More than twenty years ago, David Brevik contributed to the creation of Blizzard North. He also played an important role in the development of the hit studio - Diablo .
“I came up with the original concept in high school,” says Brevik, who was attending school in the San Francisco Bay Area (he borrowed the name of the game from the local peak, Diablo Mountain). “The only thing I always wanted to do was make games, and even in high school, I thought about the games I could make and the names that I could give them.”
According to Brevik, initially Diablo was conceived closer to the traditional RPG with an adventure party, turn-based gameplay and the strong influence of his first favorite games - Rogue and Nethack .
But right after college, he found himself in a company that created digital clipart, which gradually fell apart; after the collapse of the company, some of the employees decided to form their own company, named after a secret project, on which the company-developer of cliparts worked: “Project Condor”. So the gaming company Condor was born.
It was then that Brevik wrote the Diablo design document, describing it as a turn-based single-player DOS game, which was supposed to receive extensions similar to the booster packs of cards for Magic the Gathering, which was then very popular. Also in the game was permanent death. “This was an important feature of roguelike, so we also wanted to implement it.”
In addition, it is often said that initially the design of the game had graphics in the style of plasticine animation.
“It was n’t just plasticine animation,” Brevik says, adding that in fact when creating the look of the game, the developers were inspired by the arcade fighting game Primal Rage .
“I really liked how Primal Rage looked on arcade machines,” says Brevik. “It used single-frame shooting for all characters and graphics.” Brevik also wanted to use Diablo 's single-frame style. But when he found out how long and expensive it would be, he had to abandon the idea.
How Justice League Task Force Joins Blizzard North and South
But to stay afloat, along with planning, Diablo Condor was involved in other sports and licensed games, including the Justice League Task Force for Sega Genesis.
Brevik recalls how he took this game to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he unexpectedly found a fellow in arms - a development company Silicon & Synapse, which eventually turned into Blizzard Entertainment.
“We arrived, put our game on the stand, and then ... suddenly we saw another version of it - for Super Nintendo!”
Condor had no idea that they were developing a version of Task Force for Super Nintendo (because the publisher did not bother to let the company know about it), and yet the two games were strangely similar. Condor developers started a conversation with Silicon & Synapse employees, who, as it turned out, also had a dream to create their own hit, an original game for PC; Condor could not realize this dream with the Diablo project.
“We tried to propose the idea of this game to a bunch of people, but everyone refused, they said that the RPG genre is dead. Nobody wanted to invest in RPG, ”says Brevik.
But after Silicon & Synapse turned into Blizzard and created Warcraft , she again contacted Condor and listened to her proposal to create Diablo . Blizzard liked what they heard and the company offered to publish the game.
“We were thrilled and signed a contract for the development of Diablo ,” Brevik recalls. After this, the studio had to think about how this turn-based isometric game should really look like, what the camera position and rendering on the screen should be like.
“In those days, it was not easy ... I took a screenshot from X-Com , and we just put it in Diablo,” says Brevik. “In fact, the base of square tiles of the same size and shape is common to X-Com and Diablo .”
That is, according to Brevik, the appearance and technology of Diablo in a sense is completely based on a screenshot from X-Com .
Brevik also recalls that the decision to turn Diablo from turn-based to real-time was controversial. He said that despite the rumors, Blizzard did not ask Condor to do it in real time and add multiplayer. This happened later, when the development of the game began.
“Later, Blizzard South told us that they would really like it to be a real-time game,” Brevik recalls. At first, he was categorically against this - David loved classic turn-based “underground” games like Rogue , and did not want to give up turn-based games, because the ability to let the player regret the consequences of his decisions after the move is all the sweetness of the drama of this genre.
“Yes, Blizzard South answered, but real time will be better,” Brevik says. "Therefore, Blizzard North had to put this issue to the vote, and I voted against it, but everyone else was in favor, and we decided to give it a try."
Brevik contacted Blizzard South and said that they could do it, but they would need much more time to remake the game, as well as another advance payment.
“They agreed to it, and I thought yes!” Brevik recalls. "Then on Saturday, in the afternoon, I got to work and in a few hours remade the game so that it works in real time."
"And so, probably, the genre of action-RPG (ARPG) was born."
Brevik proudly recalls the moment when he first clicked the mouse and watched his previously turn-based warrior move around the room in real time and attack the skeleton. “I remember saying in all my voice: my goodness, this is amazing!”
“I'm pretty sure that it was then that ARPG was born,” says Brevik. “It was an amazing moment, and I was lucky to be part of it.”
During the development process, Diablo Condor became Blizzard North. This was partly due to the far from ideal financial condition of the company.
“We were so happy to work on Diablo that we signed an agreement with Blizzard, without even realizing that we were agreeing to create a game ... for $ 300,000. Our studio had 15 employees, and we would have to pay them 20 thousand a year. In addition, how would we pay for office rent? ”
But they really wanted to create Diablo , so Condor began to look for additional work to improve their financial affairs. They turned to 3DO and signed a contract to create a football game for the console for almost $ 1 million.
“It helped us. It helped a lot. ” But even after signing the contract, the company did not receive all the money right away and was forced to pay employees day after day with labor costs.
“Then, at some point, Blizzard South proposed to us: guys, we would like to buy you,” says Brevik. “For us it was a great relief, we no longer had to take care of wages.” But 3DO found out about this and she did not like this idea, so she began to make her own suggestions.
“So began the auction war between Blizzard and 3DO. 3DO offered us twice as much money, but we refused it because we felt that in fact both our company and the game really belong to Blizzard. And we were so close to her culture and views that we abandoned the 3DO double bet and moved on to Blizzard. ”
In passing, Brevik recalls how, at the end of 1996, when Diablo was in crunch mode, he was approached by a businessman named Sabeer Bhatia and said literally the following: “I am going to make email for the Internet ... I will give you ten percent of of your company, if you provide me with a place to work in your office. ”
Brevik replied: “No way, that makes no sense!” Email on the Internet? I already have mail on the Internet. ” Blizzard North worked hard on Diablo , so Brevik told Bhatia that he could not give him a place to work in the company.
The company of Bhatia took the name Hotmail and its value grew to about $ 400 million. That is, Brevik could get $ 40 million, which (according to his estimates) today is approximately 280 million.
On the other hand, the development of Diablo stimulated the popularity of Battle.net, which was originally born in Blizzard North, but was mainly developed by Blizzard South. But for almost the entire development period, Diablo had neither multiplayer modes, nor even code, so in recent months the Blizzard North team literally had to move south to work with Blizzard South to implement Battle.net support in Diablo . Brevik says that his studio was completely unprepared for how quickly cheating became a serious problem in the game.
“We knew that people would be able to crack the game or cheat,” Brevik says, but the studio thought it would be separate cases. “But then the game came out and we thought“ oh my God ... cheats are uploaded to the Internet and now EVERYONE can cheat! "We did not even think about it!"
Brevik recalls that this was one of the most discouraging moments in the life of Diablo and he strongly motivated Blizzard to remake the client-server architecture for Diablo II .
In addition: “This is no longer a secret, and I’m unlikely to cause problems for anyone by saying that Battle.net was running on the same computer. Since the players were directly connected to each other, we did not need high performance, the server only dealt with these connections. ”
Brevik then showed a short excerpt from the pre-release alpha demo that the company distributed on PC Gamer demos in November 1996. He managed to find one of these discs at home.
“One of the negative aspects of the RPG of the time was that before you started playing, you had to go through 25 character creation menus.” And Blizzard North loved the Doom menu very much, so the company developed the Diablo interface, inspired by the theme of the id Software game and subjecting it to “mom’s test” - “can my mom play this game?”. The idea was to create a game that you can start playing as quickly as possible, with minimal delays.
Speaking about the UI, Brevik noted that the minimal inspiration from Dark Forces was the direct source of inspiration for creating the Diablo map, and that the hotbar interface was invented in the last three months of the project.
Prior to this, according to Brevik, there was only one slot in the lower left corner of the screen, in which players could add potions, but if they ended, then the player was out of luck. Also, the studio almost got rid of the mechanics “right-click to activate the skill” (the player would have to open the skill book each time and click on the skill to use it) and almost add the mechanics of cooking and eating food at the very end of development, but she simply did not have enough time for this.
“The completion of the project was very harsh; we were in the crunch for 8-9 months, ”Brevik recalls. “At that time my wife was pregnant; the baby was supposed to be born at the end of December ... you see where it all went. "
Around December 10, Brevik's wife called his office and said: “I have contractions, it's time to go.”
The studio already had problems because it tried unsuccessfully to release Diablo by Christmas 1996. But as a result, the release was postponed until December 31, and the contractions were a false alarm - Brevik's daughter was born on January 3, a few days after the appearance of the game.
“We made super efforts to make the game great, and it seems to me that in the end it was worth it. Crunches are never fun, but sometimes, at least personally, I consider them an inevitable evil. ”
(Along the way, Brevik mentioned that crunch while working on Diablo II turned out to be even worse - it lasted about a year and a half. “It was the worst crunch in my life,” he says.)
A strange but interesting fact about the game: Brevik recalls that after the release of Diablo , a competition was announced - the first player to kill Diablo should have received $ 100. Soon after, one player took advantage of the health exchange skill, reached the last boss, exchanged health with him, waited until the boss almost killed him, exchanged health again and defeated him.
“We immediately removed this skill from the game,” says Brevik. Apparently, Blizzard North still paid the player $ 100.
Another interesting fact about the design of the game: “The name of Deckard Cain came about as a result of the competition ... as part of the competition in PC Gaming Magazine: people could send us their names so we could use them in Diablo . Someone sent the name Deckard Cain, I don’t know if it was invented, but we thought: “Damn, it's cool. Take it! ""
See also: “ Blizzard Announced Diablo IV .”