Individual songs like Wilderness, Rogue, Desert, and Leoric bring to mind the hundreds of minions of darkness I slaughtered while listening to them. Listening to this music throws me into a world I was really a part of, reminding me of the incredible immersion of this franchise. But even just the very first chord of the menu music from the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion still drags me back to the hours I spent crawling across the landscape of Sanctuary, killing monsters and demons. Now, of course, we have Diablo III, which introduced some of its own unique feel to the series.

And Diablo II built on that with purpose, introducing new cities and environments without sacrificing what was unique about the music of the first game.

That introduced a sound that would come to define the general sense of the land of Sanctuary for millions. With the original game he produced something highly atmospheric, music that you notice without noticing it. That the effort was something of a personal labor, more than most newer soundtracks at least, is evidenced by the fact that much of the recording was done by Uelmen himself, between synthesizers and his own guitar. The music for both Diablo and Diablo II was written by Matt Uelmen, who was a composer and sound editor for Blizzard back in the day. And let me tell you, that game had some pretty outstanding music. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to see the album for one of my favorite games of the past twenty years.

Imagine all of those 90’s games from developers who’ve gone under. That was released in 2007 to herald the coming of Starcraft 2 because Blizzard is still around and still profitable. So, you know, just to prove what I said earlier about finding old game soundtracks being difficult. The Starcraft album was released in 2007. So you can imagine I was a little surprised to find the soundtracks for Diablo II and Starcraft on iTunes. The Diablo II soundtrack wears a release date of 2000, which means it can’t have been released much after the game itself was. That’s not something most people realize, I suppose, but in many cases you won’t find a game soundtrack for anything from the 90’s unless somebody went to the trouble of digging the music out of the code and uploading it to the internet somewhere. Soundtracks for old games are kind of a rare thing.

Diablo 2 lord of destruction soundtrack