Matt Uelmen hat der Seite Shacknews.com ein Interview gegeben. Er war unter anderem für die Soundtracks in Diablo 1, Diablo 2 und World of Warcraft verantwortlich. In diesem ausführlichen Interview erzählt Uelmen über sein Leben als Musiker, seine Kindheit, seine Familie, musikalische Einflüsse und wie er letztendlich als Musiker in der Spieleindustrie gelandet ist. Und natürlich spricht er ausführlich über jedes Spiel, an dem er jemals beteiligt war.
Shack: What was the first thing you wrote for Diablo? How did you approach that project?
Matt Uelmen: The first stuff I wrote for Diablo in terms of dungeon music was a real disaster. It was kind of all over the place. It was like, trying to do a full fake orchestra really badly, because I had no idea how to do it, on the one hand. And then doing this really cheesy, amped-up heavy metal stuff, that sounded like this really kind of… direct input guitar. The first half-year of working on that, all my attempts at action music were just really bad.
I did have Tristram more or less in my mind, just from previous stuff I had done. That was relatively easy. That was mostly just based on noodling around on my 12-string. I pretty much knew where that was going from the very beginning. But I didn’t really get the formula right for the dungeon music until I got over the idea of trying to do a traditional fantasy thing, and more embraced the idea of just trying to have fun with big percussion and big guitar sounds.
Anlass für dieses Interview war die bevorstehende Veröffentlichung von Uelmens neuestem Projekt: Torchlight von Runic Games. Uelmen ist aber nicht der einzige alte Bekannte dort. Die Gebrüder Schäfer,ehemals bei Blizzard North und Miterfinder der Diablo-Serie, haben Runic Games nach der Pleite ihres letzten Studios Flagship und dem Debakel um Hellgate:London gegründet.