The 2023 Grammy Awards took place last night, awarding the best video game soundtrack for the first time. The big winner is Stephanie Economou for her work on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, specifically the Dawn of Ragnarok DLC. And this is only after a small oversight of the presenter.
Despite many compositions of undeniable quality, it took decades for video games to earn a place at the Grammy Awards. Indeed, the award ceremony for the best musical artist of the year has long avoided Wednesday, until 2021, the date of the first video game nomination. It was Kirby back then—more specifically, an arrangement of Meta Knight’s Revenge straight out of a 1996 game.
If the latter did not win that year, he apparently convinced the academy, as the following year Christopher Tin won a Grammy for Best Arrangement for Baba Yetu from the Civilization IV soundtrack. This is the first time a video game has won a Grammy, albeit indirectly. That was enough to launch an entirely new category in 2023, this time entirely dedicated to video game music.
On the same topic – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: even on the GeForce RTX 3090 the game does not run at 4K/60 FPS!
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the first video game to win a Grammy.
“Best Video Game and Interactive Media Score” is the title of this category, with the first nominees being Austin Wintory for Aliens: Battlegroup Elite, Bear McCreary for Call of Duty: Vanguard, Richard Jacques for Guardians of the Galaxy, Christopher Tin for Guardians of the Galaxy. Old World and Stephanie Economou for Dawn of Ragnarok, DCL for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
You already saw it in the title, so it was the latter that won this first award dedicated to video games. During her speech, she especially thanked all those who have fought for years for video game music to finally be recognized at the same level as her peers. However, it was not this moment that Internet users remembered, but the announcement of the leading big winner.
This one clearly had no idea who this strange Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was, which he also spoke in a very random way. How to amuse many viewers.