When Blizzard released Diablo on New Year’s Eve, 1996, the computer RPG was a dead genre. Publishers wouldn’t touch it with gloves of +5 protection. Within a year, that had changed completely.
For a generation of nerdy kids (and adults), Diablo’s lightning pace, piles of gold coins and flaming-skull kitsch made it about the most addictive possible substance. It was among the first PC games to have online multiplayer at launch, as well as the first to run on Direct X.
But according to creator David Brevik, who gave one of the closing talks at this year’s Game Developers Conference, it started life as a turn-based game with no multiplayer and with animation made out of clay.
A genre is born
It was clear throughout the talk how many of Brevik’s audience still held Diablo as a cherished, formative memory. One questioner at the end said it was the reason he was grounded in high school. Another said she’d first played it when she was five. Another stood up to confess that for 20 years he had carried the guilt of pirating the game, and now presented Brevik with the money he owed in cash.
Yet the concept Brevik had carried with him since high school until joining Blizzard was quite different from what they knew. “First off, it was turn-based,” he explained. “Next, it was single-player. It was DOS. It had expansion packs, like Magic: The Gathering cards. It had permadeath — it was unforgiving.
“And then there’s a rumor, sort of, that it had Claymation. And that is kind of true.”
Brevik explained, to some giggling, how his team had explored stop-motion animation after seeing it in the arcade beat-em-up Primal Rage. But once they realised how much model-building and photography it would take, they dropped the idea like a cursed sword.
“So it was stop-motion for about five seconds,” he joked. “I want to put that to rest.”
Making it real-time was a tougher sell. Brevik was committed to his original concept. But he lost the vote, and so one Friday afternoon he hacked together a new, real-time build of the game.
“It was stop-motion for about five seconds. I want to put that to rest.”
In those days, PC RPGs were often very slow, very clunky, and very complicated. Brevik summarised them later to me as “17 steps to kill a monster.” There was nothing in the genre which had the addictive immediacy of Doom — one of Diablo’s key inspirations.
“So I remember taking the mouse,” he said. “And I clicked the mouse. And the warrior walked over, and smacked the skeleton down. And I was like: ‘OH MY GOD! THAT WAS AWESOME!’ And the sun shone through and the angels sang and sure enough, that was when the modern RPG was kind of born. It was an amazing moment that I’ll never forget.”
That sense of immediacy led to Diablo’s infamous click-spamming, which forces players to click their mouse repeatedly for each movement or attack. Even today, Brevik says old fans blame him for their wrist problems or chastise him for how many mice they broke.
$40 million down the drain
The team also made some pretty poor business decisions. One of them was agreeing to make Diablo for $300,000 — which, minus costs and divided among the studio’s 15 members, meant about $1,000 a month.
An attempt to raise extra cash with contract work for the doomed Panasonic M2 console sparked a bidding war between Blizzard and the manufacturers to buy Brevik’s company (Blizzard won).
And when an entrepreneur called Sabeer Bhati asked if he could use the corner of their office for a few months in exchange for 10% of his company, Brevik and his team flatly turned him down.
That company was Hotmail, which sold for $400 million dollars less than two years later. At this point Brevik paused. “FORTY MILLION DOLLARS!” he shouted. “That’s $280 million today!”
One thing which did go very well was Battle.net. Today it is Blizzard’s all-purpose Steam style games client, but it began as a way to make Diablo multiplayer out of the box.
When an audience member asked how they managed to make it so stable in the age of screeching dial-up modems and having to disconnect for your parents’ phone calls, Brevik revealed, to joyous consternation, that the whole thing ran on one computer which was always turned on.
All it really did was host chatrooms and connect different players to each other, so it didn’t need much processing power. Battle.net was essentially an illusion.
Crunch time
Despite all this, development was a mess. The last eight months of the game were spent in permanent “crunch” mode, with Brevik waking up at 4am and going to sleep at 12am.
At one point, very close to release, his pregnant wife called him up and told him she was having contractions. He was terrified he would have to stop work. Luckily for both of them, it was a false alarm.
Despite this, Brevik defended long working hours in some circumstances. “Crunch gets a bad rap, and it should. But I thrive on crunch. I think crunch can be a positive thing if it’s handled correctly, if your partner is tolerant enough,” he said.
John Brindle is a critic and journalist who lives in south London, working as a mild-mannered editor for a metropolitan newspaper. He tweets @john_brindle.
