Making Diablo
- Hall:
- Production Track
What the talk is about
David Brevik tells the story of making Diablo and Diablo 2. It began with Condor, a small work-for-hire studio that met Blizzard after more than twenty publisher rejections, and the pitch was accepted. Diablo started out turn-based, but the team voted for real time, which shaped the genre. The $300,000 budget did not cover costs, so the studio joined Blizzard and became Blizzard North. A demo disc led to moving the boss off level one and inventing the potion hotbar. For Diablo 2 the team added character classes, skill trees borrowed from strategy games, loading without screens, and a client-server model against cheating. He also covers cut body-part crafting, the cancelled in-game Battle.net town, brutal crunch, and losing the source repository days before release. Useful for developers interested in genre history, design decisions, and production risks.