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James Hannigan is a BAFTA-winning composer with credits spanning games, television, audio drama and other media. His work includes entries in major game franchises such as Harry Potter, RuneScape, Dead Space, Warhammer, Evil Genius, The Lord of the Rings, Theme Park and Command & Conquer, among many others. In audio drama, among his credits are the lavishly cast, landmark series The Sandman – Amazon/Audible’s best-selling Original – along with the award-winning Alien series, Discworld, Neverwhere, Good Omens, DC’s Kingdom Come, and Harry Potter audiobooks read by Stephen Fry. A five-time BAFTA nominee, an IFMCA Award winner for EA’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and, more recently, a Webby Award recipient for The Sandman: Act II – featuring “The Song of Orpheus” sung by Regé-Jean Page – he has recorded world-class orchestras at studios such as Abbey Road, AIR and Skywalker Sound. His music, from Red Alert 3’s viral “Soviet March” to the RuneScape: The Orchestral Collection, together with over fifty AAA games and countless placements across television, has accumulated billions of streams and listening hours worldwide.
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Hannigan is also a conference founder and essayist, with work published by Classic FM, Pixel Addict, DEVELOP Magazine and Cambridge University Press, and blogs occasionally on subjects such as retro technology and the implications of generative AI on the arts. A longstanding BAFTA member and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he has been interviewed by BBC Radio, Classic FM, Sky TV, IGN, Forbes and MusicRadar, and in 2012 was made a subject of BAFTA’s Conversations With Composers series held at the Royal Albert Hall.
His television scoring work has included seasons of Primeval for BBC America, while his music has been licensed for use in an enormous range of shows, from Top Gear and The Grand Tour to Emily in Paris and Saturday Night Live. Recent projects are The Sandman: Act III, DC’s Kingdom Come, Steelrising, Evil Genius 2, Call of Antia and unannounced projects for Amazon.
Other credits include award-winning entries in the FIFA, F1, Space Hulk, Art Academy, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Grand Prix game series; titles such as Freelancer, The Darkening (featuring Christopher Walken, Clive Owen and John Hurt), Catwoman, Reign of Fire, Infestation, Brute Force, Theme Park World, Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, Conquest, Dead Space 3, Cutthroat Island, Flight of the Amazon Queen, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix through to The Deathly Hallows — along with the BAFTA-nominated Evil Genius and the pioneering interactive score of Republic: The Revolution, designed by Demis Hassabis (later CEO of Google DeepMind).
A number of his tracks can also be heard in the Super Smash Bros. and Terraria franchises, and his earliest credits also include sound design for films such as the Golden Reel-nominated Lost in Space.
“Spaaaaaaaace!.”
– TIM CURRY (COMMAND & CONQUER: RED ALERT 3)