ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE recruits Lindsey Stirling
Bandai Namco and PROJECT ACES have enlisted violinist Lindsey Stirling to perform Hortus Regis Alti as Joker Flight's third pilot, days before ACE COMBAT 8 lands.
Bandai Namco has turned to one of gaming's best-known violinists to sell the sound of ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE. Lindsey Stirling performs Hortus Regis Alti — Latin for “The Garden of the High King” — a tribute to the game's score that went live on her own YouTube channel ahead of the full launch.
What the collaboration actually is
Stirling appears in character as Tasha Severskaya, Joker Flight's third pilot, bringing her jewelled violin into Strangereal. Bandai Namco says she sings and plays the piece dressed as the pilot, interpreting the “twisting, spiralling flight of a fighter jet streaking through the heavens”.
It is not her first trip into game music. The publisher points to her rendition of Flame of Hope from Tales of Arise, performed live at Gamescom 2021's Opening Night Live in costume as Shionne Vymer Imeris Daymore. Since 2010 she has built a catalogue of gold and platinum records, plus roughly 2.2 billion Spotify streams and more than four billion YouTube views.
Why the music matters to ACE COMBAT
Music has flown alongside ACE COMBAT for more than 30 years, and the new game leans on it deliberately: several of its characters are musicians, and Bandai Namco frames the score as the thread that connects comrades, national identity and the pilots who did not come home.
The tribute lands at the end of a packed launch week. ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE arrives on 2 October for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X and digital PC, and Digital Deluxe owners have already been playing in early access, and the team has spent the week answering questions about the ACE COMBAT ZERO: THE BELKAN WAR pre-order bonus.
Our opinion
Stirling is an unusually good fit here, and not only because she has already cosplayed her way through a game-music performance at Gamescom. ACE COMBAT sells the romance of flight, and a performer who plays while dancing is a more honest picture of that than another orchestral trailer. The risk is that the collaboration reads as marketing bolted onto launch week; the detail that saves it is Bandai Namco's own note that several ACE COMBAT 8 characters are musicians, which ties the video to the story rather than to the storefront. The pre-order mess is the part of this launch that still needs an actual fix, and an apology plus “we cannot guarantee any changes” is not one.