From IT worker to god of music: the unlikely story of Baldur’s Gate 3 composer Borislav Slavov

If you hear the words ‘down by the river’ and immediately start humming one of modern gaming’s most gorgeous earworms, you have the Bafta-winning Borislav Slavov to thank

For Borislav “Bobby” Slavov, it is not enough to just be a composer. The Bulgarian musician sees himself as a man who wears many hats: composer, music director, arranger, mixer. Yet back in 2002, he had just finished a master’s in computer science and was working for the fourth biggest software company in the world. Unlike a number of other composers I have spoken to for this column, Slavov spends as much time as possible at the game studio he’s working with, embedded in narratives and mechanics “at a granular level” so that his music “isn’t massacred and chopped up”.

“I remember the very day I came up with that main theme, or Down By the River,” he tells me before a sold out Game Music festival concert in London’s Southbank Centre, where the Philharmonia Orchestra performed more than 80 minutes of music from his soundtrack to Baldur’s Gate 3. “I was having one of my favourite walks down one of the channels of the city of Ghent, and the lyrics were swimming around in the back of my mind. There was this special moment when I started hearing this theme. I stopped for a moment. I thought: this sounds exciting. I need to record this tune right now!”