GA M E AUDIO NETWOR K GUILD
COMPOSING FOR GAMES, TV, SPACE AND BEYOND! A DISCUSSION WITH PENKA KOUNEVA Penka Kouneva is a Hollywood composer whose music has been called “fantastic” (Billboard) and “breathtaking” (NPR). Her credits include Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands and League of Legends, a Harry Potter VR immersive experience, a $30M multimedia exhibit Heroes and Legends at the Kennedy Space Center, numerous mobile games including Rollers of the Realm (Phantom Compass), Cookie Jam 2 (Jam City), ElemenTerra VR game (Freeform Labs) and Mayhem (Chobolabs); and the CW episodic TV series Pandora co-scored with Joe Kraemer. Penka’s film scores include the features Devil’s Whisper, Encounter (Sony Pictures), Aga (the 2020 Oscar contender in Foreign Languages) and the award-winning documentary Zero Gravity. Penka’s composer awards include: Sundance Fellowship, Distinguished Duke Alumna, and the Recognition Award from Game Audio Network Guild. In 2019 Penka was commissioned by Los Angeles Philharmonic for the concert America In Space at the Hollywood Bowl and in January 2020, Penka scored Olay’s Super Bowl TV commercial campaign “Make Space For Women.” G.A.N.G. Staff (GS): You’ve worked on many projects over the years from indie games to AAA games. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to a career creating audio content for games? PENKA: I arrived in Los Angeles in 2000 driven by a passion to work on visual media and to tell stories. My background is classical and eclectic, which opened the biggest door – orchestrating for Steve Jablonsky. In 2008, he gave me a break scoring video games by plugging me to co-compose Transformers and Prince of Persia. GS: You got your start in the game industry as an orchestrator for Steve Jablonsky on the Gears of War franchise. Please share how your career has evolved since then? PENKA: From that point on, I immersed myself in gameplay, and also in composing, learning, orchestrating, and meeting game developers. Friends 20
hired me to score their mobile and PC games. VR is an exciting field and I started scoring immersive VR experiences. My biggest jobs in that field are a NASA theme park Heroes and Legends, and more recently, a Harry Potter immersive experience (which I co-composed with Reuven Herman during the lockdown). My artist album The Woman Astronaut
inspired various creative people to hire me (Joe Kraemer invited me to co-score Pandora, a SciFi episodic series on the CW network; director Paul Salamoff invited me to score his SciFi drama feature film Encounter that Sony released). Through my leadership and friendships in the game biz I scored four mobile games with a studio in Seattle
