Matt Uelmen
- Composer
- Actor
- Sound Department
Matt was born and raised in the South Bay area of greater Los Angeles.
Almost all of his formal training in music came through piano lessons
from Lenée Bilski from the ages of 6 to 13, which were discontinued
when his family moved to San Jose, California during his high school
years. Matt is largely self-taught as a multi-instrumentalist and
orchestrator, with a familiarity with instruments in the keyboard,
guitar, flute and percussion families. Most of his performance
experience is on the keyboard, though the piece most associated with
him, "Tristram" or "Towne" from the Diablo series of computer games,
features his playing on 12-string guitar and flute.
This series of games was the core creation of his employer, Condor Inc (later renamed Blizzard North), where he worked for 11 years. This series is estimated to have collectively sold over twenty million copies and, more remarkably, was still on the shelves at major retailers over a decade after the release of the original "Diablo" and seven years after the release of the final installation in the series, "Diablo II: Lord of Destruction". This expansion also featured Matt's first foray into full orchestral writing, with a performance by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Material from a second recording with this group was used in Matt's later work for Blizzard Entertainment on the "World of Warcraft" series, which incorporated over three hours of his music as of the release of "WoW: The Burning Crusade".
This series of games was the core creation of his employer, Condor Inc (later renamed Blizzard North), where he worked for 11 years. This series is estimated to have collectively sold over twenty million copies and, more remarkably, was still on the shelves at major retailers over a decade after the release of the original "Diablo" and seven years after the release of the final installation in the series, "Diablo II: Lord of Destruction". This expansion also featured Matt's first foray into full orchestral writing, with a performance by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Material from a second recording with this group was used in Matt's later work for Blizzard Entertainment on the "World of Warcraft" series, which incorporated over three hours of his music as of the release of "WoW: The Burning Crusade".