory’s contemplative music has been at the forefront of that change in many ways.
If you do feel like making a payment, all of the proceeds will go to Education Through Music – Los Angeles. Wintory’s association with the charity is longstanding, and even on a normal day, a quarter of his Bandcamp income goes to them.
