[eerie music]
- [Deckard] Hello, my friend.
Stay a while and listen.
- I never really envisioned
that Deckard Cain
would become as popular as he became.
I mean, he was always a
really big father figure
or whatever for your character,
and so I wanted him to be
your guide and your mentor,
giving you help along the way.
- [Deckard] If you come across challenges
and questions to which you
seek knowledge, seek me out,
and I will tell you what I can.
- My name is David Brevik,
lead programmer on "Diablo",
and this is how a show
of hands turned "Diablo"
from a turn-based game into real-time.
[dramatic music]
- [Deckard] I feel I have
come to know this hero.
- I got into video games
at a very early age.
My dad brought home an Apple
II Plus in, maybe, 1979.
Started learning to program at that time,
before that we had had
the original Pong machine
and the Atari 2600, but
program really became a passion
once the Apple II came around
and I learned how to program,
taught myself to program,
on the Apple II Plus.
That was kind of the start of my career,
and it was a passion that
never really left me.
I wanted to do nothing but make
video games my entire life,
ever since I sat down
and started programming.
So work began on "Diablo"
probably in earnest in late 1993.
We created a company and my friends and I,
who I'd met at a previous company,
we started pitching "Diablo"
to a bunch of different places.
The game was always titled "Diablo."
The name "Diablo" comes from a mountain
here in the San Francisco Bay Area
that I lived at the base of that mountain,
[chuckles] called Mount Diablo.
I didn't speak any Spanish,
so once I found out what the
name meant for the mountain,
then I said, "Yeah, that's gonna make
"a great video game name someday."
So we pitched it as "Diablo"
and the name never really left.
Blizzard first became involved
when we got together for a trade show.
It was Consumer Electronics Show
and we were showing off
"Justice League Task Force."
We were doing the Sega Genesis version,
and then another development company
was working on the Super Nintendo version.
We didn't realize that there was
a Super Nintendo version of it,
and they didn't realize that there was
a Genesis version of it.
So we didn't share any kind of
design or anything like that,
or any kind of assets or whatever.
But strangely the games were very similar.
They looked like they could
have been developed in tandem.
And so the two companies
instantly kind of merged
over our design sensibilities
and our graphic style
and everything like that.
They changed their name
from Silicon & Synapse
to Blizzard Entertainment.
They said, "Okay, well,
we're working on this title.
"Come take a look."
And I went to their little
meeting room that they had rented
and they showed off "Warcraft."
- [Video Game Character] Work completed.
- And they said, "Yeah, we're
also looking for other titles.
"We're looking to work with people
"that we think are good developers."
And I said, "Well, we've
got a great game idea,
"but nobody wants to, you know, do this.
"So are you guys interested?"
And they said, "Well, after
we finish 'Warcraft I'
"we'll come out and you can pitch us."
And they then agreed to do "Diablo."
[dramatic music]
So at the time, PC RPGs in general
were kind of in a very strange state.
Sales had really declined on
any kind of RPG at the time.
And even though that was
a huge genre earlier,
when we went to go pitch "Diablo"
to a bunch of different places,
we got rejected 20-plus times,
but we knew that this was an
unusual kind of style of RPG.
In a lot of ways, we
wanted to kind of make
the antithesis of what
RPGs were at the time.
We went out of our way to do that,
to make sure that the graphics
weren't elves and dragons.
We wanted to make it, you
know, very different than that.
We wanted to make sure that
the style of game it was
was much more like the
way that I used to play
"Dungeons & Dragons" as a kid.
I didn't really care
so much about the story
and things like that
in Dungeons & Dragons.
For me, it was much more about the loot.
It was much more about getting
the awesome vorpal swords
and stuff like that.
And so I wanted a game
that was ringing true
with a game that was more about, you know,
killing monsters and getting cool loot
rather than having a long story
with a deep character
customization and stuff like that.
I wanted to focus more on the action side
and more on the loot side.
And so we felt like we had a great idea
that separated us from the crowd,
but I think that a lot of people,
especially a lot of people
in publishing at that time,
weren't necessarily gamers.
Lot of them were just businessmen
who had learned that this
genre isn't selling anymore.
I don't care what kinda
game you're pitching me.
And so getting to pitch the game
to people that were actually gamers,
that were publishers in Blizzard,
was a kind of breath of fresh air.
And they understood the vision
and ultimately led to us
doing a deal with them.
I had many influences growing up,
things like "Ultima" to "Might
and Magic" to "Wizardry."
And so I started designing "Diablo"
when I was in high school.
And then in college, I
started playing a lot
on Unix machines that were, you know,
in the computer lab at the time.
They didn't have really
any kind of graphics
associated with them.
And that was really where I got introduced
to things like MUDs and roguelike games,
even though the term
roguelike comes from games
that are like the game "Rogue,"
which is one of the games that
I was playing at the time.
And then there were others
like "NetHack" and "Moria,"
"Umoria" and "Angband."
And those were huge influences in really,
in a lot of ways it was "Angband,"
I think, that was kind of
the model of what we wanted.
The point of the game was just, you know,
kill a boss and there was
random levels and random items,
but you were the @ symbol
attacking the letter K.
There was a game, "NHL '94."
One of the things that
we loved about that game
is that with just a few quick buttons,
we were in and skating around
and could check each other
and things like that.
And that was the kind of philosophy
that we wanted to bring to "Diablo."
We wanted to be everything
that RPGs weren't,
and one of those things was,
we want to just press a few buttons
and get right into the game.
Character creation was
this big deal in RPGs.
You would end up answering
a bunch of questions
about your history and
giving yourself a backstory
and putting numbers
into all sorts of stats
before you even knew
what the stats would do.
So we wanted to bypass all
of that and get directly in.
And that philosophy permeated
every decision that we made.
Time from boot up to kill was like,
it's gotta be under a
minute kind of thing.
For "Diablo," there were
a lot of technical things
that we had to overcome
that were different
than the way that games
had been at the time.
So the loot lottery is kind of a system
by which random items are generated,
and the best analogy
is it's a slot machine.
Every time you kill a monster,
you put a quarter into the slot machine
and you pull the lever
and out can come nothing,
you get your quarter back, you know,
you could do pretty well,
or you could hit a jackpot.
[game chimes]
And so if you can think
of pulling the lever
as every time you kill a monster,
it's got kind of this addictive quality.
Just as slot machines are addictive,
so is the, I am going to
maybe win something big here.
It was kind of loosely based on the system
that came from "Moria,"
"Angband," "Umoria,"
those kind of style games.
They had random item generation,
but not to the same extent
that we were gonna be
doing it in "Diablo."
Luckily, this was a really
fun part of the game
for a lot of us,
and so we didn't mind
working on this part.
It meant that we got to play
the game and get cool stuff.
Random level generation in "Diablo"
was extremely complicated.
There were, like, four kind of subsections
of the original game.
There were, like, kind of
four different tilesets,
but also it was having to write basically
four times the code that
you normally would write
for one of these things
also made it kind of a big challenge.
One of our pillars was
your guy that you've made,
your character that
you've made, is unique.
Your experience is going to be different
than anybody else's forever,
just because of the way the
trillions of combinations
that exist out there.
Nobody will have the
same experience twice.
A lot of RPGs were like, oh,
we've got a hundred hours,
and things like that, of content.
And we were saying,
basically you have unlimited content here.
One of the things that we
wanted to do with "Diablo"
was multi-classing.
This was kind of a philosophy
that was the, again,
kind of anti-typical RPG.
RPGs at the time were things like,
oh, you're playing as a cleric,
and as a cleric, I can't hold a sword.
It didn't make any sense at all
that, you know, a person who
claims to be this cleric,
can't just actually pick up
a dagger or pick up a sword.
They could only use maces.
And so in a lot of ways, we wanted to make
the anti-system for that,
which was this kind of
like multi-classing,
or everybody can do
everything, kind of system.
So as a warrior, you could cast spells.
You may be a lot worse at it.
It may take you extra mana.
Your spell casting animations are longer,
but you could do it.
It was the system where you
could make any class you wanted.
There were no restrictions,
like so many of the other things
that we thought were just barriers to fun.
- [Video Game Character] Fresh meat.
- And so making it so that it was kind of
this free form was really important to us.
And again, it was more of
the anti-RPG at the time.
- [Video Game Character]
The spirits of the dead
are now avenged.
- The relationship between Blizzard North
and Blizzard South was
sometimes contentious,
as any two groups can be or
whatever, in any relationship.
Largely, we got along really well.
We were very reasonable with each other.
We helped each other out.
Obviously there were some fights,
some things that they
felt passionately about,
some things that we
felt passionately about.
They were involved,
but they weren't involved
in a day-to-day basis.
You know, we would talk often,
but it wasn't like they
were sitting in our office
like with a producer or talking about
what we're doing every day kind of thing.
Originally, "Diablo" was
gonna be a turn-based game,
which is based on "Rogue"
and "Angband," et cetera.
All of those games were turn-based.
At some point during the
process, which was pretty early,
I would say within maybe
three or four months
of the start of the project,
they came to us after their success
with converting strategy
games to real-time
in the same way that
they did with "Warcraft."
And they felt, hey, with
all of these kind of
turn-based old-school versions of RPGs,
we should do a real-time version of it.
And I was really against this idea.
This was the line in the sand for me.
I was not gonna, there was no way
that I was changing
this game to real-time.
- [Video Game Character]
His reckless overconfidence
has proven costly to us all.
- I was deathly afraid of losing
what I thought was kind of
the essence of this game.
Oftentimes when you're playing
these turn-based RPGs like this,
you get to a point where your
character's about to die.
You were important
decisions you had to make.
There was just so much strategy and depth
and the games were permadeath.
So if you, you know, if
you died, that was it.
And there was on these Unix servers,
so you couldn't, like,
restore your characters
or anything like that, it was gone.
So it's this really tense moment.
And I really did not want
to lose that tension.
I thought that was essential to the way
that the game was gonna play.
And our turn base wasn't really
like our turn, their turn,
our turn, their turn.
It was a little bit more complicated.
It was if a single turn was
broken into 10 sub-turns
or something like that,
pulling out your sword may take
like, you know, 1/10 of a turn,
and then walking one square horizontally
took a whole turn, but
diagonally took 1.4 turns.
So we kind of had this scaling list.
So it was kind of a
complicated turn-based thing.
And there was a lot of conflict,
and a lot of times that we
would talk about the game
and how things were going,
and we would have phone calls
and for weeks at the end,
they would say, "Hey, so what about
"changing it to real- time?"
They would kind of keep nudging on this.
I brought it up with some
of the people at the office.
It started to gain some momentum.
People were like, "Yeah, no,
"I think that it might be kind of cool."
- [Video Game Character] My
knowledge of the ancient ways
might be of some help.
- We all got together.
The entire Blizzard North got together
in the kitchen and had a vote.
The development team was probably
maybe 15 people at the time.
We all voted and I was heavily outweighed.
There were a few, three or four of us,
kind of didn't want to change it,
but it was, you know, 15 of them
did want to change it or whatever.
So reluctantly, I said:
Okay, yeah, we can do this.
We can give it a try.
I think this is dumb.
I think it's gonna be a waste of like,
it's gonna take us a month to do this.
We've done this game for too
cheap. We're gonna go back.
We're gonna try and get
some more money as well,
at the same time.
I went back, I said: Yeah,
it's gonna take us longer
to develop the game now
because it's gonna be
this real-time thing.
So we not only need an
extra milestone payment,
but also, you know, we're
not gonna have anything
to show or talk about for like a month,
because it's just gonna
take so long to do this.
And so I said: Okay, I'm
gonna start this process.
Everybody go home.
This was on a Friday,
everybody cleared out.
And Friday afternoon I
started working on it,
and by Friday evening
I had it done. [laughs]
I remember it just like it was yesterday.
You know, I was working on it
and I always kind of the warrior.
I had this club in my hand,
there was a skeleton on the screen,
and I kind of clicked on a skeleton.
My character walked over and swung
and smacked the skeleton apart.
And I was like, "Oh my
God, this is amazing."
That felt so good. That was,
really, this was way better.
The sun shone through the
window, the clouds parted,
the angels went, ahh.
It was definitely a moment that I knew
that this was definitely the way to go.
This was way better.
And I just sat there for like an hour,
like clicking the mouse
button over and over again,
as I just swung the sword and
we never really looked back.
So when people came in on Monday morning,
it was done, it was working.
It was obvious that
this was the way to go,
and we never looked back.
One of the great things about this change
was that we had so many
assets to work with.
The game itself was
already deep in production.
We already had a bunch
of different assets,
so we didn't need to start from scratch.
We kept the same perspective.
We kept a lot of the assets that we had.
So there wasn't really
any kind of fundamental
technology changes in terms
of the graphics pipeline
or art assets or anything like that,
that we needed to take care of.
It was mainly focused on our
ability to change the gameplay
and make sure that that
was a smooth transition.
Once the real-time change had happened
and we kind of settled in,
it was pretty obvious that
it was the right decision.
Throughout the office it was
kind of an electric atmosphere.
Everybody was really jazzed.
Everybody's really psyched.
Even the people that were
kind of steadfast against us,
including myself, came to me and said,
"Yes, this feels amazing.
This is really cool."
We kind of changed some
of the design of the game
and the way that you're gonna
interact with the monsters
and the way that you're gonna
do combat and stuff like that.
And these things kind
of evolved and changed
over a period of the
next few weeks and months
as we kind of grasped what
the real-time really meant
and how that affected the actual
moment-to-moment gameplay.
So on that day that I had that
incredible encoding session,
we didn't let Blizzard
know quite right away,
but I couldn't hold it back that much.
I couldn't withhold that
information for too long
'cause it was just so damn exciting.
And they had already agreed
to pay us more money,
so that part was taken care of.
And the fact that it
took such a short time
and was such an improvement,
and they kind of got their way,
it ended up not really
being an issue at all.
And everybody was very excited
about the new direction
and the way that it turned out.
- [Video Game Character]
We have learned strength
is making the right choice.
- Looking back, I feel like "Diablo I"
turned out way better than
I ever imagined it would.
I'm obviously very proud of working on it.
You know, it's just such a highlight
and a pillar of my career,
but it wasn't just me.
It was a lot of people.
There are a lot of people,
very talented people that I worked with,
that made that a reality,
from music to graphics,
to other programmers, et cetera.
There were just so many
super talented people
that worked together
as a team to make that
a just really special time.
In terms of my overall vision,
it exceeded what my vision
of what the final product could be.
I feel very, very lucky
to have worked on it.
We had a very different
vision for "Diablo II."
We had a lot more experience
about what we were doing.
We understood the market a lot better.
We understood that we're building
upon this fantastic game.
With "Diablo II," it was definitely
more in lines with my expectations.
It still exceeded my expectations
and still does today.
I mean, the fact of the matter is
that there are so many people
playing the game today that, you know,
20 years after we released it,
says a lot about the product.
You can go on to Twitch
and find people streaming
the product at any time.
It continued to sell, you know,
a boxed copy of this game on target
for 15 years after the
product was released.
And it was always in the
top 10 sellers of the year.
At the time, "Diablo II"
was the fastest-selling
PC game of all time.
You know, it reached a million copies
faster than any other game in history.
And I think that "Diablo I", you know,
sold a million very quickly as well.
Right at the exact same
time, "The Sims" came out.
It was almost exact same
time as "Diablo II."
Those two games were
on the bestselling list
and still are on the
bestselling lists of all time
if you look up PC sales.
People are so passionate about the game
and they figure out every little aspect.
And it's funny, they'll collect
every single unique item
in the game or something like that.
And they play literally
hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of hours trying
to collect these things.
They do it unique ways.
So I'm just going to,
I'm not gonna use any kind of weapons.
I'm just gonna punch my way
to the end, or whatever.
There's like all sorts of different ways
that people come up with.
They make videos on YouTube
and all these kind of things,
and it's really great to
see people so passionate
about the game after all these years.
Both "Diablo" and "Diablo
II" had such a huge impact
on my career and still do to today.
It's strange, having such success
with your first PC game you've ever made,
the expectations for everything
that you do after that
are just sky high, ridiculously high.
That was a tough thing to deal
with when we left Blizzard
and made things like "Hellgate: London,"
and the hype for that
game was outrageously high
and didn't meet expectations.
It was a really unique
game. It was really cool.
I think it was a game that
was way ahead of its time.
Basically it was the
very first looter shooter
that, I don't know, some
people call it shooter looter,
some people call it looter shooter.
There are other names for or whatever,
but whatever way that you wanna say it,
it was the first of that style of game.
And I get a lot of people that come back
and compliment me on that all the time,
despite the flaws, which
were mainly bug-related.
There are a lot of gameplay loops
that I'm fond of these days.
I think that for me, a lot of
kind of like survival-esque games
are really kind of my jam lately.
I was really into MMOs for awhile
and I think that any kind of
survival, building, crafting,
those kinds of things, I
really enjoy that a lot,
but still I harken back to ARPGs.
Like, I still really enjoy the loop
of kill monsters, get loot.
I still really love that the most,
much more than almost any other genre.
The best general advice that I can give
are things like from a UI perspective.
Can somebody play this
without reading a manual
or getting any kind of instructions?
Like, back in the early
days when I was playing,
when we were making
"Diablo," we had this thing,
which is now kind of unfair,
but it was nicknamed the mom test,
which was like, my mom was not
computer-savvy at the time.
And so like, if my mom can
pick this up and play this,
then anybody can.
We wanted to approach the thing
so it was kind of a wide
audience kind of way
to play the game and it
made simplified things.
It forced us to simplify any UI.
And so kind of distilling the essence
of what you're trying
to do, whatever it is,
and making the UI kind of enhance that
is the best kind of
experience that I can give.
Making sure that something
is really simple and straightforward,
especially in your core
game loop, is critical.
A few years ago, I went
completely independent.
I made a company called Graybeard Games.
It was originally just me.
It's still largely just me.
Made a product called "It Lurks Below."
I did everything.
I did the pixel art, the
programming, the design, music.
Later in the game, a
couple other people help.
My wife is doing a little
bit of programming and design
and my third eldest kid,
but my eldest kid here still at the house,
she's doing some of the art.
We've done some of the pixel art
and I've got some other friends
helping me and stuff like that.
So it's more than just me,
but originally a great
majority of the project
has been just me.
I wanted to try and do
a project all by myself
and "It Lurks Below," it's out.
It's been out for about a year,
and it's coming to Xbox soon
and hopefully other platforms,
other consoles after that.
And then recently I also
just started a publisher
called Skystone Games
and looking to publish
other kind of indie products
and take my experience from
being an indie developer
and trying to boost other indies
and making sure that they can survive
in today's harsh climate.
Give them not only game feedback,
but also make sure that they can
get good coverage on their game
and get seen by press
outlets and things like that.
There were a bunch of
times during development
that I felt like this could be a hit,
but the thing that really
drove it home for me
while we were making the game,
we would work and people would
roll in and work all day,
and then when it was time to go home,
they weren't going home.
They were playing the game
that they had just spent
all day working on.
So I knew when that was happening,
that it was, you know,
it could be something
that was kind of addictive.
And the dream was never that
it would do as well as it did.
Our dream was maybe someday
we can sell 25,000 copies.
If we did that, maybe
we could make a sequel.
That was kind of the original dream.
I had no real intent
in making it, you know,
that it was gonna be so addictive
or that wasn't really
what we had set out to be.
It was just the hopes of us being able
to make the PC games that we love.
[dramatic music]
[logo whooshes]
