The Origin of Diablo

Destructoid has published some quotes from ex-Blizzard North members on Diablo’s development, courtesy of David L. Craddock’s upcoming book: Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire – Book 1. Here’s a couple of quotes on one element fans just love to talk about, the title’s dark atmosphere:

The lighting in the game was done on a grid basis. As you moved between squares, the lighting changed. So you click one square over and the lighting wouldn’t change until you stepped into the next square.

That was the easiest way to write the code, but Doron [Gartner] wrote an algorithm so that the game changed the lighting when your character moved a couple of pixels instead of once per square. He found a faster way to calculate lighting so we could update it more regularly, and that made a huge improvement to the game’s atmosphere.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

…

I think we really did a great job of giving the player a feeling of dread and claustrophobia. In terms of where so many of our artists were at and where the computer game business was at, it was really perfect timing.

It was a great response to what was dominating the business at the time, in terms of fantasy RPGs that really hadn’t conceptually advanced too much beyond the early Ultima classics, and titles like Myst, and the then-popular FMV [full-motion video] games.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Blizzard North

The full book is going to be released on October 31, and you can currently pre-order a digital version of it on iTunes.