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'Diablo': A Classic Game Postmortem

GDC Festival of Gaming

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  • Recommended by 8 people: 8 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2018 to 2023.
  • Presented by David Brevik, creator of Diablo
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 10 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1.1M views10 years ago8 recommendations

Game developmentHistory and cultureGame programmingGame designHistory of computing

David Brevik shares the development history of Diablo, explaining how it transitioned from a turn-based claymation game to a real-time classic.

Diablo developer David Brevik returns to the GDC stage to give a classic post-mortem on Blizzard's action RPG hit Diablo in this 2016 talk. Brevik shares key takeaways from the experience and sheds light on how the game went from a single-player, turn-based claymation DOS game to the genre-defining classic it became. GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives. Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/Official_GDC Checkout our Facebook page for GDC exclusives facebook.com/GameDevelopersConference gdconf.com/

Why it's here

8 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended by game developers and retro gaming fans for its insights into the creation and design of Diablo.

AndrewOMartinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The original pitch for Diablo (1994) [pdf]”

Allow me to quote Diablo developer David Brevik describing when he finally yielded to demands and hacked together a "real time" version of his turn-based Diablo, by making turns elapse the rate of 20 turns a second. 'I remember taking the mouse, and I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like "Oh my god! That was awesome!".' 'And the sun shone through the window, and God passed by, and the angels sung, and sure enough that was when the ARPG was kind of born at that moment, and I was lucky enough to be there.' link to this video If you're in this part of this comment thread, you'll probably enjoy the whole video.
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baristavibeson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo”

This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!! link to this video
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doikoron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo creator David Brevik is back with a new game: It Lurks Below”

Brevik was one of the founders Condor (Brevik was the president while the Schaefer brothers were vice-presidents) which later became Blizzard North when Blizzard bought them. The work on Diablo started before Blizzard bought them. He really was one of the "creators". IIRC they made the first Diablo game with a team of 15-20 people. In a team that small pretty much everyone is a "game designer" as in everyone wears many hats (especially the president of the company) If you are interested you really should check the postmortem from the GDC a few years back link to this video
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Reedxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The original pitch for Diablo (1994) [pdf]”

David Brevik released that just after the Diablo postmortem from GDC a couple years ago: link to this video Worth watching for any fans of the original and if you want more context around that pitch. Lots of interesting tidbits about the origins of Diablo and Blizzard North. And an amusing moment during the Q&A: Someone in the audience went up and gave David some money to make up for pirating the game when he was a kid.
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oraknaboon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game”

I was never a huge Diablo fan, but I could always appreciate the things people liked about it. I gained new respect for it from watching Brevik's GDC postmortem 0 from a couple of years ago. I love the idea that it was originally a dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM and would love to play one of the early builds before they changed to real-time combat. 0: link to this video
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Reedxon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game”

For anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: link to this video Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc. Also here's the original design doc: link
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wcarsson Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Secret Origin of the Action RPG”

…noon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold. He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC1 a few years ago. 1 - link to this video…
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somedude895on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo II: Resurrected”

That's an interesting thought, but I'd assume 20 year old 3D models wouldn't be much use today, would they? I know they were thinking about making D2 a 3D game at first, like Runescape, but then went with 2D, because 3D technology wasn't at a point that allowed them to carry over the gritty and dark theme they wanted for Diablo. And then went on to make D3 look as cartoony as it does... They used photos of clay figurines for Diablo 1, would be fun if they remade that with 3D scanning techniques. Do check out David Brevik's post mortem on D1 from GDC by the way, it's fantastic: link to this video
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cpetersoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]”

To find out what happened next, check out Diablo developer David Brevik’s postmortem presentation at GDC 2016: link to this video
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cpetersoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What’s your favorite talk from 2017?”

…tems built on logical time. link * Level Up Your Concurrency Skills With Rust. This talk will show you how Rust will catch many concurrency errors at compile time. link * Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem. Diablo developer David Brevik returns to the GDC stage to give a classic post-mortem on Blizzard's action RPG hit Diablo in this 2016 talk. link to this video * The Flash Games Postmortem . In this 2017 GDC talk, Kongregate's John Cooney attempts to encapsulate the immense history of Flash games and how it has shaped the current game industry by giving game developers their first chance to build and publish their games quickly to the web. link * Siege Battle AI in Total War:…
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stateoffon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Diablo creator David Brevik is back with a new game: It Lurks Below”

In this case he really did invent the "Realtime-RPG" that made Diablo what it is. In his own words: link to this video
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shooon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Game Programming Patterns: Double Buffer (2014)”

there's a bit of discussion about isometric tile rendering nonsense, although not specific to vsync, in David Brevik's diablo postmortem link to this video along with a whole lot of other fascinating stuff
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bdowlingon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience”

You picked the wrong time to use that example, considering that Nintendo will soon release Super Mario Maker 2, a new game which includes a mode with virtually unchanged mechanics from Super Mario Bros 3. link Regarding Roguelikes, the biggest change was Diablo in 1996. Diablo was arguably a Roguelike with fancy graphics and a real-time mode hacked onto a turn-based core. link to this video
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bexsellaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]”

My favourite story of Diablo's development (as relayed by David Brevik in the Diablo Postmortem - see below) is the part where Diablo was made real-time. He passionately championed that it should be more like Rogue or Moria purely turn-based and permadeath. That was until he implemented real-time movement in an afternoon and attacked a skeleton. This was a directive from Blizzard, and it effectively created the ARPG genre. link to this video and for those adverse to Google: link
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