{"id":102915,"date":"2019-11-01T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T20:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/353272"},"modified":"2019-11-01T20:02:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T20:02:00","slug":"dont-miss-david-breviks-tale-of-designing-the-original-diablo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/11\/01\/dont-miss-david-breviks-tale-of-designing-the-original-diablo\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Miss: David Brevik’s tale of designing the original Diablo"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brevik helped cofound Blizzard North over twenty years ago, and played a pivotal role in the design and development of the studio\u2019s influential hit Diablo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The game was released at the end of 1996, and to celebrate its 20th anniversary Brevik took the stage at GDC today to deliver a postmortem look back at his work on the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe original concept was something I came up with in high school,\u201d said Brevik, who went to school in California\u2019s Bay Area and got the idea for the game\u2019s name from local peak Mt. Diablo. \u201cIt\u2019s all I\u2019ve ever wanted to do, make games, and even in high school I was thinking about what kinds of games I could make and what names I could use.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original concept for Diablo<\/em>, says Brevik, was more of a traditional party-based RPG, turn-based and heavily influenced by his early love of games like Rogue <\/em>and Nethack<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But right out of college, he wound up working at a digital clip art company that eventually went under; when that company went under, a few survivors went on to launch their own company, named after a secret project the clip art company had been working on: \u201cProject Condor.\u201d Thus, Condor the game company was born.<\/p>\n

It was there that Brevik put together a design document for Diablo<\/em>, describing it as a turn-based, single-player DOS game that would have expansion packs — like booster packs for Magic the Gathering cards, whch were big then. It also had permadeath, says Brevik. \u201cThat was a big feature of roguelikes, so that\u2019s why I wanted that.”<\/p>\n

It was also, as is sometimes rumored, originally designed with a \u201cclaymation\u201d art style — kind of.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just<\/em> claymation,\u201d said Brevik, noting it was actually inspired by the look of contemporary arcade fighting game Primal Rage<\/em>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved the way Primal <\/em>Rage<\/em> looked in the arcade,” said Brevik. “It used stop-motion for all its characters and graphics,” and Brevik wanted to use a sort of stop-motion art style for Diablo<\/em>. But once he learned how expensive and time-consuming it would be, the idea was shelved.<\/p>\n

How Justice League Task Force <\/em>brought Blizzard North and South together<\/strong><\/p>\n

But since Condor had to stay in business, it was planning out Diablo <\/em>while it was also working on some other sports and licensed games, including the Sega Genesis game Justice League Task Force<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Brevik remembers taking the latter game to show it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and finding an unexpected comrade-in-arms in developer Silicon & Synapse, which would eventually become Blizzard Entertainment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWe show up, and we have our game on display, and we look over and…there\u2019s another version of the product, for Super Nintendo!\u201d Brevik said.<\/p>\n

Condor had no idea there was a Super Nintendo version of Task Force<\/em> being made (because the publisher had never bothered to tell them) and yet the two games were still \u201cstrangely similar.\u201d Condor wound up talking to the developers, Silicon & Synapse — who also happened to have dreams of striking out on their own and making their own original PC game, just like Condor had been trying (unsuccessfully) to do with Diablo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d been trying to pitch this game idea to a whole bunch of people…and they have said no, RPGs are dead. There is no way we are investing in an RPG,\u201d said Brevik.<\/p>\n

But after Silicon & Synapse became Blizzard and made Warcraft<\/em>, they came back to Condor and heard the studio\u2019s pitch for Diablo<\/em>. They liked what they heard, and offered to publish the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo<\/em>,\u201d remembers Brevik. The studio then had to figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like — <\/em>and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was not easy back then…I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com<\/em>, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cSo the actual tile-square basis — the same shape and size — is exactly the same in X-Com<\/em> and Diablo<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo <\/em>is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Brevik also remembers that the decision to make Diablo <\/em>real-time, rather than turn-based, as a controversial one. He said that, despite rumors to the contrary, it’s not true that when Condor first pitched the game as a turn-based game, Blizzard said it was great — but that it had to be real-time and multiplayer. That came later, after development of the game had begun in earnest.<\/p>\n

\u201cEventually, Blizzard South, they approached us and said \u2018well, we\u2019d really like to make this a real-time game,\u2019\u201d recalls Brevik. At first, he says, he was adamantly against it — he loved classic turn-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue<\/em>, and he didn\u2019t want to give up turns because giving players time to agonize over their decisions between turns could create so much “delicious” drama<\/em>.  <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Yeah,\u2019 [Blizzard South] said, \u2018but real-time will be better,\u2019\u201d said Brevik. So Blizzard North eventually put it to a vote, \u201cand I voted no, but everyone else voted yes, so I said I guess we can do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Brevik called Blizzard South to say yes, we can do this, but we need lots more time to overhaul the game — and also, another milestone payment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey agreed to that, and I went \u2018yesss<\/em>,\u2019\u201d remembers Brevik. \u201cSo I sat down on a Saturday afternoon, and in a few hours I had it running [in real-time.]\u201d<\/p>\n

“That was when the APRG was kind of born”<\/strong><\/p>\n

At that point Brevik fondly recalls clicking his mouse, watching his formerly turn-based warrior walk across a room in real-time and smash a skeleton, \u201cand I remember saying out loud \u2018oh my god, that was awesome!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure enough, that was when the ARPG was kind of born,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cIt was an amazing moment, and I was lucky enough to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

During Diablo<\/em>‘s development Condor became Blizzard North, in part, remembers Brevik, because of the company’s less-than-stellar business sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were so excited to do Diablo<\/em>, that we signed the contract [with Blizzard] without realizing we\u2019d just agreed to do Diablo…<\/em>for $300,000,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cWe have 15 people in this studio, so\u2026.are we just going to pay them $20k a year to do this? Also, how are we gonna pay for this office space?\u201d<\/p>\n

But they really <\/em>wanted to make Diablo<\/em>, so Condor went looking for more work to bolster its finances. They found 3D), and signed a contract to make a football game for the console — for almost $1 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat helped,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cThat helped a lot.\u201d Even so, the company didn’t get all that money up front and was still struggling, day-to-day, to pay its staff and maintain its operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen at one point, Blizzard South came to us and said \u2018hey, we\u2019d like to acquire you guys,\u2019\u201d Brevik said. \u201cThat was a big relief, not having to worry about making payroll anymore. But 3DO got wind of it, and didn\u2019t like the idea — so they stated making their own pitches.<\/p>\n

“3DO was offering us twice as much money, and we turned them down”<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSo this bidding war started, between Blizzard and 3DO,\u201d said Brevik. \u201c3DO was offering us twice as much money, and we turned them down, because we felt that Blizzard really got us, and got the game. And we were so close in company culture and beliefs that we turned down twice as much money to get bought by — and become — Blizzard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Brevik recalls that late in \u201896, as Diablo’s <\/em>development was in crunch mode, a businessman named Sabeer Bhatia came to Brevik and said, basically, \u201cI\u2019m going to make email on the internet\u2026.I\u2019ll give you ten percent of my company if you let me have a room in the back [of your office] to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brevik said \u201cNo way, this doesn\u2019t make sense! Email, on the internet? I already have email on the internet!\u201d And with Blizzard North crunching away on Diablo<\/em>, Brevik remembers telling Bhatia he couldn\u2019t spare any room to work on his company.<\/p>\n

Bhatia\u2019s company came to be known as Hotmail, which went on to be worth roughly $400 million. So Brevik would have had $40 million worth, which in today\u2019s dollars (he estimates) would be roughly $280 million.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, developing Diablo<\/em> gave rise to Blizzard\u2019s Battle.net, which was borne out of Blizzard North but primarily developed at Blizzard South. But Diablo<\/em> didn\u2019t have multiplayer modes – or code — for most of development, so in the last months of development a team from Blizzard North had to actually move down south to work with Blizzard South on getting Battle.net support built into Diablo, <\/em>and Brevik says the studio was completely unprepared for how quickly — and badly — cheating became a problem in the game.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew people were going to be able to hack, or cheat,\u201d said Brevik, but the studio figured it would be isolated incidents. \u201cThen the game came out, and instantly we were like \u2018oh my god…they can just upload the cheats and EVERYBODY can cheat! I didn\u2019t even think about htat!\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back, Brevik recalls this was one of the biggest \u201cegg on our face\u201d moments of Diablo\u2019s <\/em>livespan, and it srongly drove Blizzard to revamp the client-server architecture for Diablo II<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“I’m gonna say it: Battle.net ran on one computer”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Also: \u201cIt\u2019s not much of a secret anymore, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m going to get into trouble if I say it, but I\u2019m gonna say it: Battle.net ran on one computer,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cBecause we had people directly hooking up with each other, we didn\u2019t have to carry a lot of bandwidth…we just had to make these connections.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Brevik then showed a brief snippet of a Diablo <\/em>pre-release alpha demo the company shared via PC Gamer demo discs in November of \u201896, one of which he\u2019d managed to find in his own home.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things we didn\u2019t like about RPGs at the time is they all had like 25 minues of character creation before you could get into the game,\u201d said Brevik. And Blizzard North had a lot of love for the menus in Doom, so they designed Diablo\u2019s UI with a lot of thematic inspiration from id\u2019s work, to meet the \u201cmom test\u201d — \u201ccould my mom play this?\u201d Brevik said. The idea was to make something that players could start playing as quickly as possible, with minimal hang-ups.<\/p>\n

Speaking of UI, Brevik noted that the map of Diablo<\/em> was inspired directly by the minimalistic automap of Dark Forces, <\/em>and that “we invented the hotbar some time in the last 3 months of the project.”<\/p>\n

Before that, said Brevik, there was one slot in the lower-left corner of the screen where players could put potions, but otherwise, you were straight out of luck. The studio also almost got rid of the \u201cright-click to use skill\u201d mechanic (requiring the player to bring up the skill book and click on a skill each time to use it) and almost put cooking and eating mechanics into the game, right at the end of development, but ultimately didn’t have time.<\/p>\n

“The end was really, really rough”<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe end was really, really rough; we crunched for 8 or 9 months,\u201d remembers Brevik. \u201cMy wife was pregnant at the time; the baby was due in late December…you can see where this is going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around December 10th, recalls Brevik, his wife called him at the office and said \u201cI\u2019m having contractions. It\u2019s go time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The studio was already in trouble, since it had tried — and failed — to have Diablo <\/em>ready for Christmas of \u201896. But it wound up shipping on December 31st, and the contractions proved to be a false alarm — Brevik\u2019s daughter was born January 3rd, days after his game.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were super, ultra-focused on making this thing great, and I think it paid off in the end,\u201d said Brevik. \u201cCrunch is never fun, but sometimes, at least for myself, I think it\u2019s a necessary evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, Brevik noted that crunch on Diablo II <\/em>was even worse — about a year and a half straight. “It was the worst crunch in my life,” he said.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a weird bit of trivia about the game: Brevik remembers running a contest after Diablo <\/em>launched, offering to pay $100 to the first player who could kill Diablo<\/em>. Shortly thereafter a player used a health-swapping skill to run down to the final boss, swap health with him, nearly die, swap again and slay him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe promptly yanked that skill out of the game,\u201d said Brevik. Presumably, Blizzard North also paid the player his $100.<\/p>\n

Another tidbit of design trivia: \u201cDeckard Cain\u2019s name was actually a contest..as part of a PC gaming magazine contest, people could send in name suggestions to get their name in Diablo<\/em>,\u201d said Brevik, in response to a question from the audience about where the Diablo <\/em>character got his name. \u201cSome guy sent in the name Deckard Cain, I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s made up or not, but we were like \u2018Damn, that\u2019s badass. We\u2019re gonna use that!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brevik helped cofound Blizzard North over twenty years ago, and played a pivotal role in the design and development of the studio\u2019s influential hit Diablo. The game was released at the end of 1996, and to celebrate its 20th anniversary Brevik took the stage at GDC today to deliver a postmortem look back at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}