The Music of Minecraft

At least 32 million people a day enjoy Lena Raine’s work. That’s about how many daily players of popular video game Minecraft there are. And Raine’s music is part of the iconic soundtrack to one of the industry’s most played games (turned into a box office smash movie).

If Minecraft was the only thing on her resume, that would be quite a legacy. But Raine’s success reaches well beyond that. The Cornish College of the Arts alum is an award-winning and highly sought-after composer who also has developed her own games in addition to being an author.

A Seattle native, Raine studied music composition at Cornish. With fewer options to break into the gaming world when she graduated in 2006 than there are today, Raine got her foot in the door by taking a quality assurance job at Nintendo while continuing to produce and release her own music. Her break came when she was hired by Bellevue-based game developer ArenaNet as a designer.

Working with writers on game content, she mentioned she was a composer in her spare time and asked to try writing music for some of the content she was working on. That eventually became part of her job duties.

Raine’s star really began to rise while she spent six years working as a designer and soundtrack composer on the very popular Guild Wars 2 game. Leaving ArenaNet, Raine spread her wings in a number of areas. Composing music for the game Celeste—regarded by some game journalists as one of the best games of all time—she was nominated for Best Score/Music at the 2018 Game Awards and for a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and won American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Video Game Score of the Year in 2019.

That same year she worked on the music for Steven Universe: The Movie and released her debut album, Oneknowing. Raine says that it was her album, not her previous game work, that led her to Minecraft.

“The people that worked at Mojang, the studio that does Minecraft, heard that album and then reached out to me on Bandcamp," Raine said in the No Tags podcast in 2024. “And so that was actually a result of me doing my own independent music, outside of games.”

On Minecraft, Raine composed almost 20 new pieces of music for various updates to the game. In 2021, she created the soundtrack for the adventure game Chicory: A Colorful Tale and developed the game Anothereal through her own development studio. In all, she’s released 11 albums/singles and has contributed to more than 25 soundtracks.