In September 2025, the team at Red Hook Studios sat down with the composer Stuart Chatwood at Armoury Studios in Vancouver. He was writing a new battle track for Curse of the Court, a module in Darkest Dungeon II: Kingdoms, in which the player fights vampiric Crimson Courtiers. Chris Bourassa, Red Hook's creative director, had asked for a reimagining of the music from the Crimson Court expansion of the first Darkest Dungeon.
There was one practical problem. The strongest melody in the trailers was a waltz, and a waltz counts in three. The combat music around it counts in four. Chatwood said that when a piece switches between the two, the listener can lose track of the beat. He called this "pulse confusion." His answer was to slow the main tempo down and give it a triplet feel, so the waltz and the fight could share one pulse.
Chatwood was born on October 22, 1969, in Fleetwood, Lancashire, England, and grew up in Windsor, Ontario. His first band was called The Stickmen. According to Wikipedia, he was also a childhood friend of the electronic musician Richie Hawtin, and the two shared an interest in 8-bit home computers such as the Commodore 64.
He later played bass and keyboards in The Tea Party, a trio from Windsor. Their first album, The Tea Party, came out in 1991, followed by Splendor Solis in 1993 and The Edges of Twilight in 1995. The band mixed rock with Middle Eastern and Indian sounds and called the result "Moroccan roll." In 2001, Chatwood won a Juno Award, Canada's music prize, for the artwork of a Tea Party album.
In 2003, Ubisoft Montreal released Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with music by Chatwood. According to MobyGames, it was the first complete soundtrack he wrote, and he used the world-music instruments his band already played. The score uses Indian tabla and strings, with vocals by Cindy Gomez and Maryem Tollar. How the job first came to him, the sources I found do not say.
He kept the job. Warrior Within followed in 2004, then The Two Thrones, Battles of Prince of Persia and Revelations in 2005, Rival Swords in 2007, and the 2008 Prince of Persia and The Fallen King. That is eight games in six years. Several were co-scored with Inon Zur. His official site says the series sold more than ten million copies.
In 2016 he wrote the score for Darkest Dungeon, a gothic role-playing game from Red Hook Studios in which the heroes you send into the dark can break down mentally. Reviewers describe the music as dark and orchestral, mixed with drone, rock and ambient sound. He went on to score its expansions Color of Madness in 2018 and The Butcher's Circus in 2020, then Darkest Dungeon II in 2023. The man who had written music for a prince running through palaces was now writing music for a party losing its nerve in a cellar.
Away from games, he has run a project called Uncommon Folk in New York City since 2006. Its quiet, therapeutic music is meant to raise awareness of misophonia, a condition in which ordinary sounds become unbearable. Its first single, "This Land Is Your Land" with Glen Campbell, came out in August 2017. The Tea Party was still on tour in 2026, when Chatwood stopped by ABC Classic's studio in Australia to talk about his rock beginnings and how a love of music from around the world led him to video games.
In Vancouver, the waltz still had three beats, and the fight still had four. He did not cut either one. If you are carrying something that does not fit the count of the room you were asked to play in, which one do you change?