When you think about the music in Diablo games — in fact, when you just think about Diablo games — you hear one thing in your mind: a steel-string guitar, echoing with heavy reverb, playing slowly strummed chords and picked arpeggios over a moody backdrop.
This is one of the most distinctive and powerfully evocative musical identities in gaming. It just is Diablo. It does so much to set the series’ dark fantasy setting apart from the high-fantasy grandeur of contemporaries like Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls. It’s mournful, personal, ancient and modern at the same time, rooted in vague, mysterious folklore rather than Toklienesque saga.
The sound originates in “Tristram,” a masterpiece of mood music by composer Matt Uelmen from the soundtrack to the original 1997 Diablo. It has echoed throughout the series ever since; no Diablo game soundtrack is complete without a plucked steel-string guitar somewhere. Uelmen expanded on it throughout the opening passages of Diablo 2; Diablo 3 quoted it directly in “New Tristram.”
Such a memorable sound can be a double-edged sword for the musicians working in its wake, though. I spoke to members of Blizzard’s music team recently when they were in London for a Diablo-themed concert, and they expressed appropriate reverence for the “Tristram” sound, but also a desire not to spend the rest of their lives aping it.
“It’s just such a strong piece of music,” says Ted Reedy, lead composer for Diablo 4. “So that is something that is always going to be part of the definition of Diablo and it’s something we want to always be mindful of and reference. Although we don’t want to do it all the time and be too on the nose.”
“It definitely loomed large in the early D4 days,” says Leo Kaliski, lead composer for World of Warcraft, who also worked on the Diablo 4 score. “I definitely fell into the trap of like, I’m gonna write my ‘Tristram.’ And then none of those pieces ended up in the game because it wasn’t me.”
Blizzard has the rare luxury of an in-house music department staffed with nine full-time producers and composers who work alongside the development teams from the earliest stages of a project. The team is headed up by music director Derek Duke, whose job it is to think deeply about every musical manifestation of Blizzard’s games, from soundtracks to adverts to song choices for trailers. When I ask him to define Diablo music, Duke doesn’t define it in terms of a particular sound, or even mention the guitar.
“It’s immersion in storytelling, it’s gothic qualities, and it’s darkness,” Duke says. “In its most recent incarnation, I like to say it’s emotional ambiguity: the ability to take on the qualities of the experiences of the listener while scoring the story emotionally. […] Ted’s ability to capture the story through the textures that he chose was really quite amazing.”
Rather than the guitar sound, what Duke thinks is important to preserve from Uelmen’s scores is their “ambientness.” “It was very different to what was going on in the age of Street Fighter-esque video game scores at the time. It was a very ambient score and scored more the immersion.” Diablo scores have continued to be “more mood than melody,” he says, even as 3 and 4 have developed some “bigger themes.”
“The early Diablo scores are so experimental, especially for their time,” Kaliski agrees. “I think the thing that worked for us ultimately was just finding our own version of being experimental.” He mentions the contribution to Diablo 4‘s soundtrack of a drone choir, Nyx, whose ethereal, unsettling vocal textures underpin the “witchy sound” of the Hawezar region. (Coincidence disclaimer: a friend of mine sings with Nyx.)
“We looked for that in every zone we could,” Kaliski says. “I remember, for Scosglen, doing a bagpipe session so I could run it through a distorted amp, to try and evoke a Scots sound but still have the feel of Diablo.”
Explaining how he develops soundtracks, Reedy says that the score for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred started to take form as soon as he got a lore dump on the history of Skovos (the expansion’s island location) and its two Queens from the narrative team. “Derek and I were talking about the idea of having two really unique female vocalists embody the idea of the Oracle Queen and the Amazon Queen.” After an exhaustive online search, they found Úyanga Bold and Asja Kadrić. “Those two voices were so unique and definitive for the world, and such an inspiration to build the entire score around,” he says. “The first piece of music that I wrote was the ‘Firstborn’ theme, which is then the first piece on the soundtrack and ended up being the main menu theme.”
Will those two voices — or Nyx, or Kaliski’s distorted bagpipes — ever be as iconic as Uelmen’s steel-string guitar? No, but maybe they can build new soundscapes around them in the same way. And the guitar’s always there in a pinch.
