David Brevik on the Making of Diablo

Gamasutra has penned an excellent write-up of David Brevik’s presentation at this week’s Game Developers Conference, in which he talks through the early days of Condor, their relationship with Silicon & Synapse (which would become Blizzard Entertainment), how they eventually pursued development on the original Diablo, some of the tough design decisions that needed to be made, and much more. A generous sampling:

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.

(We’d 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,) said Brevik.

But after Silicon & Synapse became Blizzard and made Warcraft, they came back to Condor and heard the studio’s pitch for Diablo. They liked what they heard, and offered to publish the game.

(We were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo,) remembers Brevik. The studio then had to then figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like — and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen.

(This was not easy back then…I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,) said Brevik. (So the actual tile-square basis — the same shape and size — is exactly the same in X-Com and Diablo.)

So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com.

Brevik also remembers that the decision to make Diablo 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.

(Eventually, Blizzard South, they approached us and said ‘˜well, we’d really like to make this a real-time game,’) recalls Brevik. At first, he says, he was adamantly against it — he loved classic turn-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, and he didn’t want to give up turns because giving players time to agonize over their decisions between turns could create so much “delicious” drama.

(‘˜Yeah,’ [Blizzard South] said, ‘˜but real-time will be better,’) said Brevik. So Blizzard North eventually put it to a vote, (and I voted no, but everyone else voted yes, so I said I guess we can do this.)

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.

(They agreed to that, and I went ‘˜yesss,’) remembers Brevik. (So I sat down on a Saturday afternoon, and in a few hours I had it running [in real-time.])