Who composed Spyro the Dragon's music?

Copeland came to games from film. After the Police split he built a second career scoring movies, Wall Street among them, and Insomniac's Spyro became his longest running screen job: the original trilogy, then a fourth game, Enter the Dragonfly, with collaborators joining on the later titles. His method, described in interviews across the years, never varied: play the levels first, absorb each world's atmosphere, then write music complicated enough in its harmonies and basslines to stay fresh through the dozens of hearings a platform game demands.

The workload was the story. For the series' 25th anniversary Copeland told Screen Rant he had little time for a creative process at all: the job was, in his phrase, churn and burn, the equivalent of a quadruple album of backing tracks every summer for four years. The pressure, he concluded, raised the quality: there was no time to second guess, so the drummer's instincts went straight onto the record. The contrast with film work was the liberation: no dialogue to dodge, no single hit point to land, just worlds to fill.

The music outlived the original hardware. When the trilogy was remade as Reignited in 2018, Copeland returned to help remaster his tracks and composed a new title piece, Tiger Train, woven from favourite themes of the original scores, with the option to play the remake to the original music restored. And in concert halls he now performs orchestral pieces derived from Spyro between the Police arrangements: the summer job became part of the life's work.