Matt Uelmen is a genius and (being a genius) is his own harshest critic. The whole soundtrack of the Act I is a masterpiece, and it’s a shame that several tracks from it didn’t make it to the final cut of the game.
I absolutely love outtakes 1, 2 and 3 and my teenage dream was to hear them in the game. With the upcoming remaster we have a chance to officially have them in the game. Check those out with the comments of Matt Uelmen:
Hurry up or you’ll miss the train! This track is part of a good ten minutes of “Look-at-my-pretty-guitars” garbage that was mercifully tossed before release. Despite a disgustingly cute midgets-in-lederhosen quality, it is given some dignity by the oboe stylings of Roger Wiesmeyer. Like the Monastery intro which eventually became the second part of our Diablo II title screen, this is a good example of how NOT to pace game action music.
You may notice an instrument which makes it nowhere else into this little game – the classical guitar. Even though I have probably fallen asleep to the sound of Segovia more than any other recording artist, I was never able to reconcile the Spanish sound of this instrument with the feel of the game. There is something inescabably warm and seductive about the sound of nylon which just did not fit with the feel that the steel strings established in the original game. The flamenco riffs I tried to insert always seemed a bit forced. Some people around the office liked this track, despite the fact that those open mandolin chords now make me wince.
The original Diablo II mp3s are complete! And you thought we would never get around to it. For those of you of who wondered what we actually do here at Blizzard in our marathon development cycles, this outtake provides a pretty good example of the difference another year or two can make. This track is the original tune recorded around January 1998, which became the fifth minute of what was eventually the wilderness combat music in Act 1 when I was able to take a look at her again in January 2000. The first half made it into the game with many snips, additional pedal steel and orchestral sample textures, and some mastering magic from Scott Petersen. The second half of the piece in all of its rocker glory was chucked entirely, unheard by the public until now. Much like a fine piece of california cheese sitting in the backyard sun for weeks, we will release no track before the appropriate time. This particular tune tries pretty hard to rock out, but seemed pretty silly as a background to the opening few scenes of the game.
A rented mandolin and a Roland space echo do not a soundtrack maketh. This track was on the cusp of making it into the game, but, fortunately, I had the time to do better material in January 2000. Even though this track uses many of the elements which ended up being quite successful in the rest of the first Act, it still had more than enough problems to earn its place in the great musical recycle bin. Though I liked the sound of the mandolin, and ended up using mandolin sounds elsewhere in this Act, this piece suffered from a serious lack of harmonic development.
When you are creating a track which loops, chief among the things to avoid is a lack of harmonic movement. If you stay in the same place for too long, as this piece does with its simple mandolin open chords, you run a big risk of creating deadly monotony. This stasis earned the piece a yellow card that turned into a red card when stacked up with the echoing whisper effects which never quite worked, as they were much too obviously derived from the whispering voices used to such great effect in “Friday the 13th”.