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James Hannigan is a BAFTA award-winning composer and producer with a career spanning AAA games, television, film, installations and audio drama. His work includes entries in game franchises such as Harry Potter, RuneScape, Dead Space, Warhammer, Evil Genius, The Lord of the Rings, Theme Park and Command & Conquer, among others. In full-cast audio drama, among his credits are landmark series The Sandman – Amazon/Audible’s best-selling Original – the Audie award-winning Alien series, Discworld, Neverwhere, DC’s Kingdom Come and the Harry Potter audiobooks. | LISTEN
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 with world-class orchestras at studios such as Abbey Road, AIR and Skywalker Sound. His music, from Red Alert 3’s viral “Soviet March” to RuneScape: The Orchestral Collection, together with over fifty AAA games and countless placements across television, has accumulated billions of streams and listening hours worldwide.
Among his television credits are series such as Primeval (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 include The Sandman: Act III, DC’s Kingdom Come, Steelrising, Evil Genius 2, Call of Antia and unannounced projects for Amazon.
More credits
Hannigan’s work has included entries in the FIFA, F1, Art Academy, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Grand Prix game series, along with Command and Conquer titles Red Alert 3 (featuring Tim Curry and J.K. Simmons) and Tiberian Twilight.
Spanning over thirty years, his credits also include Wing Commander spin-offs Freelancer and Privateer 2: The Darkening – featuring Christopher Walken, Clive Owen and John Hurt – as well as titles such as Space Hulk, Transformers Universe, Catwoman, Reign of Fire, Infestation, Brute Force, Theme Park World (BAFTA Award, 2000), Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, Conquest, Dead Space 3, Cutthroat Island, Flight of the Amazon Queen, and the record-breaking MMORPG RuneScape.
Further credits range from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix through to The Deathly Hallows, alongside the BAFTA-nominated, pioneering interactive scores of Evil Genius and Republic: The Revolution – the latter designed by Demis Hassabis (now CEO of Google DeepMind). A number of his tracks have also appeared 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.
Hannigan is also a conference founder and writer, 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 impact 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 work has been performed in concerts around the world, including performances in the UK with the The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. He is represented in the UK by COOL Music.
“Spaaaaaaaace!.”
– TIM CURRY (COMMAND & CONQUER: RED ALERT 3)