What a thrilling time to be a video game music fan, indeed! Earlier this year, the Recording Academy unveiled a new Grammy Award category to honor music written particularly for video games and interactive media.

This is the first time the Academy has recognized this type of music, showing the increasing popularity of gaming and the relevance of high-quality music in video games. This award was also created to highlight the rising trend of releasing video game soundtracks as solo albums.

Fast forward to the Grammy weekend in February 2023and, we see one of the best games of the year, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, produced by Ubisoft, earning the first-ever music award in the video game category at the Grammy Awards.

Stephanie Economou’s music for the legendary 2022 expansion of Valhalla, Dawn of Ragnarök, won in the newly created category of Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games & Other Interactive Media to take the prestigious award home.

Valhalla was in a great pool of competition though, as it beat out other candidates such as Alien’s Fireteam Elite, Call of Duty Vanguard, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Old World.

Video games have previously been acknowledged and awarded in categories other than the video game category at the Grammy Awards. For example, Civilization 4 received an award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) in 2011, Journey received an award for Best Score Soundtrack in 2013, and Kirby Super Star unexpectedly received an award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella last year.

It’s truly a wonderful category and we can’t wait to see which game takes the prize next year when the competition gets more intense as the year goes on! A great incentive for video game music producers to get their hands on one of the most illustrious music awards on the planet.