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.

Ten Ton Hammer: You have one of the more distinctive musical styles in the industry where a lot of your compositions are instantly recognizable as being something you’ve created, while still remaining wholly unique to a specific game or setting. Is that something that you intentionally set out to achieve early on, or has that been more of an organic process over the years?



Matt Uelmen: I think a lot of the stuff I do just seems to me to be the logical way to approach the fantasy genre. So for me it sometimes seems strange if it isn’t just assumed that other people would want to do the big mandolin triads with the reverb on. A lot of it is stylistic choices that I make. To me they seem just the way that I would want to have something based in a Tolkien-like universe if it’s a logical soundtrack for it.

It seems so logical and natural for me to just stack up the 12 strings and mandolins in the fantasy genre because it’s a really comforting sound yet it’s also creepy in the right ways. It’s also different enough from the normal musical syntax that you get in rock or classical music, both of which kind of ignore that. I try to put a country flavoring in things too that I think a lot of composers don’t necessarily think of, or at least they don’t think of it first in terms of the fantasy genre.

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