Journey Composer Austin Wintory Was in Talks to Score Mass Effect 5, Shares 20 Minutes of the Unused Music
More details about the cancelled Mass Effect 5 keep surfacing in the weeks since BioWare’s shutdown, and the latest one comes from an unexpected corner: the music department. Composer Austin Wintory, best known for his Grammy-nominated score for Journey as well as his work on Stray Gods and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, has revealed that he was in serious conversations with BioWare and EA to score the game, reportedly titled Mass Effect: Universe. Now that the project is gone for good following EA’s shutdown of BioWare, Wintory has released nearly 20 minutes of the music he wrote as part of his pitch.
A Love Letter to the Original Trilogy’s Score
Wintory explained that he had been quietly working toward the job for the past couple of years, culminating in an elaborate surprise production he recorded last year: close to 20 minutes of music built with synths, vocals, and a full orchestra in Los Angeles. He said he had not yet been given any story details for the in-development game, so the pieces were pure speculative exploration based on the series’ history rather than material tied to a specific narrative beat. His pitch, by his own description, was to treat the original trilogy’s score by Jack Wall and Sam Hulick as a foundation and build outward from there, leaning further into analog synths while weaving the orchestra in more tightly, all in service of what he described as a love letter to the series first and foremost.
“Working on Mass Effect 5 was my career’s biggest dream project, my white whale.”
Austin Wintory, Composer (Journey, Stray Gods)
Wintory said his pitch was meant as a tribute to the Mass Effect trilogy’s existing score, not a replacement for it.
Tracks Named After the Series’ Biggest Moments
Wintory shared the music as a standalone YouTube upload titled My Ideas for Mass Effect 5, presenting it as the soundtrack that could have been. The track titles lean heavily on established Mass Effect vocabulary, including a piece called The Legacy of Shepard and a more upbeat, combat-focused cue titled Hold the Line, alongside others referencing the series’ relays and scanning mechanics. It remains unclear whether Wintory had been formally signed on for the job, as his own description frames the discussions as ongoing rather than finalized at the time EA shut the project down.
A Reminder of What EA Walked Away From
Wintory closed his message by thanking BioWare and EA’s music department for the chance to explore the setting at all, calling it a privilege to have gotten even that far. His post adds to a string of behind-the-scenes details that have emerged from former Mass Effect: Universe collaborators since the shutdown, from leaked trailer footage to descriptions of the game’s planned choice-tracking systems, each one underlining just how far along the cancelled project reportedly was.
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Picture Source: Austin Wintory, Electronic Arts / BioWare
