While young Adrien’s first forays into video games took place as he marveled at the levels of Shinobi on the Master System and the high-speed runs of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, it was above all the Final Fantasy series on the PS1—and more specifically, the seventh, eighth, and ninth installments—that ignited the first spark of what would soon become an unconditional love for video games and video game music.

Nobuo Uematsu’s compositions and orchestrations still resonate in his head today, prompting him to revisit them time and again.

During that time—the mid-1990s—Adrien also discovered music by learning to play the piano, tackling a mostly classical repertoire, which proved very useful for honing his sense of melody. In the evenings, he would play casual games of Age of Empires II on his mother’s Windows 98 computer, discovering a passion for managing and developing an empire—often Egyptian or Japanese. On weekends, he would walk alongside his father and Sir Daniel Fortesque through the dark levels of MediEvil.

A few years later, middle school and his father’s love of music led him to explore the rock scene of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s and to take up the guitar, all while racing at full speed on the tracks of Crash Team Racing, not to mention hunting down egg thieves with Spyro the Dragon and catching as many Pokémon as possible on his GBA.

A second turning point came when Adrien started college and discovered the jazz music of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk while exploring the wastelands of Fallout 3 and the wilds of Skyrim, traveling through the orchestral and ambient soundscapes of Inon Zur and Jeremy Soule.

Fascinated by the harmonic possibilities explored by jazz, he decided to study it for two years at the Caen Conservatory, passionately following the impressionistic paths pioneered by pianist Bill Evans.

At the same time, Adrien began playing in pop, post-punk, shoegaze, and electronic music bands as a keyboardist, drummer, and backing vocalist (Gandi Lake, Goldwave, Veik, Rouperou, La Houle), honing his skills in sound synthesis, recording, and album production. At that time, Adrien was looting like crazy in the deserts of Borderlands, helping Altaïr carry out his assassinations in the Holy Land to the rhythm of Jesper Kyd’s music, and searching for a way to escape the sprawling Rapture—the fantastical city from BioShock—amid the pounding violins of Gary Schyman.

With several albums and tours under his belt with various bands, Adrien launched Tularosa in 2023—a live music-and-visuals project that demystifies the Western genre by telling a story of friendship between a man and a horse, alongside guitarist Inaniel and comic book artist Loïc Sécheresse— followed by Oroville in 2025, the second installment focusing on the conquest of the West and the last Yahis—the last “wild” Native Americans discovered in 1911 in California.

Alongside these early experiments with live music-and-image performances, Adrien decided to return to his first instrument, the piano, recording a series of solo and ambient pieces dedicated to the mystery of this “king of instruments.” Floraison and Crepuscùlo are the first examples of this.

Meanwhile, in 2024, Adrien decided to travel to Japan—the land of his first game consoles, his first video games, and his first video game soundtracks—without realizing that this trip would reignite his love and passion for video game music and, above all, his deep desire to compose it, following in the footsteps of his childhood idols: Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Shimomura, and many others.

Returning with the firm conviction that he would make this his career, Adrien Legrand has since been working on building a portfolio of compositions created for imaginary games—games yet to be imagined.