Image: David Brevik
Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo is one of the most highly regarded games of all time. The 1996 title revolutionized computer roleplaying games by tossing random dungeon maps, online multiplayer support, and real-time combat into one endlessly addicting package. And as Diablo creator David Brevik revealed recently, the seminal action RPG originated from a single, humble eight-page pitch from 1994."As games today substitute gameplay with multimedia extravaganzas, and strive toward needless scale and complexity," the document reads, "we seek to reinvigorate the hack and slash, feel good gaming audience." The more things change, eh?
Brevik posted the pitch yesterday following requests for it in the wake of his participation in a Diablo postmortem on Friday during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It's not quite the same pitch that Blizzard itself would see and accept, according to Brevik, but the broad strokes of what millions of players have known and loved since 1996 are on display in its time-stained and clip-art-cluttered pages. Brevik and his team wanted a game with a "unique structure designed for maximum replayability, expandability, and versatility," and that's what we got.
Still, there are fascinating differences. The document shows, for instance, that Brevik and his team at Condor, Inc. originally envisioned players and enemies moving on a time-honored "turn-by-turn basis" much as in Dungeons & Dragons.
As Brevik revealed in his talk, the switch to real-time combat didn't even happen until around six months into Diablo's development. He'd been reluctant to make the change on account of his affection for turn-based dungeon crawlers like Rogue, but found that it only took a couple of hours to implement rather than the weeks he was envisioning. And he saw that it was good.
As Gamasutra notes, Brevik's talk at the Diablo postmortem was full of other great tidbits about its later development, such as how the entirety of Battle.net ran on a single computer at the time and how Diablo's isometric look ultimately originates from a single screenshot from X-Com. He also revealed that, in his team's excitement over having the project picked up by Blizzard, they accidentally overlooked the fact that Blizzard had only agreed to fund them with $300,000 for a team of 15 people. They'd go on to make an entirely different game to get more funding for the same project. It all worked out, though—by 2001 alone, Diablo had already sold more than 2.5 million copies.
But that's all in the future of this simple document. It's an important piece of gaming history, and Brevik's posting of it appears to mark the first time anyone outside of Blizzard has seen it.