Following EA’s shutdown of BioWare, the Journey composer reveals his pitch: a love letter filled with synthesizers that he saw as his personal white whale.
Composer Austin Wintory was once in negotiations to contribute the soundtrack for Mass Effect 5. After EA shut down BioWare and scrapped the game, he has now published his drafts from that time online.
You may recognize Wintory’s compositions from titles such as Journey and Sword of the Sea, as well as other games, movies, and TV series. Whether he would have actually been awarded the contract, however, remains unclear.
“My White Whale”: Austin Wintory Shares 22 Minutes of Music from His Dream Project
The roughly 22 minutes of audio he’s released already sound extremely promising. “Working on Mass Effect 5 was the biggest dream project of my career, my white whale,” the composer explains in the video description of his YouTube upload. “It’s my absolute favorite franchise. Over the past few years, I’ve had serious discussions with BioWare and EA about getting involved.”
“My proposal was to use the masterful score by Jack Wall and Sam Hulick from the first game as a foundation and build upon it: with an even deeper use of real analog synthesizers and a tightly integrated orchestra. First and foremost, however, it was meant to be a love letter—much like my approach to the Aliens series with Fireteam Elite.”
Composed Without Prior Knowledge: A Painful Farewell to BioWare
His enthusiasm led him to produce this amount of music to convince EA and BioWare—even though he had been completely unaware of the project up to that point. According to him, it is a “pure musical exploration.”
“Finding out, just like everyone else, that EA wasn’t just canceling the project but shutting down BioWare entirely was a deeply painful loss,” he adds. “It hurts to see dear friends lose their jobs and this celebrated series seemingly disappear forever.”
In social media posts, Wintory expresses his hope that he can do justice to the work of Wall and Hulick. He sees his compositions as a musical tribute to the franchise. “So here it is… Thanks again to my friends at BioWare and EA. It was a true privilege to even be allowed to dream in your sandbox.”
