Shack: Let's tackle Diablo II. How early did you start working on that?

Matt Uelmen: Oh, very early. It was a long project, actually. We pretty much knew we were going to make a sequel as soon as Diablo was released. The first year was actually really, really hard, because our ownership of our ownership was a company called Cendant, which was involved in probably the biggest stock market scandal up to that point. Basically it was similar to Enron in a lot of ways, a few years before Enron. So that was intensely demoralizing. And we had already started to hemorrhage some people that were really significant.

It's actually kind of been buried in history for whatever reason, but a bunch of guys from around that time, the Cendant scandal, started a studio called Fugitive. And then there was another studio called Spark Unlimited that was also founded, and the guy on that team, Ben Haas, was the animator of the original Diablo. So it kind of hurt to see him go, in terms of losing something that was that core. He was also involved with a lot of iconic Diablo animations, of the monsters especially. He really kind of gave Diablo this boxer personality that he has.

Shack: Do you work with the animators pretty closely when you're in a sound design role?

Matt Uelmen: My role moved away from sound design the longer I was at Blizzard, but they almost always were the guys I got along with best. To me, the animators are a massive part of what makes a game. On this title right now, the main guy that I work with--because I am doing a lot of sound design work--is Matt Lefferts. He's a really important contact for me, and he's a big part of what makes this game work.

But yeah, the animators were a huge part of it, and especially with Diablo II. I felt like that animation team did such unique work, and so much of the replayability of the game is the fact that the characters those guys created had such personality. Even if it wasn't always the most conventional approach to animation, I thought it was really effective.

Shack: Yeah. I mean, they were limited to fairly low-res art, and that animation still pops.

Matt Uelmen: Exactly. It's actually easier--in a lot of ways, I think the level of technique in animation has only finally gotten to the point in the last couple of years where it's starting to surpass the best 2D stuff of that era. It's much easier to render out an atmospheric scene in 2D. That's a big reason why Diablo II has had so much staying power; it's really hard to generate atmosphere in 3D, because it just wants to stay so clean and geometric, and particle effects are so expensive on [graphics] cards. Whereas when you render stuff up, you can render it as foggy as you want, though of course the fog effect won't be dynamic.

Shack: Any opinion on how Diablo III is looking? I don't want to get you involved in that mess, but I am curious what you think of it.

Matt Uelmen: I think the game, especially the technological aspect of the game, looks really good. I enjoyed the video that they just showed at BlizzCon... was really impressed with the blood effects, and the randomization they're doing with bodies. The animations are obviously really well done. [Joseph] Lawrence is obviously doing amazing work. So yeah, the game looks amazing.

But the reason that I'm not working on it has nothing to do with me thinking it has any problems. I think it looks fantastic. I actually consider [Diablo III lead designer] Jay Wilson a friend. I thought he was immediately going in the right direction after he showed up at Irvine, which wasn't that much later after I did. But the main reason I'm not working on that is just the philosophy at Blizzard is very geared toward having people physically in-house on a full-time basis, and that's just been impossible for me over the past couple years. That's really 90% of what's happening there. It's just hard to make the in-house thing down in Irvine happen for me because I've been up in LA for my wife's career.

Shack: That's good to hear, that it's not a result of a disagreement or anything. Okay, so getting back to Diablo II. It's a more global soundtrack, you're obviously pulling from more influences. Act II in particular, you've got that great Harem track later into the act, and I know you did some session work with a percussionist for that act.

Matt Uelmen: Mustafa Waiz, right? Yeah, yeah. Mustafa was a friend of Scott's, and I have not seen him since we did that session. But he was actually an Afghan. This was three years before that giant Buddha statue was blown up there and any American really knew what Afghanistan was, unless they had a doctorate in British history, or had a sense of recent Russian history. But I didn't really think much about that; I was amazed by his musicianship. And he's actually not used on that Harem track; he is the basis for the desert stuff. Probably the better stuff. I can see people not liking the disco-y part of the desert stuff, but the more interesting of that stuff is based around his hand-drum playing. It was a real privilege to be able to work with him. I hope he's doing well, wherever he is.

Shack: Yeah, that desert stuff is great. And did you do a session with a female vocalist for that Harem track?

Matt Uelmen: That was just from a stock CD, Heart of Asia, from Spectrosonics. That was just me chopping up a sample CD. I think people could have some kind of interesting image of a woman doing a session and wailing away, but it was just squeeky old me in front of my computer. An interesting story about that though, is she actually... the original track has quarter-tones in it, and I actually had to tune all those out. The reason it sounds a little more palatable to Western ears is that I had to go phrase by phrase and make some of the quarter-tones into semitones. It would seem horribly out of tone if you would hear the original because with our cultural conventions, we don't really know how to listen to quarter-tones.

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