Matt Uelmen and the Music of Diablo

This piece follows Matt Uelmen through two books — David L. Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen, Book I and Book II (BI / BII below). Every quotation is kept in the original English with a page reference; the Chinese edition of the same material lives on the Chinese side of this site.

The page numbers are PDF pages, not printed pages. Passages where the author is describing rather than quoting are marked as narration.

1. The Man Who Kept Calling

In 1993, a fresh Georgetown graduate from the small California town of Lomita decided he was going to write music for games. He had no portfolio and no contacts. So he looked up phone numbers and started calling.

The first call that went anywhere reached Matt Householder, a vice president at the publisher DTMC:

"Sitting in my office one day at [Nintendo publisher] DTMC, I answered the phone to a cold-call from Matt Uelmen, who was looking for a job in games. He told me that he'd called Nintendo of America and they'd given him DTMC's phone number. He explained that he had no experience and wanted to compose game music."

— Matt Householder, vice president of development, DTMC(BI, p.75)

Householder found him obviously smart and entertaining, and passed Max Schaefer's contact along — though privately he thought the kid had little chance, having no experience in games or electronic music production. Uelmen called Condor anyway. Then he called again, for weeks.

"Matt Uelmen's persistence was legendary. He'd call all the time and say, 'Give me a job!' I still have his original mix tape that he gave me. He would call over and over again for weeks. Finally I gave in and said, 'Fine.' I mean, at the same time, he was obviously talented, so I liked him."

— David Brevik, co-founder, Condor(BI, p.74)

What he was asking for was, in 1994, close to absurd: a full-time composer on staff at a studio of a dozen people.

"In those days, having your own musician on staff was unheard of. Either you outsourced your music or just did whatever, but you didn't have an actual freaking music guy. It was too expensive, relatively speaking, to what your team needed."

— Rick Seis, programmer, Condor(BI, p.74)

Growing up in the small town of Lomita, California, Matt Uelmen's interest in video games blossomed alongside his talent as a musician. He started gaming and playing music at a young age, switching off between piano lessons and devouring stacks of Atari cartridges. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1993, he set his sights on making music for games.(BI, p.75)

His 'music room' was a converted storage closet. He was rarely in it.

Matt Uelmen was more likely to be found milling around the main room than closed up in his closet-sized music studio writing tunes.(BI, p.145)

"I've always been one of the worst roamers. Generally, even when I'm at my most productive, it usually happens in one intense three-hour chunk. For the rest of the day, I'll kick around ideas or work on smaller-scale things, but I'm able to be a major distraction for everyone else. This is partially why Runic Games doesn't mind having me a thousand miles away from the studio in my current job."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.145)

Sound effects were his too. The crisp, hollow crunch of a shattering skeleton was Uelmen dropping pencils in the office.

"The feeling when you hit him and he shattered, which was a sound effect Uelmen made just by dropping pencils—the whole [sequence] was so satisfying and set the bar for the rest of the monsters and combat."

— Erich Schaefer(BI, p.163)

He also gave himself a business-card title.

"Commissioner of Funk."

— Matt Uelmen, Commissioner of Funk, Condor(BI, p.193)

Unable to keep up with his new friends' skills in games like NHL '94, Uelmen built up a unique reputation around the office.(BI, p.76)

2. Tristram: the Marina, a 12-String, and Four 'Cannots'

Once the game was greenlit, the first thing he did was ask Ken Williams for money to buy real equipment.

Getting the Gear, Then Two Bad Months

"I told Ken Williams I needed actual musical gear. It [composing Diablo's soundtrack] was really a process of grinding until things stuck. The first couple of months of attempts were pretty bad, though I think I knew I wanted to have acoustic guitar as a centerpiece for any kind of town setting.

The main piece of gear was an Ensoniq ASR-10 [keyboard sampler]. That was the core tool for the making of that soundtrack, and we actually got a good discount on it, because Ensoniq was trying to market sound cards in that era, and so developers could buy their musical gear near wholesale prices."

— Matt Uelmen, composer, Condor(BI, p.170)

The sampler was used in the simplest possible way: he recorded himself playing instruments, then rearranged those recordings into tracks. His sound library was his own hands.

Before writing anything he worked out the emotional gap between the two halves of the game — the dungeon, where danger could rear up at any moment, and the town, where players let their guard down.

The Marina, the 12-String, and Four 'Cannots'

To get an idea for the mood he needed to set, Uelmen studied the atmospheric disparity between dungeons and towns. Down in the dark, danger reared its head at a moment's notice. Up in town, players let down their guard and moseyed around.(BI, p.170)

Daily, Uelmen walked the shore along the marina. Stretching out with his twelve-string, he watched boats bob along the water and strummed, playing with different sounds and moods.(BI, p.171)

"I think the sound of the 12-string dictated a good deal of the approach Tristram's tune ended up having. The style of it was really more created by what it couldn't be: it couldn't be too overtly country or bluegrass, it couldn't be too obviously Latin, and I didn't want something that was too faux-medieval, so it ended up somewhere in between all of those things."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, pp.170–171)

David Brevik was the one who had to sign off on it.

"If you were to go into Tristram and hear happy-go-lucky music, it just wouldn't work. It's like a horror movie: it's all about the atmosphere, the music, the sound, and how that creates feeling.

I thought Matt did a perfect job of balancing dark, eerie, moody, and a little bit of light because of the string guitar. It's got kind of that feeling of lightness to the tone, but it's also kind of sad and disturbing, kind of haunting."

— David Brevik(BI, p.171)

Cain's legends and that line — stay awhile and listen — set a good deal of the mood. What nailed the town down was the music.

Uelmen's final product washed over players each time they set foot in Tristram to repair armor, hawk goods they didn't need, browse new wares, and let Pepin heal their hurts.(BI, p.171)

3. Gothic Horror, and Burying the Wavetable Era

The town was done. The dungeons were not. He tried epic first — tracks worthy of a fantasy adventure — and it did not fit.

Not Epic Fantasy — Gothic Horror

It was gothic horror, a new type of game that demanded a new type of musical score.(BI, p.221)

"I don't think that the composition process was as linked to each particular background as one might imagine. What became the opening cathedral theme was actually intended to be something like a final boss fight theme.

The stylistic approach is pretty similar throughout the soundtrack. It generally consists of 70 to 110 second chunks that fade into each other, with more metered and focused material, like something with a strong beat or bass line, generally alternating with slightly more abstract 'horror'-type material, like synthesizer cluster chords and distorted sound effects."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, pp.221–222)

"I definitely felt that I could become a little more aggressive [with Diablo's musical score] as the player descended through the level types, and knew that I wanted to put the choral sound a little more up-front in the final level. [...] Making the music more primitive, with more basic structures, was an easy call for accompanying that."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.330)

"I think you always want to take at least 20 seconds to establish a new environment when you're writing [music] for a game interior."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.330)

Playing through each new build of the game and peering over artists' shoulders as they worked gave Uelmen some direction. Holing up in his cramped noise room, he powered on his Ensoniq ARS-10 and mixed and matched samples until he hit on themes that worked.(BI, p.222)

In the background, the fruits of Uelmen's labor complemented Erich's hellish visuals: a low drone punctured the bubble of silence and rose in pitch while drums boomed and crashed.(BI, p.223)

Mono, 22K, and the Wavetable Era

"A funny and somewhat ironic thing about the original Diablo soundtrack was how liberating it was to make it all mono and 22K. When the entire top quarter of the harmonic spectrum is missing, white noise isn't such a concern!"

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.329)

"I'm most proud of helping to bury the wavetable era with a shovel to the back of the head. I think Diablo made a nice statement about putting digital audio soundtracks front-and-center and helped end that period where a better sound card meant better MIDI fonts and hence better music. There was something deeply annoying and undemocratic about that world, and I'm glad I helped kill it."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.348)

"I don't like to see any particular genre become too defined or common. I'm proud of the fact that we did give a nice horror twist to high fantasy in the original Diablo [...] Things need a twist, or they can descend into predictability and cliché pretty quickly."

— Matt Uelmen(BI, p.348)

4. Forty Months, Eighty Minutes

When Diablo shipped, the team rested. He ran experiments — new tools, and a different idea of what a game score could be than 'six loops'.

The Break: New Tools, a New Approach

"Matt Uelmen, Blizzard North's composer, conducted experiments in his noise room, a storage-closet-turned-laboratory where he strummed guitars and recorded samples. He had spent the past two months experimenting in Gigasampler, a software suite that lets musicians record samples of instruments. Using Gigasampler, he could arrange a virtual orchestra and blend sounds any way he saw fit. When Uelmen wasn't concocting aural delights, he studied music. One of his goals for Diablo II was to compose a dynamic score that ebbed and flowed as players moved from place to place."

— narration (BII, p.52)

Six Tracks, and a Self-Critique

"He admired what Uelmen had done in the first game, but noted—and Uelmen tended to agree—that the game lacked aural variety in each scene. There were six main tracks: the title theme, Tristram's motif, and a track for each of the four dungeon environments."

— narration in the book, referring to Jon Stone (BII, p.221)

"It's more like a movie set where you need to create the entire sound environment instead of letting it follow naturally from the world's architecture. You need to place each sound where you want it to be heard."

— Jon Stone(BII, p.221)

"Most Hollywood composers would have a big laugh at the idea that making eighty minutes of music over forty months is stressful, even with a few hundred sound effects thrown in. Having creative control and no one in between me and upper management was the opposite of burnout-inducing. [...] it certainly helped that I had substantial work done in the first year or so of the project, just going off of genre descriptions for later acts."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.199)

"If you're working on something exciting, long hours should be a pleasure. It may sound counterintuitive, but I'm a real believer in the idea that the best stuff is created when you're able to have a little bit of objectivity and look at it from the consumer or gamer's perspective. If you just keep hacking away until that person is satisfied, it is hard to go too wrong."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.199)

"Working with Scott and Jonathan was amazing. I was incredibly lucky to have that experience. Our backgrounds just meshed extremely well: two out of three of us had a rock music background, two out of three had some training as composers, two out of three of us had a strong technical audio background, so the combination was really magic."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.220)

Five Seconds of Percussion, Long Crossfades

"The solution we hit upon was long cross fades between music tracks where the beginning of each track would be all percussion so you wouldn't have a jarring juxtaposition of two keys on top of each other. As the melody from the previous track faded out, the percussion intro of the new track would fade in. That was how we worked around the fact that we couldn't really predict when, exactly, the player would initiate a transition between levels."

— Jon Stone(BII, pp.222–223)

"The composers—usually Matt Uelmen—begin each track with five seconds of percussion and then seamlessly flow in the next track."

— narration (BII, p.223)

"I can say that I've always felt like I needed the discipline of a project to really grow in terms of my musicianship. The transition to Diablo II—where I needed to do an action pastoral track, something vaguely Arabic, something vaguely tropical, et cetera—was a good incentive to explore new sounds."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.223)

One physical condition came with it: when the studio moved to San Mateo in 1999, he was one of the reasons.

"Matt [Uelmen] needed a larger space for all his instruments and recording equipment, and away from other people who'd mind the noise. We needed a bigger server room, a game room, that kind of stuff."

— Stieg Hedlund(BII, p.170)

"There were only two sound guys. We were able to split our time and work on both. There wasn't really a choice. The sound department, you can look at it like a service industry. Every project needs sounds recorded, and if there's only two guys or one guy doing it, especially if there are multiple projects, you're always busy, you're always working on every project."

— Scott Petersen(BII, p.283)

Watermelons, Wine Glasses, a Closet

Between them they had thousands of library sounds on CD-ROM and it was still not enough, so they walked to the supermarket, filled a cart with melons and vegetables, wrapped the produce in saran wrap and destroyed their groceries in front of a microphone. The meaty, hollow pop of a watermelon was, to Scott Petersen, exactly a zombie skull caving in.

"That was the basis for almost all of the melee damage sounds for Diablo II. It was a blast. You just find yourself getting maniacal because the process of recording is a lot like a performance. You try to get the right sound out of the object. That's sort of a musical experience whether it's a drum, or a chunk of wood, or you're hacking and slashing on a turkey carcass, which is one of the things we had—you just try and put your best effort into it so you get the best recording out of it."

— Scott Petersen(BII, p.220)

"Every now and then, he'd pick up his guitar and strum a dramatic chord while singing 'Kill the monster, kill the monster.'"

— narration (BII, p.221)

He created the sound by purchasing dozens of wine glasses and tapping objects against them until he hit on just the right note.(BII, p.221)

Diablo II offered no simple way to link audio to visual cues, leaving North's team to improvise by creating a loop of footsteps that played according to a set rhythm. They tweaked the loop over and over, playing the game until the footsteps matched each character's movements.(BII, p.222)

5. First Time on Paper — and the Player's Side

In the spring of 2000, with the base game's score finished, he wrote music down on paper for the first time.

Bratislava: Scoring for an Orchestra

"My skills had a way of growing with our resources. Even if I'd had the ability to record a full orchestra and choir at a beautiful studio and had every sample library and synth out there at my fingertips back in 1995, I would have had no clue what to do with them."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.296)

He spent the spring of 2000 researching orchestras and landed on the Slovak Radio Philharmonic in Bratislava, conducted by Kirk Trevor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. He wrote and revised the score through the autumn; the orchestra recorded it the following January.

"It was a pretty short soundtrack. A lot of it was fairly derivative of Gustav Holst and Richard Wagner, which for me was kind of a safe thing to do in terms of, if you know a certain sound works, then your first time out recording with an orchestra, it's pretty dumb to try reading at the wheel, and I definitely didn't try to read at the wheel in terms of my approach."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.297)

"It was good for me to just get out of the sample-and-army-of-guitars-and-synthesizer world and expand my musicianship by putting it on paper. I really made it a point the first couple times I went to Bratislava to just do things strictly on paper without any kind of midi preview file, just so I could learn as much as possible about the process."

— Matt Uelmen(BII, p.297)

The Player's Side

The winner of the official 'Tristram's Tune' contest, René de Hoog of DiabloFans.com, wrote:

"I have a terrible confession to make: I have only defeated the Lord of Terror once or twice. [...] I spent most of my time on the surface in the darkened village of Tristram: talking to all the townspeople about the terrors below, listening to them gossip, while Matt Uelmen's music played on and on. [...] Whenever the monsters were too numerous or all healing potions had been gulped down, I'd quickly cast a town portal and scamper through it. The first chord of Matt Uelmen's defining music always was a welcoming beacon of relief. [...] I've only dared to take a handful of heroes into hell to confront the Lord of Terror. Sure, I defeated him, but I liked it better on the surface, just staying awhile and listening. Not to Deckard Cain, though. I was listening to Matt Uelmen."

— René de Hoog(BI, pp.310–311)

6. His Method

Pressed into a list, the method in these two books comes down to six lines:

• Fix the emotional coordinate before writing a note. Dungeon tense, town slack — the player's state in that space decides the music.
• Define style by exclusion. Tristram = not country, not Latin, not faux-medieval. Cross out what would ruin it first.
• Sample your own playing. From the ASR-10 to Gigasampler, the sound library was always his own hands, never a purchased patch set.
• Blocks and fades. Seventy to a hundred and ten second units, each opening with five seconds of percussion, built for seamless transitions.
• Turn a limitation into a style. Mono at 22K let him record fast and loose; later he helped bury the wavetable era on purpose.
• Give the player twenty seconds. Establish the space before you introduce a theme.

Most of Uelmen's quotations in the books come from interviews Craddock conducted between 2009 and 2013; chapters 9 and 12 also draw heavily on Nick Breckon's Shacknews interview, "From Tristram to Torchlight" (23 October 2009). One side note: the Hellfire expansion, developed by Synergistic, was allowed to produce 'a couple of music tracks' on its own (BII pp.39–40) — music was always treated as a small, outsourceable, critical asset. Which is exactly why hiring a full-time composer looked so strange in 1994, and why Tristram exists at all.

7. Interview (2001): The Mushroom

February 2001; questions by Andrew Long of The Mushroom (archived at RPGamer).

Q: What was your big break and how did you get it?

A: My "big break" came from making a tape using the same technical specs as the Sega Genesis, and personally taking it to the offices of every publisher in the Bay Area mentioned in a Nintendo document, which somehow came into my possession. One of those companies was DTMC, which was employing Matt Householder at the time. Matt, currently working as a producer here, pointed me in the direction of what was Condor at the time, later to become Blizzard North.

I knew instantly that Condor was where I wanted to work, and bugged them with dogged persistence for a solid four months before I was hired.

Q: Any specific composers that influenced you to become a composer?

A: I had a steady exposure to orchestral music through my parents as a child, and was studying classical piano from the age of six, but I did not really make the connection between the piano lessons I had been taking and the popular music I was discovering until I was 13. Trying to plunk through arrangements of the rock stuff I loved, like the Police and Prince, was what really motivated me to think about the structure behind these tunes.

Liszt and Debussy were some of my favorites in my high school years, while American giants like Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and Tom Waits also figured largely as I grew to appreciate the depth and diversity of the music world.

Q: What kind of education do you have? If you went to college, did you go with the intention of studying music, or did you just someday decide that music making was your thing?

A: From age 6 to 13, I took weekly piano lessons from a very patient and talented musical educator in Los Angeles named Lenee Bilski. She had the ideal approach to a student like myself, letting me discover things on my own while giving me a good basis in theory and technique. Though she never pushed me to the point of making music seem like a chore, she gave me a quality weekly workout of scales and theory which has provided the basis for my musicianship since.

Most of the rest of my education has been through discovery on my own, with a few guitar and jazz piano lessons here and there. I would have liked to have taken a real counterpoint course in college, but the music department at my university was almost nonexistent. In my college years, spending hours in front of the "real book" playing through jazz standards taught me more than any other experience. Those Gershwin and Richard Rodgers classics are excellent studies in making a compact, effective melodic statement.

Playing keyboards in a six-piece bar band also provided a good experience in arrangement, interaction and economy.

Q: Diablo II: Lord of Destruction will take place in the Barbarian Highlands. Will the music have some type of barbarian influence, and if so where would you draw that style from?

A: When the word "Barbarian" is mentioned, the obvious reference of Basil Pouledouris' amazing scores to the Conan movies has to come to mind.

I recently recorded some tracks with Kirk Trevor and the Slovakian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava, and heard more Wagner than anything else in the influences, which seemed immediately apparent. If anything, I will be trying to do something closer to the Wagner/Orff traditional fantasy style than I have done in the past.

Q: Finally, what's the most important advice for young composers who want to get into the industry?

A: Two things.

One, what you are selling is a commodity like any other commodity, and should be thought of as such. Being treated fairly on a business level is important, and if you don't have this relationship clearly defined by all parties, the resentment which results can be worse than not having had a break in the first place.

Second, if there is a gig you want, be persistent to the point of getting a restraining order put on you. Wear them down. Good gigs are competitive by nature, and you don't get them by waiting by the phone.

8. Interview (2017): Dread Central

December 2017; interview by Dread Central, on Diablo's 21st anniversary and Hob.

Q: From what I've read, you're a largely self-taught musician. What were the ways that you challenged yourself musically to become a composer?

A: My lessons from age 6 or so to 12 with a local piano teacher, Lenée Bilski, were very formative, and I'm not sure if I would have ended up a composer without them. I consistently tried to expose myself to new genres and keep a little bit of grinding on aspects where my musicianship was relatively weak, usually involving musical literacy, through my teen years and since, and those are good habits for any composer.

Q: While recent gamers will know your music from the Torchlight series, older games will have spent countless hours hearing your melodies in the first two Diablo games. Can you tell me a bit about how you came aboard that project?

A: I found the development crew for what became the Diablo team when they were known as Condor through Matt Householder, who I found by coldcalling numbers of developers on an old Nintendo document. We ended up working together later, when Dave Brevik and the Schaefers brought him on as a producer.

I had a demo designed around the technical specs they were developing for, at the end of the SNES/Genesis cycle, and bugged them over a few months before getting the gig.

Q: Often listed as one of the greatest video game themes of all time, Diablo's "Tristram" has enchanted and bewitched listeners for over two decades. Did you ever expect that theme to have such an impact on not only the gamer community but also the music community as a whole?

A: No, we had no idea that Diablo would take off in quite the way it did, in terms of the soundtrack or the game as a whole. In retrospect, I can see why it was successful in terms of our timing on the platforms we were on, and the state of gaming and the fantasy genre in general at the time, but as a group of kids still in their 20s, we didn't, as a development crew, expect the reception to be quite as big as it was.

Q: I'd like to focus a little more on "Tristram" by asking if you can tell me a bit about the composition process for that piece? What went into making a theme that was such a wonderful blend of sinister beauty and ethereal hope?

A: I think the main thing I was hoping to get was the "medieval" vibe that the best folk rock of the early 70s had, like on Led Zeppelin III and IV. That and some Latin American influences all had a role.

It also helped that I had played the main roguelike that inspired Diablo along with Dave Brevik, so I had some natural sense of what the ideal vibe would be for a safety/shopping/quest zone.

Q: Last question about "Tristram", I promise! When you think of the piece, 20 years later, what are the thoughts that come to your mind?

A: I'm happy that I was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time, given that even a track with bad production values, which the original Tristram most definitely had, could get over and be really effective by virtue of originality and solid writing.

Still, I don't know quite who the 22 year old is who wrote it, he's a familiar but still very distant person to whatever I am now.

Q: You've basically stated that you were composing music for Diablo III prior to your leaving Blizzard. What can you tell us about those pieces?

A: The public has heard almost all of it, much of it went into World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, while "Hydra" and "Lord" were released as promo tracks when Diablo 3 shipped.

Q: Hob, which comes from Runic Games, is your latest soundtrack. It wonderfully blends digital and analog instruments into something quite sublime. What was your approach heading into scoring this game?

A: Thanks! My main goal was to try to create a hybrid lead instrument out of three different instruments that had common properties and all were a little outside the usual mid 2010's soundtrack pallet: Moog guitar, fretless bass and pedal steel.

I ended up working pretty hard just to feel like I had decent chops on all three, and was fairly satisfied when those elements came together in the soundtrack. I felt like that composite voice basically did what I hoped it would, gave a signature sound that matched the loneliness and exotic aspect of the game's player character.

Q: As the years have passed, the technological capabilities of video game music have evolved quite dramatically. How has your own composition style changed over the years with these new advancements?

A: I would hope it has evolved! I love being able to spend time with a project to make a "custom fit" atmosphere, so I'll always bend in the direction of whatever a given project needs.

My twin goals are keeping my less-used skills, like traditional orchestration, from rotting while trying to keep an intellectually curious aspect alive in my music. I know that my fantasy-ish stuff has a trademark sound, which is absolutely key to my career, but I don't want to fall into a trap of too much self-reference. It is always a balance.

Q: In an interesting turn of events, video games went from trying to push graphical and technological barriers to easing back and embracing a certain amount of "retro" nostalgia. How has this trend affected your work?

A: Well, I definitely enjoyed the fact that "Stranger Things" made the big, wet sawtooth synth sound cool again, but, honestly, I try to be truly Catholic in the non-religious sense with all kinds of instrumental textures.

I never fell out of love with the sound of wah-wah guitar or the Geffen-label country rock textures from my childhood, and feel that way about all the Linn and Roland drum sounds of the 80s, as well as the big brass sounds of the German Romantic tradition. I try to love the flavor of the textures themselves outside of the particular fashion-related baggage the sounds carry.

Q: You're known for taking some time in between projects as Hob is the first new video game soundtrack we've gotten from you in several years. What's next on your plate and how can people continue to support you?

A: Thanks! My next project is already very much in motion, and should hopefully be public next calendar year. I look forward to helping hype it, and am greatly enjoying working on it now. The team is a great mix of vets and exciting younger talent.

9. Interview (2019): From Condor to Torchlight

Interview from 2019; questions by Diablo 3 ESP, answers in Uelmen's own words.

Q: Let's start from the beginning. How was working during the early days at Condor? At that point, we had never heard something like the OST that you were about to compose — what were your original inspirations?

A: Condor was a dream job, even if the initial pay was fairly low by the standards of the Valley at that time. I knew that the team had the kind of long-term talent I wanted to be a part of, and that showed itself fairly quickly in the history.

I think the town part of the original Diablo and the action material really come from two different universes; the town more from the Peruvian waltzes, older US country sounds and the folkier side of the early 70s acoustic sound immortalized by Page, Buckingham, and the Geffen acts. The dungeon stuff was a little more influenced by 80s sounds like Bauhaus, where that noisy post-punk sound experimented with the kind of things dub reggae was doing around that period. The way I lean on delay as an effect a bunch can obviously be heard in things like 'Comfortably Numb', but the more subtle influence is from eighties acts a little later that really used echo as a rhythmic effect.

Q: Of course, the most known melody is the Tristram song. Why does it sound so unusual? What techniques did you use to make it sound so… oppressive?

A: The recording itself was super low budget, I just went directly from an AKG directional mike which was nice but not a huge upgrade on a sm-57 into my old Ensoniq 16-bit sampler, then stitched the phrases together blind before I saw the waves, much later in the process when they went through the DAT and then finally into my first generation of Sound Forge. My Ensoniq was a nice piece of gear in terms of being fairly clean and bright, so it was still 'red book' audio before I dumped the whole thing down to 22Khz in one brutal pass.

I think Diablo accidentally had extra originality to it just because my whole approach was so low budget, structuring everything around that ASR-10; it gave me a distinctive sound compared to what someone much more pro would have been doing with the standard LA soundtrack hack Akai libraries of the time.

Q: With Diablo II you brought many new things to the table. New environments needed new styles — places like Lut Gholein's deserts and the forests of Kurast have their own personality. How did you devise the music for these new areas?

A: I tried to be very literal minded, and physically bought a bunch of Asian, Central American and African instruments around that time, and ended up using them quite a bit. The wind gong that Lut Gholein is structured around is a real wind gong made in Wuhan probably thirty years ago.

Folks in general, twenty years later, are much more intellectualized about trying to use instrumental sounds which are also cultural signifiers, but I don't really think that's the right approach; I just tried to enjoy the sounds themselves on a sensual, fun level divorced from specific cultural baggage, and I don't regret that approach at all.

Q: On the other hand, some other melodies had a new vibe but always keeping that oppressive wall of sound (those drums!). What do you think was the major improvement of Diablo II's OST with respect to Diablo I's?

A: It was a very different project, in that I had four specific things I had to do: repackage the old Tristram material, make a new town base which referenced it but wasn't too derivative, give a 'round-the-world' experience with the different areas, and finally, give a climactic feel to the final fighting. All of that is much different than one town and four dungeon types.

Q: With the extraordinary success of Diablo I, did you feel more freedom to explore new things or more restricted when doing the music for the sequel?

A: Absolutely, I felt that I had to deliver on what the promise of the original game was; in that I was a true nerd/fan of the genre in regards to really enjoy landmarks like 'Ultima III' that were all about exploring a large, somewhat open world.

Folks like to play up the rivalry between the Bay Area and main studio of Blizzard in that era, but, in retrospect, D2 was an iterative design step towards WoW, which finally captured the scale of those Ultima games, at least IMO.

Q: Diablo II's OST last track (Coda) is based on Chopin's Prelude in C Minor and was never used in the game. Which great masters of music do you use as a source of inspiration?

A: Chopin is definitely one! I have a very strange, idiosyncratic relationship with the classical canon. It's an extremely long list, but I will say the musical personality that has affected me most in my past few years of research has been Mussorgsky. Of course, I've lifted from Mozart, Beethoven, Scriabin, Debussy, Bizet, Verdi, Wagner… it isn't a short list.

Q: For the expansion of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, we explore new environments like the snowy Harrogath. One of my favorites is Harrogath's music. What new ideas did you have for a cold, snowy area and how did you translate them without sounding like a Christmas song?

A: I was fairly conservative about not straying too hard from Holst, Debussy and Wagner in that score. I think I less wanted to capture snow, mountains, fortress per se, and more wanted to try to capture the sensibility behind the Barbarians who had the place as a homeland.

So I wanted to do justice to the classic fantasy association with brass there, as expressed in stuff like old 'Mars' and the great, original stuff Poledouris did for the Conan series.

Q: When Diablo III was announced in 2008, the initial chords of Tristram were enough to make everyone go crazy about it. You had a small part on the Diablo III soundtrack. What can you tell us about Blizzard North's take on the third installment and how did it influence your music?

A: Well, 90% of what I intended to be used in Diablo III in a bigger 2005 session ended up being repurposed for WoW in that era, which was a reasonable call as the music generally fit the fantasy parameters and WoW was having explosive sub growth in that time.

I had no creative control over the guitar part which was used for the install sequence; it was from my last month at Blizzard around January 2007. 'Hydra' was the only track of that bunch which I left in condition which I would have been OK with releasing; personally, the release of everything else did not involve me at all.

Q: After leaving Blizzard, you and some of the Blizzard North members formed Runic Games and released Torchlight, Torchlight II and Hob. Torchlight is usually seen as the non-official sequel to Diablo, and a big part of this feeling comes from your soundtrack. How was the experience of composing for a brand new ARPG at a smaller independent developer? What new challenges did you find?

A: No, that history is a little off. Runic was a splinter company formed from Flagship as it collapsed in that period and, even though me and the Schaefers were involved early, the star of that show was Travis Baldree, who didn't come up through Blizzard.

I took a two year break to focus on parenting in between leaving Irvine and starting work with that Seattle-based team. The TL design and world is obviously a closely-related descendant of the Diablo world, but Travis brought a significantly different flavor to that style of game.

I really had fun with that team, especially in the first year or two when the Seattle economy was much quieter and I still had enough youth in me to drink with commitment.

Q: With the closing of Runic Games a lot of talent was dispersed. What are you up to nowadays?

A: I was lucky in that Max was super-flexible about getting me directly on to his new team, which is Echtra, developing 'Torchlight Frontiers'. It was ideal in that I was able to get on board early enough to be (finally) getting ahead of content now as we get closer to letting the general public experience the game beyond tests with a few thousand, and also able to jump back and forth a bit with Runic as we wrapped up 'Hob'.

This team is very exciting in terms of our audio assets: I have an awesome producer and sound designer in Erika Escamez and one of the best audio programmers in the business with Guy Somberg. We've tried extremely hard to be very 2019 in our approach and the action music is truly dynamic and truly modular in a way which is totally new to me. That's pretty cool to have as a team and a creative experience when you're 25 years into a career.

Q: Finally, this is something many fans are asking: would you like to come back as a composer or consultant for a future Diablo game?

A: I'm currently very happy on my team, but I plan to be doing this as long as Jerry Goldsmith did, so you never know what the future holds.