Interview with Video Game Composer Matt Uelmen

[Morreion]

An Exclusive Interview with Video Game Composer Matt Uelmen (Ten Ton Hammer)

Industry legend Matt Uelmen discusses the role of audio in gaming, his influences and shares some advice for aspiring musicians

An excellent soundtrack has the ability to take an already great gaming experience to the next level. This was certainly the case with Torchlight, which was developed by Runic Games and features music by industry legend Matt Uelmen. Like many PC gamers in the late 90s, I spent many, many all night gaming sessions clicking my way through the genre defining Diablo series, and still consider them to be some of the best PC games out there to this day. Ever since, much of the music from those soundtracks has had a permanent place on my iPod, and I’m sure I’m not alone in considering Matt’s compositions to be some of the best in gaming, both past and present.

Ten Ton Hammer recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Matt about composing music for video games, the differences between composing for a single player title vs. an MMOG, some of his musical influences, and even some advice for aspiring musicians looking to make a career in the video game industry. So dial up your favorite tunes (the town theme from Torchlight has become a personal favorite) sit back and enjoy our exclusive interview with one of the biggest names in video game soundtracks.

Ten Ton Hammer: In the past you’ve cited some of the more often overlooked inspirations for creating a specific style of music such as Led Zeppelin vs. some of the more standard or familiar sweeping orchestral arrangements commonly associated with the fantasy genre.

Matt Uelmen: I really see just about all of the fantasy world where it’s so rare to get away from the Wagner and the Tolkien archetypes. Any kind of flavor you can get from that is nice, but I think it is important to find more modern fantasy influences than that if you can. Definitely the way that Led Zeppelin would use a more renaissance fair type of sound in their folky stuff, it has a kind of resonance with the fantasy genre in terms of just that kind of mandolin heavy thing. I mean, they were definitely the best at doing that kind of sound in that era.

And that’s really kind of the charm of just the culture that comes from the Appalachians here. The reason it sounds interesting to us is because there’s an element of it that’s totally missed out on over the past two centuries. That’s kind of why it has this authentic resonance with this kind of historical memory that we have. It’s from a culture that never really had modern life in some ways. That’s a specific part of the history of American music though, in terms of so much of it coming from remote places in the hills there and so much of it coming from cotton country and the delta.

I can still hear the Diablo soundtrack- that was great, very atmospheric.

[Regolyth]

That was cool. I really liked how they had the music you could play while reading the interview. Matt Uelmen has long been my favorite video game composer. He does such great work. Right along with Kenji Yamamoto (Metroid and a few other random titles) and Koji Kondo (Mario, Zelda, etc.).

After I played through Diablo my first few times, I was hooked on the music. Sometimes I would stand in town just to listen to the music (or stand in a safe place in one of of the lower levels). I then found a hack on the internet that let me rip the music from the CD. I bought the collector's edition of Diablo II so I could have the soundtrack for that. I also made sure I downloaded all of those MP3s of the week they released there for a year or so. I also have the StarCraft and World of Warcraft (all three of them) soundtracks.

I'm a huge fan of Uelmen's. I love his work. I regularly listen to his music while at work. I worked some of his Diablo tracks into a Halloween CD I made. It works well when you play it on Halloween outside your home, while trying to scare the kiddies. Just ask Kul.

[Rakul]

"Not King" speaks true.