The year 1997 means many things to me – it’s not only the year I met my wife, but it’s also the year I sacrifice hundreds of evenings and nights. Diablo, the newly released grandfather of loot lottery games. No game I had played before had anything else Diablo’s raw power to change the stream of time – like, you look at the clock, see that it’s a little before midnight, you throw a few monsters, and then the sun suddenly peeks through the window.
If the Lord of Terror could be said to have a father, it would be lead designer David Brevik. A lot of what would become Diablo sprang from his mind, including the name itself (taken from Mount Diablo, near where Brevik lived at the time of Diablo’s entrance). All those lost nights and blushing eyes might well lie at his feet – though Brevik originally imagined it, Diablo would be more of a traditional Rogue-sque affair of turns and actions of sub-turn. Diablo’s signature real-time loot-spewing combat was something of a late addition – and one Brevik himself opposed it.
Smash and grab
As Brevik explains, it came at the end of a long week on a simple show of hands in the office. Brevik and maybe two or three others wanted to keep the game turn-based, and more than a dozen others voted to convert the title into a real-time game.
Brevik expected the actual change to take at least a month to implement, but he sat down that Friday night to take a crack at the beginning and in just a few hours hacked enough of the real-time elements to support some test play. To call the resulting change “remarkable”, it would be underwhelming just how transformative the decision was for the player experience.
“I remember it just like it was yesterday,” Brevik recalls. He roamed the now real-time dungeon and spied on his first real-time enemy: a skeleton. “My character ran over and swung and knocked the skeleton apart. And I was, ‘Oh my God, this is awesome.’ That felt so good! This was it wei better. ”
The clouds parted, the angels sang, and Brevik became the saddest person to lose a few hours of his life. Diablo. When the team arrived Monday morning, “it was obvious this was the way to go and we never looked back,” he said.
(Excitingly, this is almost exactly the opposite of what happened to Sid Meier and Civilization—That iconic title started as real-time, before moving to turn-based halfway through development. Game development is sometimes as much intuitive art as business science.)
Until the sun rises
There’s a lot more to discover in the video – and we’ve also hoping to unleash an extended cut of this conversation, as Brevik was extremely outspoken with his time and with digging unique and new stories around us. tell about the development of one of the most popular gaming franchises to ever exist. Stay tuned and listen!
