'Diablo': A Classic Game Postmortem

few stragglers still coming in I think that uh they're closing the doors hi everybody wow there's a lot of people here I uh I you know when Rob Bardo asked me to do this talk I uh I was H okay sure yeah I'll I'll do it or whatever but I didn't expect it to be this popular thank you for uh for coming out um so let's first go over who I am uh my name is David brevik and I am uh was the president of Blizzard North for about 10 years uh that's me there on the left with Max and Eric schaer who were the other co-founders of Blizzard North and uh I was lead programmer on Diablo as well as a co-creator and co-designer and Etc as well as kind of the original concept Creator so uh uh the idea for Diablo uh started oh wait before we go

to that let's uh talk a little bit about what we're here for we're here here to talk about Diablo uh it was released December 31st 1996 that makes this the 20th anniversary year uh it'll be 20th anniversary the very last day of this year some people say that it came out at the very beginning of January technically if you were on the west coast you got some boxes at the stores on the 31st but uh then it was probably January 2nd or 3rd before you actually got it in a lot of places in the US because of the way that shipping worked and things like that at the time uh so this is I'm here to do a postmortem on on a game now it may be a little early uh I don't know if we had enough time to digest whether or not you know the the uh the entire gravity of the situation of making this game but the uh but I I hope to do it some justice uh 20 years ago was is a long time ago and my memory is uh not as sharp as it used to be so uh let's go through this and we'll see how it goes so um

first uh the original concept the original concept uh was something I thought of in high school uh I lived here uh my Junior and Senior year of high school out in the East Bay uh East East part of San Francisco Bay area and uh in a town called Danville and uh I lived at the base of Mount Diablo and that is where the name comes from uh was that uh I didn't speak a of Spanish when I moved here and then I found out what the name meant I was like yeah that name rocks I'm going to use that someday I was very fortunate to know from a very early age exactly what I wanted to do uh my dad brought home an Apple 2 plus uh when I was young and I taught myself to program and uh played games and programmed non-stop pretty much all the way well even today so the uh I haven't stopped really and uh it's

all I've ever wanted to do make games and so even in high school I was thinking about what kind of games I could make and what kind of names I could use and and uh the the the concept was very different at that time it was uh much more uh kind of a party based Wizardry kind of game you know Might and Magic and Wizardry and that that kind of style uh that it was that it when it ended up being uh it really was influenced heavily through my time in college by a lot of Rogue likes including Rogue and uh and net Haack and Moria and Ang band and games like that uh and I played them on these Unix machines when I was at College before kind of the internet existed um and so uh it it existed but it was just like you know the universities were hooked up to the government services and stuff like that it was not you know HTML and stuff had not really been invented at that time so um then I graduated school and we decided

that we were I worked very briefly at a few different places including being technical director at Iguana Iguana's claim to fame was really their NBA Jam games and uh and so uh they moved to Texas they started out here in the Bay Area and then um I uh I left when they moved to moved to Texas and started my own company called Condor with Max and Eric these artists that I had met at uh at the clip art company that I originally worked at right out of school uh there was a clip art and then video game company that went under after 6 months uh anyway so uh one of the the name of the company we came up with was Condor and Condor comes from that time uh when we were at the clip art company and we knew it was kind of a mess and uh and so we were all kind of dreaming about what day we'll make our own games and so the the secret project was going to be project Condor was the the code name hey we want to talk about Condor

over lunch and uh and so uh we would go and chat and dream of ideas and things like that but I kept coming back to this Diablo idea uh that I had and uh that uh anyway So eventually we we put it to paper and here is the original design document for Diablo uh it was uh it was very similar to the way it turned out uh okay no it wasn't similar at all uh first off it was turn-based next it was single player it was Doss it had expansion packs like magic the Gathering cards like you could buy a disc with like 50 items on it and install it and we could sell just tons of these packs that you could just add on and we quickly realized that that was a big issue uh there there was perade death it

was unforgiving I mean hardcore eventually made it way its way into the series thankfully but the uh but uh the time it was it was you know that was a very staple feature of of Rog likes and so that's uh that's why I wanted that so um and then there's a rumor sort of it's not really just a rumor but uh that had clation and that is kind of true the original idea uh about the art style was that we were going to and and this was kind of about 5 years ago blizzard made a a retrospective of Diablo and all their games or whatever and uh and in it they made this cute little funny jokey cartoon of the uh of this demon clay thing coming out and like getting attacked and falling over and was very cute but I I'm kind of setting the record straight here there was a game at the time wasn't just playmation okay so

there was a game at the time that was called Primal Rage and uh Primal Rage was uh I love the way that this game looked in the arcade I thought it was really neat it had it very distinct look and because it used stop motion to make all of its characters and graphics and I thought that it you know they didn't have bump mapping and all these kind of you know really fancy ways you can make graphics look great now they just didn't exist back then and uh or if they did you needed like weeks to render it so the uh so we uh said well we'll give this a try we'll see what this is like and so we sat down and we looked into it and we're like oh my God we're not doing this this is a disaster there's no way we can make all these models and and photograph all these things and put them in the game so that it it was clation for and it wasn't really clamation it was stop motion for about 5 seconds so that that was definitely uh that was that that that puts that to rest it was it was they say

clation I say stop motion but there you go so the company Condor got contracts to do a bunch of different games uh doing just uh uh contract work with uh developer you Publishers that we knew aaim and sunsoft and some others and uh and so we got a contract to do the Justice League task force game and this was a Superman Batman Wonder Woman Street Fighter clone and uh and so uh we you know we're working on this and we were working on some football games uh you I'm a big sports fan and uh they so we were doing some NFL quarterback club Game Boy and Game Gear games at the time as well and uh so we show up at CES this is before E3 existed uh we used to have our our uh got to feel like such an old guy at this point back in my day when

we we had our show next to the car stereos which were blowing us out the whole time the uh and so uh we show up and we're we we have our game on display and we look over and wait there's another version of the product for Super Nintendo I'm like wait what what we didn't know that there was another developer working on the exact same game as us the two had never talked the publisher never talked about there was another contract there was no like what the heck is going on this is really weird or whatever and the games were strangely similar like whoa this is really weird so we got to know these guys and uh their name was silicon and synaps and and uh and so we got to talking at the show and and they said oh yeah well uh

you know we're we're silicon in synapse right now and uh and but kind of under the radar here uh we're we're selling the company and we're going to change our name and we're going to make a PC game and I said oh that that sounds awesome that's what we want to do my dream I have a dream to make a PC game you know that's I love PC gaming it's the main thing that I play and I and I we're going to someday I'm going to make this game uh and we've been trying to pitch this game idea to a whole bunch of people and we've gone around to 25 different Publishers this CES and previous ones and handed out this document to a whole bunch of people and they have said no RPGs are dead there is no way we are investing in an RPG this is ridiculous you guys are out of your look at that and you guys not only want us to invest in an RPG but you also want us to sell a crap ton of discs and that's a logistic Nightmare and that's just never it's going to happen

I said but damn it the game idea is solid okay it's it's kind of a modern version of Rogue or whatever and uh anyway so we got to talk into silicon and synaps and they're oh we're making this game or whatever and and we're going to change our name we're going to be called Blizzard Entertainment and the game that we're making is called Warcraft and I said o well let me let me go look at it so we went back and they had this one room that was maybe 10 by 10 let's say we'll be generous in a little 10 x 10 kind of Walled in you know semi- per perit structure kind of uh meeting room and back in the corner they're kind of geeking out and playing the game and and uh and they have a couple posters and a couple press people in there and talking and stuff and I thought it looked really great I thought that it was it was amazing and so a bunch of people heard the buzz at the show about this thing and then as time went on I kept kind of bugging them and saying hey you guys you guys need some beta testers cuz I got a whole company full of beta testers if you guys need some beta test testing and uh and

eventually they we got to talking more and more and I said all right come on let after you guys I've got this great game idea I said okay well after we're done with Warcraft one we'll come out and we'll uh listen to your pitch I said okay well that's all I can ask for thank you and so they came out in January of 1995 correct and uh doing the math quickly in my head no yes okay somewhere in there and uh and so they came out and and we pitched them Diablo and then you know kind of the the rest is history and so we signed the contract to do Diablo with them uh we were very excited because this kind of this dream game now at the same time we also we were kind of beginning development on Diablo but we had to finish the development of Justice League and the the the game boy football games and things like that so we had to kind of wrap this stuff up through the most of of kind of the 95 year about the

first half of it as well as start you we had to sign these contracts and do all sorts of stuff to uh to get rolling and that that kind of takes time and whatnot and started to hire some people and and whatnot uh to try and work on this development but one of the very first things that we did is we decided what what is the game going to look like right what is what is kind of the graphic look of the game one of the games at the time that we've been playing a lot and really loved was XCOM and I still love that game to this day I mean there were a bunch of games actually during that era that uh that the that simtech made a whole bunch of really fantastic games right then and uh and so we took and this was not easy back then by the way I kind of took a screen grab of XCOM and had a little cursor box that showed exactly the tile size and Etc and we wanted to emulate this look and so we just took that and we put

it right into Diablo and so the actual tile Square basis is exactly the same in XCOM and Diablo uh they are the exact same shape uh and and size uh so all the kind of Technology we built was upon basically you know a screenshot screen grab from XCOM uh uh so uh as you can that's a really early version of the game there on the right you can see that uh God I don't even know what's going on in that picture there's a I don't even know what those big black boxes are I have no idea what we were even thinking there uh anyway very strange who knows I mean because it's got health and man health and monor reversed it I don't even know what's going on in that thing uh so I'm going to get a little bit technical here I hope that I don't you know people start nodding off or something like I apologize but I am going to get slight L technical here um

so one of the things that went right so also before we get into this just a quick note I went through and I looked at a bunch you know postmortem in my mind was like hey here's three to five things that we did right here's three to five things we did wrong boom boom boom D you know and that's that's postmortem but uh I looked online and started watching some of the classic postm modems and like they weren't doing that and I was like wait what I okay well I already wrote my talk and it was all the three to five things that were good and three to five things that were bad I don't know what I'm going to do crap I got to you know rewrite this thing so I'm kind of merging my old talk with this with the new one so I I hope that uh one of the things that went right here was that uh is lighting so we came up with this idea actually I think Eric came up with the idea of doing lighting uh and arranging the pallet uh in such a way we have 256 colors at the time this is super VGA 640x 480 Graphics just state-of-the-art kind of stuff and uh and uh and so we

had I mean 256 colors was a a big deal I mean okay VGA you know 320 by 200 is that what it was 2 320 by 240 I don't remember uh and uh that was kind of you know 640480 was definitely the a big leap up and so we had these 256 colors to work with and so we kind of split the pallet into two different sections we said it split it into 128 colors for the background and 128 character colors for everything else that was the monsters the UI the the characters the spell effects everything fit into one 256 color palette and then the background into a I mean 12 128 color pette and the other was uh the background was 128 colors I'm not really sure why we did it that way we probably should have balanced it a little bit better and made like 64 for the background and the rest for the for everything else but you know who knows I don't know we we were we were dumb back then

uh actually funny story and a true story my Diablo one was my Act was actually the first time I ever coded in C uh the I had never done a c program in my life until until I coded Diablo 1 and in fact Diablo 1 a lot of the graphic routines and stuff are all written in assembly uh they so i' say maybe like whatever an eighth of all the code in Diablo is was an assembly um so we used this and and kind of organized the pallet so that the colors went from dark to light and so every strip of 16 colors we had you know eight different Hues for background eight different Hues and saturations whatever you want to call them and lightness levels uh you know going across so that you could go from dark to light and so when we went to go draw the uh gra oh wait let's go through the art pipeline first the uh we've got uh this is I think this is the butcher but but I'm not really sure

anyway I got this out of some weird magazine article um you know this was a very popular thing to do when we were making when people were making game articles in magazines was O this is the process of making the art or whatever and it was like here's the sketch here's the mesh Here's the the the solid render of it and here it is textured and it was like every article on video game making had this included this was a standard issue art piece in the uh in every single article anyway we would take this and we would actually render out the Sprites develop the models in 3D just like it was actually this process I don't think they ever went to a solid render but the uh uh we would then uh export it and would render out a bunch of series of Sprites on a one sheet and so it's kind of some Sprite sheet thing then we' use this program called debabelizer that would map that pallet these 24-bit images to this spe specific pallette

that we had whatever it was if it was a background piece into the background ones and if otherwise it would go into these the uh eight Hues of the kind of the foreground and other characters so we had this kind of pipeline where we would create the art it would go through this process this post process that would uh that would convert the pallet so that was they were all in the right place and then we went to go draw it every Square on the map would have a light level and uh and so you would used that light level and it was up to 16 different light levels and we would use that and combine that with the original light level and then so those two 16 level things those are both nibbles that make a bite it was a bite lookup that I could then get the final light color kind of the matching of the light color and then you know I knew what Hue it was and that was the upper nibble and the new bite new nibble on the bottom became the actual color to use and so then I could write that and that is how we did the lighting we had these these kind of

two different tables and set up the pallet in that way and it was something that really had not been seen before at the time and uh and it really led to the atmosphere of Diablo made it you know dark and creepy and uh and uh that was one of the one of the techniques that we Ed to really kind of bring out the atmosphere so what went wrong in the graphics and uh this one still gives me I just don't even I don't even know why we didn't change this even when we knew that it was a big problem so what went wrong with the floors or I guess the walls or I guess both all right so looking at this picture you can see that how we drew the drew the scene and so the way that we would draw the scene is we would start it there at tile number one you can imagine then tile two and then three and then four and then five and then six and then so you kind of like went from the back what was away from you and kind of moved forward left to right and and Drew these tiles so when you drew the tile I

drew the tile and then I drew all the stuff that was on top of the tile right there and so uh it's like oh it's got a player there and it's got an item and you know it has a chest or whatever and so it would it would draw whatever is on top of the tile so that worked really well until we actually attached the walls to the floor and so when I went to go draw something and you were moving from one square to the other you would get your Sprite would get cut off you would be like halfway through your walk as you moved along cuz you're here in this location in the kind of the one position and as you move to two it would draw two after it would draw one and so your Sprite would just end up getting cut off and so we had to fix this by actually moving you to the place that you're going to be down screen and then kind of negatively offsetting you back to where you were and then slowly drawing you the other other way so in

Diablo and then we had to Pro program all sorts of AI stuff where it was like targeting the right place of where you were or going to be and all this kind of stuff all we had to do was just separate the damn floor from the walls I don't know why we didn't go back and do that if we had just drawn all the floor and then drawn the walls then and all the things on top of it it would have solved a lot of these problems anyway uh Lessons Learned you know have to worry about this anymore the cardot does all this crap for you so it's kids today the so uh the big controversy so real time versus turn-based this so there is a a a legend that uh

when we pitched the guys from down south Blizzard Entertainment on on making this game they came out of it and they said this game is awesome we're really excited about it it looks great this is I mean it's just such a great idea but there's two things wrong one it's turn-based and two it needs to be multiplayer and they got their way on both but the uh we'll get to that in a second the so uh originally the game was set up to be a turn-based game and it was turn-based but the turns were kind of divided into into sections so not everything was an even amount of turn length so you would have uh you know it would cost let's say Five Points to make some moves versus 20 points to make others and you know independent and we can call those you know whatever tenths of a second or something something cost takes a half a second to do something takes two seconds to do whatever and so it was this kind of we set up the whole game to have this kind of this detail of

what uh you know different skills took and how much time they took and things like that so it was kind of a complicated turnbas game uh and So eventually uh blizzard South they approached us and said Well we'd really like to make this a real-time game and I said what are you guys talking about real time wait no no no no no no no this is this is one of your strategy games uh the uh we are you know I'm really committed to making a turn-based game here I love this this sweat I love in a turn-based game especially in a rogue like when you've made a turn and you're you just got hit and you're down to one hit point you're kind of frantically searching through your oh my god do I do I read this scroll I don't even have it identified I don't I don't know what it's going to do here but I got like one chance to do something I should I drink a PO do I run away do I oh my God I'm at a dead end like I mean your palms are swing I've been working

on this character for 2 weeks my God what am I going to do and like you got to get up and walk away from the computer I don't know and and then you of course you dead dead and you the tears would flow for a second and all right let's play again and uh and so uh and so I really love that tension I really love the the sweaty Palms of I've been working on this thing and I'm about to lose two weeks of work so I I didn't want to lose that at all and um they said yeah but you know real time will be better okay well if you say so so they started you know going around talking to other people in the studio and and other people in the studio yeah we should make this thing real time and so I kind of held out there were about two or three of us that like held out to The Bitter End and uh finally one day we decided to have a talk uh and bring it to a vote so we all met in the kitchen and we voted and I

voted no and everybody else voted yes and uh and so I said all right well okay I guess I guess we can do this but it's I I called up lizard South and I said well as you guys will see in a few minutes we were terrible businessmen so but I but I this is this is a huge delay in the project uh it's going to take us a long time we have to redo all sorts of things it's going to take me forever to write this um I you know okay all right yeah but we need another Milestone payment out of this but yeah okay we'll go ahead and do it so they agreed to this yes and uh and so okay I'll do this so I sat down on a Friday afternoon and in a few hours I had it [Laughter] running and uh and so uh I can

remember yes this is what went right I can remember the moment that this happened I can remember like it was yesterday this is like one of the most Vivid moments of my career um I was sitting there and I finally got you know all the kind of because the turn base was basically uh already everything took different amounts of turn I just like put in some stuff for moving around took time was it basically a certain amount of turns and then just made the turns happen 20 times a second or whatever it was and and uh and and then it all just kind of worked magically um and uh so I remember taking the mouse and I clicked on The Mouse and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down and I was like oh my God

that was [Applause] awesome and the sun Shone through the window and God passed by and the angels sung and uh and sure enough uh that was when the arpg was was kind of born at that moment and uh and I was lucky enough to be there it was an amazing amazing moment I'll never forget it um and so uh that was really kind of the birth and really a big turning point in the project and this was pretty early on this was still this was still probably about maybe five months in or six months in that uh that we had done this what went wrong budget we are the worst businessmen in the history of the universe okay F first off I didn't want to be a business man I didn't I like I wanted to have a

business but I didn't actually like I didn't go to school I didn't know anything about business hell we weren't even paying our taxes I found out that that was a bad idea the uh uh and so uh we uh we were terrible businessmen so we're so excited about actually making Diablo that we signed the contract without realizing that we just agreed to do Diablo for $300,000 we have 15 people in the studio how what we have to pay them 20 grand a piece for the next year to get this done and not only that but that's full that's like with the office space and everything or whatever we got to pay them $12,000 a month a year or whatever $1,000 a month to come work on Diablo how exciting uh wow that was dumb but we're making Diablo and uh and so uh

then well what are we going to do about this well [ __ ] we got to get more work all right well we got to do more contract work and so we knew some people over at 3DO and 3DO is making a new machine called the M2 and uh and so they said okay well yeah we would love for you to do some Cutting Edge development and so we signed up an agreement to do a football game called nflpa Superstars uh which kind of a a backyard football like a six on six football with just the stars of the NFL league and uh we said awesome and we signed the contract for almost a million dollar which was huge at the time and uh that helped a lot now everybody won in the end here because the M2 Hardware was never really launched and after we were bought by blizzard uh the um spoiler alert the uh

we um the M2 technology was sold to Massa so uh for $100 million so uh that really kind of launched 3dio as a publisher and they use that money and uh for all and a lot of the reason that you know it sold was for from demos and stuff that we had of of our game actually our football game looked really amazing uh it was way out of its time because the architecture on M2 was unbelievable at the time it was way way beyond anything else so uh anyway so that everybody really kind of made out in the end uh and that and that was great so we then decided that we were going to you know continue our bad business Behavior here and decided Well my God we're you know even with all this other stuff we got like 20 something people even 1 Point whatever $3 million but it wasn't three $1.3 million because we had Milestones to hit and things like that in order to get paid so we we really didn't have all that money in we were still kind of struggling dayto day

uh to to be a developer with the number of people that we had and stuff uh but we were just figuring it's going to work out and Blizzard's really committed to this project and I think that we can convince them that they haven't paid us enough and then they approached us late in in '95 uh like December right over the holidays and said hey we're interested in in acquiring you guys we were like yes thank God and uh and uh it it was a big relief to not have to stress about that payroll anymore and uh and so uh in early in January then uh we started telling people look we're we're going to probably sell to Davidson Associates which was the actual owner of blizzard and uh and they and so 3dio got wind of it and they you know their deal with selling them m2o wasn't done yet and they're like oh my God no we can't we can't have that so they found out and they started bidding on us and so this bidding war kind of ensued between blizzard and

3dl and in the end we never really even almost considered 3DO we went in there I mean don't get me wrong I went in there we listened to their pitch and trip Hawkins who's an amazing speaker and super influ influential like I went in there and I was like 3DO to the moon coming out of there you know I was like oh my God this is going to be so awesome then uh blizzard said well you know we're not really going to budge and 3dio was actually offering us twice as much money and we turned them down really because we felt that blizzard really got us and got the game and we were so close uh in company culture and beliefs that uh that we turned down twice as much money to uh to be bought and become blizzard so little something there which doesn't make us the best businessmen but another example of my worst business decision in my

career late mid 96 Max has friend it's not just Maxx's friend but Max knew him first his name is seir and he uh came to us with an idea and he said I got this idea I am going to make email over the internet I said dude that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard what are you talking about I already have my EML over the Internet what do you this isn't even an invention this is nothing and he said no it's going to be huge it's a big idea it's a really no he's like look I'll give you 10% of the company if I can take one office in the back just you know you guys aren't even using that room look it's crunch time we only have a few months left in the project here we're trying to ship by December this is late summer at this point it's like oh my God I don't need the stress I don't need the distraction of him doing it plus this is the

stupidest idea ever email on the internet it doesn't even make sense I already have email on the internet yeah that company was hot mail which 14 months later sort for $400 million of which 10% could have been mine which is now worth $280 million [Applause] what went right battl net so 6 months before we shipped maybe a little bit more than that let's say seven or eight months I think in May lizard South had been bugging us for a little while because they you know they were really focused on finishing

Warcraft 2 and uh kind of after that was done then there the you know the eye turned its way towards us and uh and started well tell us more about this multiplayer stuff I'm like oh multiplayer yeah uh and uh it's going to happen it's going to happen and uh and uh sure this is my first seat program but it's going to happen the uh uh and so uh they said well we got this idea aidea that we we're going to we're going to make our own service we're going to put it right in the box and we're going to call it battl net I said okay well all right I guess I mean that's that sounds pretty awesome there were services at the time like total Entertainment Network 10 uh where you could play Duke Nukem with others like you could like pay $10 a month and belong to the service and they would host a bunch of games they wouldn't host them but they they would you could go up there and meet other people and play the games peer-to-peer with each other over over this

network and so we were kind of going to beat them at the game or whatever by actually including it as a one-step process because it was a pain in the ass to actually play multiplayer almost anything and so we were going to have it so you just pressed a button and you could play multiplayer over the Internet like yeah that is awesome uh okay I guess I'm not going to write this uh and they said yeah don't worry about it we're going to take care of this and Michael Bryan Super Genius from down south really kind of spearheaded this this movement to right battl net Michael bran obviously he left blizzard made arena.net but the uh but he at the time was there and uh and made the first version of Battlenet and then they said okay well um what went wrong multiplayer we're going to come up and we're going to take a look at your multiplayer code and they came up and they're like you don't have any multiplayer

code oh [ __ ] all right well uh in order for this to work with battl net we're going to have to have multiplayer codes so a few of the guys from down south actually moved up North during the last 6 months of development and started making Diablo into multiplayer and integrating battl net into the entire thing and so like I I I didn't know anything about multiplayer I didn't know anything about networking at the time I I learned a lot through the process of doing this and actually were able to do all the networking stuff for Diablo I but uh the the this was kind of my first exposure of the entire thing to me it was magic it was like there's some kind of magic that happens and then everything's okay so what went wrong in multiplayer wasn't just that we didn't have multiplayer code which is a bad thing don't get me wrong it was also that we didn't realize like it just didn't dawn us like we knew people were going to be able to hack because it was peer-to peer and that means that everybody's kind of in charge

of their own [ __ ] and we've got you know whatever we're going to we're going to do our own stuff right here and you know every if you want to cheat go ahead and ruin your little game for yourself that's fine we don't really care and then we're then it came out and like instantly we're like oh my God they can just upload the cheats and everybody can cheat oh my god I didn't even think about that so obviously the number one thing that we wanted to fix with Diablo was the rampant cheating that happened and so going client server and for Diablo 2 was definitely necessary so some of the good things and some of the bad things there so uh DirectX and PC Gamer CD so late in the summertime in the kind of September is time frame DirectX was kind of taking off and Windows 95 was kind of taking off and dos really sucked because it was really hard to run games under

dos cuz he had to know hey what's your irq of your sound card and is this extended memory or expanded memory or BL blah blah blah and you had to have you know PhD in computer science to actually run games and so the uh they you know direct X was going to solve all those problems now that that's what they had said with wi G as well so people were a little reluctant which they dropped like a hot potato and so uh I don't know about this direct X thing so we kind of waited a little while and then DirectX said well we would like there to be a demo of Diablo on this CD we're going to send out a million copies of the CD and we said okay I think we'll make direct X now uh and uh and so we made uh the DirectX version and it got distributed as well as we used the demo and sent it to PC Gamer and they distributed it in their November 1996 uh magazine which came out in

October and uh and so I was kind of rumaging downstairs and actually found the disc and I actually got it running and here it is this is a little bit of the demo right here [Applause] [Music] now you'll notice a few things here the interface is much different the panels are reversed the speech for this guy is very different I barely escaped from the butcher he killed my wife my children I beg of you in the name of God avenge them I I I believe that was Bill rooper but I'm not

positive the smell of death surrounds me notice how I miss all sorts of stuff how am I missing that Barrel one other thing is that you had to click to move you couldn't click and hold it was like clickity clickity clickity clickity clickity all the time there was no click and hole and our fa fresh meat oh yeah the butcher was on level [Applause] one I can't believe that still ran that was amazing I was so excited when I got that thing running so uh one of the things that

with that CD that really we got tons of great feedback and uh and out of that came of a Strike Team which I'll talk about in a second um that kind of processed that feedback and we use that feedback to to kind of iterate on the game and the interface and things like that but right off the bat we knew what we wanted to do with interface one of my favorite games of all time and one game that was super popular at the office was NHL 95 and what we loved about this game and didn't like about RPGs at the time was that RPGs it was like 25 minutes of character creation it was tell me about your backstory and like where where what town do you come from and what color are your eyes and like all the which is great and stuff but it was like it was 20 minutes to actually get in when I loved about NHL 95 was like clickity click click I'm skating I'm skating around I'm body checking I'm like and so it was the uh it was like that quick quick action that we really wanted and we love the Doom style menus right and

then it was really easy to navigate those kind of things so we want to do the simplest interface that you could possibly do and that was something that we that we really prided ourselves on we actually had this thing called the mom test which is kind of terrible to say at this point but it was back then it it applied a little bit more my mom actually became a computer expert but at time she was not and so it was would my mom be able to play this was really kind of the the test and uh and and sure enough she could so and she liked it actually she became pretty good my father-in-law actually still plays a ton of Theo too but that's that's beside the point the um uh so anyway we uh we we really want to create the the the simplest interface possible and I thought that it was very very effective one debate that we had uh that was a very hotly debated thing was what to do with the autom map and at the time the a lot of the autom maps in role playing games were like a peach of piece of parchment and it drew the grid and you

could put your pen on it and you could type in notes and you could do all these kind of things like it was the wrong pace for the game completely and at the time a game called Dark Forces came out which is one of my favorite games and and I love that game and the uh and they had this cool overlay uh on top of the of the screen I like so it became this this kind of almost meme around the office in which uh there was a lot of controversy and finally are we going to do something modern and cool are we going to do the cool dark Forces way or we going to do this crappy old parchment way and uh and eventually a lot of things it was it was this all right we're going to cool dark Forces this was the uh uh the the code for we're going to do kind of the modern thing so that led to the the autom map uh which changed a lot the Strike Team gave us a bunch of feedback on the interface and we did a whole bunch of changes one thing that you will notice that I was shocked to

remember is that we invented the hot bar sometime in the last 3 months of the project on the left on the left screen in the very lower left of the there was one one slot where you could put one potion down in the kind on that like gold background on the lower left so um uh the the interface got much nicer we we cleaned it up I think that the in all fairness the the interface got much nicer simply because we we kept changing it over and over and over again so we didn't want to make it look too nice until it was the final version uh and uh and it was laid out much nicer and the experience became much better but a lot of this feedback was from this the the PC Gamer and DirectX demo the Strike Team also gave us some very strange suggestions that we'll will I'd like to point out at this time one was that they wanted to remove the right Mouse button but they didn't want right Mouse button to be using skills they

wanted you to have to bring the skill book up click on the skill and then click on the monster or whatever in the you know in the in the window that that was very controversial for weeks and weeks but the most controversial is they wanted cooking and food to be in the game I I can't even imagine what that would have been like well I kind of sort of can because they put food in World of Warcraft so the uh I think that the premise was the same but Diablo with a food meter was definitely not on the list um what went wrong so uh here's a little bit of a personal story one of the uh the end was really really rough we crunched probably for the last eight or nine months something like that um and it was I mean was it was all day every day I

would get up usually at about 4: in the morning and I would drive to work I'd pick up my brother and we'd go to go to work and then I would work until I don't know midnight or so and go home and get up and do it again and I did this for every day for about 8 months my wife was pregnant at the time the baby was due in late December you can see where this is [Laughter] going around December 10th my wife calls I'm at the office and she says I'm having contractions it's go time uh wait what but I'm in the middle of this oh my God uh and so we were already burning things you know left and right we really tried to make Christmas we desperately wanted to make Christmas but it just

wasn't ready and here was you know kind of my worst case scenario uh fortunately in some ways it it turned out to be a a false alarm and the baby didn't wasn't born then actually was born on January 3rd she waited actually for me to finish Diablo and then was born very nice to her that's what he so uh one of the things about crunch I think crunch gets a little bit of a bad rap and it should but for me personally it is something that I thrive under uh and I know that it's not really talked about much as a positive thing but I think crunch can be a positive thing uh if it's handled correctly and if you your partner uh is tolerant enough of such a schedule um but uh the uh you know I think that for me we really came

together as a team we were always very very close we would do all sorts of things together we hung out at the office all the time and went out to lunch every day and did all sorts of things together and uh uh but really that those kind of stories and the late night hours and the goofiness that happens as well as like you know putting in cows that you can click on and like things like that just they they they end up happening late at night and that that in kind of the stress and stress and goofiness of the entire situation so though it was really rough and it was difficult personally and I was quite burnt out for about two months afterwards two or three months afterwards um I thought that it really made the product shine we were super ultra focused on making this thing great and uh and that really made a big difference in the end uh so though it was CR crunch is never fun I think that sometimes especially for myself it's it's a necessary evil so kind of the home stretch we finally

got everything in the game including Diablo Diablo got put in and so we decideed we were going to put the whole game to a test we need people to kind of play and iterate and work on this so let's offer up a $100 prize for the first person you know and when we're only paying people $112,000 a year that's quite a $100 prize means something so they uh the uh they uh let's go ahead and and um and uh and pay the $100 for the first person that kills Diablo and so we had this skill in the game called blood exchange at the time and uh and so what this skill did is it swapped your hit points with a monster well we didn't think that through did we uh and so this person Ben H he ended up finding the skill G runs down to the dblo he swaps his health he's like nearly dead he swaps his health and he kills Diablo one below and

we promptly yanked the skill out of the game so anyway that was it and then uh then Diablo finally got finished and was released on December 31st 1996 and uh and turned out to be something that I'm very proud of and uh and something that will be remembered for a long time and I'm just so happy that I was able to participate in and so lucky thank you everybody and uh I will take questions if people have some so I go ahead [Applause] [Music] and yes go ahead uh hi there uh thanks for this talk it was really I'm a huge fan of the original game I think it's a really um foundational game I think it's

a really important game uh isn't it true that there's no way to buy and play Diablo now uh I do not know I I have a copy of Diablo right here okay well the Amazon Marketplace is certainly one I just unopened oh wow okay you should put it on the Amazon Marketplace do you want it I I have one thank you uh no I I just wondered if I don't know the preservation of this stuff seems really important and I agree uh I would like to see it still working I I don't know if it does I mean I got it to work but I have an old laptop it runs on XP still uh but XP is you know going by the ways side I didn't try installing it on Windows 10 or anything like that uh but uh I know that it it did it did work on on XP okay well I just want to say I hope that there will be ways people to play this as we go for me too there'll be emulators and things like that someday I would guess so all right yes over here hi uh so first of thank you for the talk it's great for Fanboys like me who got into the indry

because of this game uh I have a two-part question uh the first one is how did you guys come up with deard Kane and the Line Stay a while and listen I I don't remember exactly how we get however Deckard Kane's name was actually a contest so as part of a uh gaming uh PC Magazine uh I think it was computer gaming world or something like that we had this contest where people could send in name suggestions or maybe it was their names to get their name in the video game Diablo and some guy sent in the name Decker Kane I don't know if it's made up or not we're like damn that's badass we're we're going to use that and uh and so that's how the name came about actually it was this person somewhere out there there is an actual Decker Kane walking around I think the uh and uh he's like I'm famous the uh stay a while and listen to my story the uh and uh so I don't know where the line came from uh you know I didn't actually

write the dialogue so but uh but that's how the name came about thank M so you talked about a few of the influences for Diablo during the talk I was just wondering if there any more that you could bring up I'd be interested to hear oh my God it's a giant list sure I mean like Ultima Wizardry uh all the RO you know many different Rogue likes there was uh Doom was an influence on us like I said everything from Dark Forces to uh yeah I mean you saw the list or whatever but there XCOM and things like that there was so many influences on on the what came together to make that game there one games um what's that were there any influences that weren't games uh maybe movies or books or something that you ready for well I mean definitely in the art style it was it was it was uh quite a bit of influence from gothic art style and things like that uh there was a church that the one of the artists had visited on some vacation that he used

actually to model the tristem church and things like that uh and so uh yeah that that those influences were in real life as well as kind of European old style architecture cool thanks very much yeah uh excuse me oh sorry I didn't see the third microphone I'm sorry so uh Diablo 1 is the reason I got grounded in high school and had my phones taken away because when battl net was like starting to get hot I sat down one Friday evening and got up that Sunday evening having tied up the phone light for an entire 3 days so my question to you um well Diablo is one of the greatest games I've ever played and it was also the first game I ever pirated because we got a CD uh CD burner for the first time and we were like what can we do with this thing but my question to you is how did you get battl net to be so perfectly effective and like like always on and just in 19967 being able to have a persistent

internet where anybody can log in you can have four player games with people from Germany and Spain and just have 24 hours a day gaming must have been insane yeah well I mean I guess it's not much of a secret anymore I don't think I'm going to say it and who knows if I'll get in trouble for it but battl net ran on one computer holy [ __ ] that is Bonkers uh yeah micheel Bryan is a networking Super Genius that guy is just amazing but the uh uh there were a bunch of super super smart people that worked at di at at Blizzard at the time and uh and so I I think that uh it was because we used a lot of the we had people directly hook up with each other the bandwidth amongst you know that we we weren't handling much of the bandwidth we just handled the kind of these con they would come into the battle net we would store their IP information and

things like that and send it off to the other people and con get people to connect up to each other so all it really needed to do is get this connection kind of send it off to other people and then that would and and do run like a chat room or whatever which is really not much even back then it was really not much processing that needed to be involved in that and so it was it was able to run very very fast very quickly and there's many games many MMOs and things like that now that they'll have four four or five computers running the front end that that kind of mask the back end or whatever so that you can't actually have access to the hardware but you connect to these connection servers and then and you know they'll have 50,000 60,000 people simultaneously on these things and without much of a problem yeah so one last thing the 16-year-old me has carried guilt for about 25 years for not having bought it so I would like to actually give you the money that I stole from you in 1997 [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] thank you very much thank [Music] you that was awesome how early did the composer Matt Ulan come on to the project and say again man I knew I would butcher it I was just going to say composer and then I figured I'd go for it and I knew I'd mess it up but how early on did he come on and then how much was the project he was very he was at the very beginning okay um he was one of the first people we hired actually he was really annoying uh he sent me this demo tape I don't even know how he got like our name and address and stuff like that I don't even know how like we originally met but he sent me this mixtape of with video game music uh and

uh and he would call up and he would write and he would like kept pestering us like how'd you like my demo uh yeah sure I uh it was good I I still hadn't listened to it yeah no it was great it was uh when can I come in we can talk about this or what he was very very adamant about getting a job and So eventually I just relented and then then and so it came in and uh he is he's just a musical genius like he he was really it was I was blown away at how lucky we were to have such a talented artist uh you know with us from the very beginning and he was a huge influence on kind of the atmosphere of the game in general uh I mean that town music is just so haunting and uh and beautiful and so you know I think that um uh you know he was he came up the most ingenious ways to make sound effects like the the sound effects for the skeleton are pencils and

dice in a little rly cup and like you know there's all sorts of things like that that he that he came up with that uh that it was just it was amazing to see him work and he it was funny he would work like two hours a day and the rest of the day he'd just be kind of farting off but the but but the but those two hours were like more productive than my eight so it was he was he was amazing when he was he would work like crazy crazy fast for a few hours and then kind of you know fart around and play with dice and you know and play Diablo a lot so that was anyway it was really good it was he was he was amazingly talented or he is and uh and uh as well as we were very lucky to have him he was on from the very beginning thank you you guys have been in line for longer than we have uh so Diablo's easily the most nostalgic game for me it's it created such a sense of fantasy when I was a child uh and one of the

things that I really loved was this idea of the church that you slowly descend into the depths of hell and I was wondering when that idea came to you that was that was actually in here that's in this document is the yeah is from the very this is something I've been we've been thinking about for a long time that that that is exactly the kind of layout that we would have we would be starred you know in a town this is very you know Moria Ang and Rog likee kind of thing where there's one town and the dungeons underneath but you know what better place to place the dark creepy Crips underneath the church right you know and so then it just the it all the idea went like this and it all worked and uh so that's uh it was right from the very beginning that we we thought of that was that design doc ever made public no I don't think so that would be cool okay yeah I'll put it up online if somebody wants to if you guys want to peruse it I'll uh I'll mail out an URL or I'll

I'll tweet a URL where I you guys can see this uh later if you guys want to follow me I'm it's really my Twitter name you may not remember is David brevik anyway that's uh so if you guys want to follow me I'll I'll tweet it out later I'll put a URL up and put it up for public consumption yes over hey all right so I played a fair amount of games and blizzard games but unfortunately never really got into DBL so I'm going to ask you right now may I have your copy of Dia so I can learn how to play it yeah you're bold enough to ask for come on up and get it here I don't know if it'll run though unfortunately but you should give it a [Music] try better put at least 100 hours into that great talk thank you very much um for giving it uh I figured I had to ask you something so um where where did the Advent come from for the when you

finished you beat Diablo starts over and then you play again and the multiple difficulty levels that continue well the multiple difficulty levels was something that we wanted to extend the gamep play or whatever to extend the runway was one thing that I didn't really like about some of the Rogue likes you know you kill the boss and the game ends or whatever I F Well we can we can do the same thing that we have and with very little work graphically and things like that uh no no new levels and whatnot we could actually just go ahead and uh and expand the content make it last for a lot longer slash forever you know it's going to take forever to get to a level 100 or 99 or whatever it is and uh and uh so that was that was kind of the intention from the very beginning um and uh God now I've lost my train of thought there was something else that you remind me of a different story and I can't remember what it was but uh anyway it's fleeting fleeting now I'm sorry the uh anyway so it was from the very beginning that we intended on on extending the

game plan awesome thanks I thought you were going to talk about the gem in the head by the way that's why anyway go ahead over there um something I always liked about Diablo is not only that um that there's a great loot grind that goes in but also that there's a sense of place some other uh loot based games that I've played before for example uh Destiny and the division they either had one or the other they had a lot of great LW drops but the sense of place was terrible uh or they had a great sense of place some place that I would that feel invested in but just not enough of the game itself to keep one going what would you what would your suggestion be for somebody if I were to make a loot base game to both make the world interesting and loot drops of be interesting that the reason it feels like a real place and and what really helps is that it's

small when you don't have to make tons of places and make each one identifiable makes the job a lot easier if you can keep the amount of content and the amounts of locations to a minimum then you can really make those flourish you can make those really expand them and and put a lot of detail and a lot of backstory and whatever you want into it to really make it feel like a place right thank you yep go over here hey um so I have to admit uh I missed out on Diablo 1 and to even get and you missed out on the copy now too I'm no I'm no freeloader uh but and to even play Dia 2 I had to beg my parents and it was this whole Spiel cuz I was definitely not at the mature threshold anyway so my question is about Diablo I um the chat gem activate deactivate I know it's million times I get asked this a lot I'm still not telling there's no satisfactory answer wa a my wife programmed it and it's not you know I'm I'm never going to tell you what it is sorry it's hers to tell right

thank you awesome so after coming out with Diablo and it was a huge success you mentioned that you were burnt out for like two to three months afterward how did you come back from that and like what how did that really affect your next project and even the time after that next project it didn't affect the next project it was even worse the Elva 2 crunch was the worst crunch of my life the uh um I crunched for about a year and a half on Diabla 2 uh so I you know I I I think that it just I just needed to recover I needed to not be so stressed out all the time uh and that meant well having a baby which strangely is still stressful I don't know the the you know I went from one stressful situation to the other and uh but it was also relaxing because it felt very much like a sense of place and a sense of home and it it meant it meant something to me right and that that was

that that made me you know focus on my family and that really kind of made it a you know get away from work and focus on other things in my life that uh that kind of calmed me down and made me you know de-stress and not think about work even though you know having a baby is a little little bit stressful so it's not that bad I mean you just I I so everybody has mutant Powers my Mutant Powers I don't need sleep and uh and so and this is actually pretty well known I've I stayed up for 96 hours straight and things like that during Marvel Heroes the uh so uh uh it's it's a little weird but the uh and so uh you know having a baby that's the biggest complaint people have is oh my God I'm not getting any sleep but didn't really bother me so it's not it's not as stressful as situation is I think for most people anyway so that that's really getting back to other things besides games really grounded me and really made me appreciate other things and uh and it took us probably 2 or 3 months after

that cuz we said oh we're done with Diablo we're going to move on we're not going to do Diablo 2 and it probably took two months after that before we decided to actually do Diablo 2 so playing Diablo 1 and two I was quite fond of jcker Kane and spoiler alert how salty are you he died in Diablo 3 uh I think it sucks you know I I I love that character too and uh you know it's a shame that they went that way but you know I have no real influence or control over any of that and they're going to do what they want to do and you know I was sad to see him go that's the way it is need a eulogy for him I [Laughter] think yes guy you can ask a question thank you uh what is the story with the Hellfire expansion oh my god really you're going to bring that up uh I I'll I'll tell it quickly but basically it was not made by us we had a design dock they didn't follow it they made a teddy bear Quest I was [ __ ]

pissed and uh and so then that that was that's really it in the nutshell and uh and uh it it didn't work out it didn't sell like I wanted to I mean Davidson really wanted an expansion for the product but we were going to move on and make Diablo I at this time and uh but Diablo 1 had sold so well that they really wanted this and we said well so Davidson is Associates and Sierra online were owned by the same company at the time so Sierra online and blizzard and that all was one company and so some people over at Sierra uh said well we've got a team that could make this Hellfire expansion and so we said okay and we sent them over a bunch of stuff and and it just didn't work out we couldn't communicate well with them I was really upset about the entire thing uh and in the end I just kind of have disavowed it now whether or not that's the right thing to do or not I don't know but the but you know I'm still a little upset about the entire way that it went down sorry to upset you no no no no it's it's

fine it's just that you know it wasn't really a blizzard North product and they didn't listen to us so that's what can you do yes um so first the was like my favorite game I've ever played thank you so thank you um I was actually curious about the automapper like I don't know if I misunderstood that part but you know after all the times I've played it started to notice like motifs like certain rooms that would be built like did it build it in chunks or did it no actually the entire game is tile based which changed for Diablo I there was it was actually room based in Diablo I but first one was purely tile based I would set down uh some patterns when I was doing the DI when I was doing the different different tile types had different level generation algorithms and the first one was like I built a hall and the hall could have two or three big uh rooms off of that uh off that hall and then off

those big rooms then it would randomly generate a series of rooms connecting to each other off that that could connect to each other or not connect each other it just didn't it it didn't matter and then we would like place down stairs in a random location which you know you often saw you would come down the steps and then the stairs down would be right there and and things like that so uh it was um but it was purely tile based Not only was it tile based but all of the tables for how the entire thing looked were there was no tool for this I had like hand code when you get this particular intersection with this particular pattern and these four par you know squares connected to each other display the graphics this way and if there was one of these things next to it put a shadow on the wall and like all these kind of things I there were eight zillion little exceptions in fact we got down to the the caves level and in the caves level uh we did the generation and it looked terrible and we didn't know what to do and so we had to black out

kind of the the bottom part of the the cave level and then we realized we couldn't have Doors Down screen like we could on the on other levels so in the caves there are no doors leading down you know down left or down right and uh and so all of them are are up there so each one had its own particular set of you know the only only way it generated own way it generated uh and the caves actually there were there were even up to the very end there were still bugs at the caves that would make it so you couldn't get out of the caves you couldn't get to different sections of the caves and stuff like that and I had to write these this terrible algorithm that like Brute Force checked whether or not you could actually get to every section of the caves um anyway so uh each one was tile based it was very complicated and had all sorts of rules and each one was handc mhm Hey so uh you were going to tell us a story about the the jewel in the head but I guess my my question is in addition to that cuz it might Beal I

do get yes absolutely is um what were you planning the story to go in the direction that it did from the very beginning or was that just kind of more of a cliffhanger thing that you wanted to end so I uh um I'll just tell the story so we uh we were up all the cinematics for the blizzard games were made down South by a cinematic team and uh they were doing pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to and we had no influence whatsoever over them uh and so we had ideas and they come up and we talk about them and then they would go down and do something different and uh and so you know like a lot of the cinematics didn't turn out like we wanted them to but then we started to get along a little better and things started to work a little better there's a little more cooperation things started to get and things were going great and and then uh and then they said okay well we're done we we finished the final cinematic and I'm like okay cool I I can't wait to see the

you've killed Diablo uh cinematic and so they s it up and we look at it and we're all crowded around the desk and we're looking at this thing and then and then we watch it and he dies and then he jams the gem in his forehead and all of us are like what the hell did we just watch what was that that that doesn't make any sense at all is that cool uh okay well I don't know about this and so we had a little bit of an argument about whether or not we were going to have this or not and whether or not this could be the official ending it was pretty controversial down there too so there was no intention of this being the ending to the game at all uh but in a lot of ways it turned out to kind of make sense because of the ability to kind of play the game over and over again it kind of set up this weird not really much of a story you got to really

stretch the truth to kind of get back to Diablo still exists kind of thing but uh but it was that that was kind of some of the premise of of you become Diablo now you have to defeat your old guy kind of thing and that was the uh that was kind of the idea behind it whether or not that really worked or what it means or what it meant at the time or did no it didn't make sense and then that's you know that's just the way it was and uh never our intent to do that but uh but that was that was the way it was and it stayed that way and actually now looking back and I'm quite happy with it actually it's just weird enough to remember well thank you very much and I you all thanks well I couldn't hear you by the way I'm sorry I just heard thank you but yes render all the Sprites uh to render all the Sprites and stuff we just used whatever the computers were uh at the

time we used uh Autodesk uh 3D Studio Maxs to to make all the 3D models and stuff at the time uh except for the backgrounds the backgrounds were actually made on a Mac using some mac modeling program because Eric did a lot of the backgrounds and he only knew how to use this thing on the Mac so they he didn't know anything about PCS at the time or anything about 3D Studio at the time so oh they're kicking us out I'm sorry thanks everybody