Diablo, from developer Blizzard North and publisher Blizzard Entertainment, launched on December 31, 1996. Now 20 years old, many see it as the very first example of an action-RPG. It was an experience where fast-paced combat merged with character building, skill trees, and powerful items of different colour and rarity. In other words, loot.
Both Diablo (1996) and Diablo II (2000) were seminal releases, and have gone on to influence many games over the past couple of decades. Diablo III (2012) brought the series into the modern era, with faster combat, a cinematic story, and the same focus on player customisation.
Diablo III Lead VFX Artist and industry veteran Julian Love was working at Sierra On-Line when Diablo launched. A programmer introduced him to the game, proclaiming that it was something that he absolutely had to play. Which they did together, at Sierra offices whilst “fake-working for a good three months straight.” Eventually they got into trouble.
“Somehow, I was still working at Sierra when Diablo II came out,” Love tells me. “It got to be such an obsession. That's all I was talking about. That's all I was doing. It got to a point where it was like, ‘What am I doing?’ So, I quit and applied.” Joining the post-launch Diablo II team at Blizzard North Julian has been at Blizzard for the past 15 years. Rob Foote, who’s been there for a little longer, was working in another industry entirely when he applied. With no game development experience at all he applied via fax machine to become a game tester at Blizzard, where, “Just being anywhere near Diablo was super exciting.”
Origin Story
“Diablo is a role-playing game wherein a player creates a single character and guides him through a dungeon in an attempt to find and destroy ‘Diablo’, the devil himself. All the action takes place in an isometric, three-quarter perspective…”- Excerpt taken from the Original 1994 Diablo Design Document by Condor, Inc.
In 1993 brothers Erich and Max Schaefer and David Brevik formed game development company Condor. Right from the beginning the dream was to work on an idea that they had for an RPG set in a dark gothic world, a digital space devoid of the sorts of Orcs and Elves that you might associate with the fantasy genre. Working on the original design and pitch for Diablo, it was to be an experience where brutal combat was king.“Diablo was exactly the game I wanted to play,” Erich Schaefer says. “When I was younger, and the Dungeon Master in games of D&D, the sorts of campaigns I ran were short, brutal, and loot heavy. No real story to speak of, but just hinting at interesting lore. For Diablo, the important thing at the time was a casual, play-with-one-hand, self-paced, loot-filled RPG.”
“When I was younger, and the Dungeon Master in games of D&D, the sorts of campaigns I ran were short, brutal, and loot heavy. No real story to speak of, but just hinting at interesting lore.” - Erich Schaefer.
Aside from the original design calling for turn-based combat in the vein of popular PC strategy series X-Com, it’s clear that even from this early stage the foundation of what would eventually become Diablo had been set. “That core loop of starting out in Tristram, or in a town, and then going deeper into a den of evil and fighting Diablo, the ultimate evil, is one that's really strong,” Joe Shely explains. “And you can see it throughout all three games.”“
The only problem for Condor was, no one wanted to fund the development of a PC, DOS-based RPG in the ‘90s. In fact, when the trio pitched Diablo to various publishers, the general feeling and response was that the wider gaming community didn’t want anything to do with the genre. That, and Diablo was the sort of experience that would fail to find success outside of a small hardcore audience. And so to pay the bills the team took on contract work, developing games where both budgets and scope were set in advance.
“We were hired to develop a game for the Sega Genesis called Justice League Task Force. This was a fighting game, kind of in the vein of Street Fighter, with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman,” Condor co-founder and former Blizzard North president David Brevik tells me. “We were showing off our game at CES, and lo and behold, there was another company making a Super Nintendo version of the same game. And we didn't know. We didn't chat. We didn't share ideas. It was kind of ‘Surprise!’ And yet, the games were strangely similar. It was really weird. The art, largely the same, and the locations were kind of the same too.”The developer of the Super Nintendo version of Justice League Task Force turned out to be a company called Silicon & Synapse. The development studio was actually in the process of changing its name to Blizzard Entertainment and prepping for its debut in the PC gaming market with a new real-time strategy game called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.
David Brevik recalls the immediate kinship they felt, and the response. “We were like, ‘Oh, PC games. That is what we want to do. We love PC games. We are big PC gamers you know, and we are only doing these projects to kind of pay the bills, but we’ve got this great game idea. We've pitched it to everybody. We've been turned down, you know, 50 times, or whatever it is. Nobody wants to do this game because RPGs are dead, but we got this great RPG idea we would love to make some day.’"
As Blizzard Entertainment was putting the final touches on Warcraft, communication with Condor kept up and the two studios became close. The team even offered Beta Testing services for Blizzard’s ground-breaking RTS. After Warcraft made its critically acclaimed debut in late 1994, Blizzard returned the favour and paid Condor a visit to hear all about its RPG. “We pitched them Diablo, and they loved it,” Brevik continues. “We signed a contract, maybe about two months after that, and immediately started development. Development itself took about two years, and about half way through they acquired us and we became Blizzard North.”
A Gothic Superhero Fantasy
“We called it gothic fantasy at the time. It was a combination of trying to not to look like everything else, and my love for dark and grimy Italian zombie movies,” says Erich Schaefer, explaining the visually striking look of the first Diablo game, on which he served as both lead designer and art director. “We wanted it to be gritty and gory. I wanted you to kill the first monster by bludgeoning its head in with a shovel, before you even got a sword,” he adds. “Lots of the looks were based on my travels to castles, churches, and catacombs.”“I think a constant, across all three games, is the tone and the mood. I love horror as a genre. And there are twisted memories that I have from all three,” recalls Rob Foote, looking back at the shared visual impact that can be felt from Diablo to Diablo II to Diablo III. “I remember that first encounter with the Butcher, and being startled whilst playing it. I remember the quest in Diablo II involving the countess who bathed in blood. And then in Diablo III, when you help the farmer and go inside to meet his wife and she's just a skeleton in a rocking chair.”But being dark, gothic, and gory is only one part of the equation; the overall Diablo experience and its raw immediacy is what kept players coming back. “Somehow, we hit a sweet spot where even though things were dark and evil, you still felt like a superhero,” says Erich Schaefer. This aspect of the series has played an important part throughout its history, and still informs every decision the Diablo III team at Blizzard makes.
“It's really about this fantasy of getting stronger and being able to slay the minions of hell,” Joe Shely tells me. “Being able to reach new and crazy heights of character development, and getting all kinds of items that enhance your powers in ways that you can't even imagine.”
“All combat is with monsters, there are no enemies in Diablo. This is something that I think is an important part of Diablo, that there is no grey line of morality running through it.” - Julian Love.
“All combat is with monsters, there are no enemies in Diablo,” Julian Love adds. “This is something that I think is an important part of Diablo, that there is no grey line of morality running through it.” A strange by-product of the gothic setting that creates a more inviting atmosphere than say, a game with fewer demons or mostly human enemies. “We, as a team, go to extra lengths to try to make sure that when you see a thing that should be slain, there instantly is no question in your mind about the reason why. You're not killing people, you're killing monsters.”“
“Even though I'm not a religious man, I think devils and demons are just a much cooler enemy than giant rats and orcs,” says Erich Schaefer, on the lasting impact of Diablo as a gothic fantasy. “Not that we didn't have plenty of those kind of monsters as cannon-fodder to slaughter, but as a main villain, who's better than the devil?”
The Birth of the Online Action-RPG
Originally pitched as a turn-based single-player RPG, a number of significant changes were made during the two-year development cycle for Diablo. Chief among those, was a suggestion from Blizzard – before Condor was acquired – that they switch the combat to real-time.“I remember it like it was yesterday, the moment that we made it real-time instead of turn-based,” David Brevik recalls. “It was a big debate in the office for quite a while. I resisted it. I didn't want to make it real-time. I really loved the tension and the perma-death and things like that of games like Rogue and NetHack. Stuff like, ‘Oh my god! I've got a little bit of health. I've got to make this decision. What am I going to do?’ It didn't feel like a real-time game could give me that tension, and so I resisted.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday, the moment that we made it real-time instead of turn-based… It was a big debate in the office for quite a while. I resisted it. I didn't want to make it real-time.” - David Brevik.
It’s hard to quantify the lasting impact that going real-time would have on an RPG like Diablo, but for those that played it upon release, the experience was both familiar yet new. “I was a big Gauntlet fan, but the thing about playing Gauntlet, it's just sucking quarters out of your pocket,” Julian Love explains. “So, when Diablo comes out, it's like that but with so much more depth that you can just lose days and days in it. It was an instant, instant hook.”“
As the lead programmer on Diablo, one of the drawbacks that David Brevik saw with the prospect of switching the combat to real-time would be extensive delays to an already drawn out development cycle. Plus, the need for more money from its newly found benefactor to complete the project. Even so, he got out-voted, and was left with the prospect of radically changing the game.
Alone in the office on a Friday, he was forced to face his greatest fear. “I was like, ‘This is going to take me forever. You guys just go home or whatever.’ And when they came back on Monday, it was working. I remember playing the hero and he had this mace. I clicked on a skeleton and the hero walked across the screen, swung, and smashed it to pieces. At that moment, I knew that it was something different and special. You could easily tell.”
“It wasn't long after that, that everybody in the company was just staying after work and playing the game,” Brevik continues. “People don't usually sit around after work and play what they are working on all day.” This change to real-time combat came fairly early in the Diablo development cycle, and its impact would inform every choice from that moment on, from monster behaviour to skills to items and of course, loot.The second major change, going online, proved to be a different story, in that it came late and was a feature that the team saw as one of the last major hurdles to overcome. In the end, the creation of Battle.net and its introduction with Diablo not only helped define the series in the eyes of fans but also served as an important milestone in the still relatively new arena of online gaming.
“When Diablo II came out it was the first real online game that I'd played,” Rob Foote tells me. “And playing on Battle.net and being in chat and talking to people about what's going on and then jumping into games was a brand-new experience for me. Even now when I'm playing Diablo III, we sit around with people that are playing the Seasons and we're talking about our characters. Some of the people here play Hardcore too, so when your character dies you tell the story. There’s a connection that you feel with other people when you play Diablo.”
The Sounds of Heaven and Hell
First impressions last. And once you factor in the gothic fantasy that defines Diablo’s look, the immediate and rewarding action, and the ability to play online with other people, the next thing that comes to mind is both the music and sound effects. For Diablo and Diablo II the music was composed by Matt Uelman, who got his start at Blizzard North after sending in demos to every developer who was working on 16-bit games in the San Francisco Bay Area - circa 1993. This meant ensuring that each piece of music was created using the same technical specs as a Sega Genesis.This attention to detail, combined with a childhood spent learning classical piano before moving on to other instruments and genres, culminates in the very first piece of music you hear when you fire up Diablo. The Tristram theme, named after the town where your hero begins their descent into hell, was unlike anything ever heard before in a fantasy RPG. The classical guitar strings, reverb, delay, and moody atmosphere all coalescing to set the scene and musical tone for a new type of experience.
The Tristram theme, named after the town where your hero begins their descent into hell, was unlike anything ever heard before in a fantasy RPG.
“It's very eclectic. He uses a lot of found sound,” says Russell Brower, Senior Director of Audio and Composer at Blizzard, of the impact of Diablo’s score. “The original Diablo was the first Blizzard game I played as a civilian and I immediately noticed how the music was not what I expected. It totally worked, and was not only accepted as a soundtrack for a game but also went on to become a huge part of the Diablo universe.”“
Prior to joining Blizzard in 2005, Brower worked extensively in the field of animation and storytelling. For him and the passionate sound team at Blizzard, both past and present, inspiration comes from the studio’s almost religious devotion to creating new worlds and stories. “The key word is story,” he tells me. “And that can take the form of concept art, a script, or any number of things, including early pre-alpha versions of a game. It may not look like much, it may all be grey textures and stuff, but you can still get a sense of scale and atmosphere.”
When composing the score for Diablo III, bringing back the iconic sound for the music that would accompany the setting of New Tristram was always on the cards. In fact, Matt Uelman’s early work on the third Diablo that began development at Blizzard North, would inform the team’s approach to the score. “I could tell in some of the music he wrote both for the Diablo II expansion and some early work on Diablo III that he was becoming less eclectic and more Wagnerian in his influences,” Brower explains, referring to German composer Richard Wagner. “It was stark, and the music was starting to get really big and really powerful. It pointed us in the direction of where to go.”
Although larger in scope, recorded with a full-piece orchestra, choir, and several additional musicians, the music found in Diablo III feels like a natural extension of the work found in the original. And with the third game taking on the same Act structure found in Diablo II, the composers could inject the same level of immediate detail that could identify a singular location, purely through the music.
The 2008 Diablo III teaser gives an idea of where the score is going...
“As a composer just looking at the art for Act II, something starts to speak to you. Things felt very old, very ancient, so I started thinking about the instrument called the duduk. In real life, it’s an instrument that originated in Armenia. It’s one of the oldest instruments there is and, thanks to Hollywood, the average person kind of associates it with sort of biblical-era stories where there are deserts and cities that have been buried in the sand. Over time the music became more sonorous because there's this vast view, and you can see on forever. It conjures up a certain feeling about the space and what it might mean.”As Diablo evolved so did its story, with Diablo III offering avenues for emotional expression through music as the backdrop for a cinematic tale for the first time. And as the gothic fantasy began to deal with the themes of loss, regret, and being able to pick up the pieces and move on, Brower recalls a piece of music he composed for one of the more dramatic sequences in the game.
“There's a character named Leah and there was something about her storyline that stuck with me. I was going through a rough patch in real life and I noticed that there was a parallel between my feelings and her path. I remember sitting down at the piano to write it and I have no memory of what happened in between, but only about 20 minutes had elapsed. It just came from my experience and my raw emotion. The conductor, Miss Emma Noon, looked over the score before the session and said to me, ‘I just played Leah. You're an old romantic, aren't you?’”
The Iconic Second One
“I don't think any of us thought we were doing anything profound or ground-breaking,” Erich Schaefer reflects. “We thought we were creating something of high-quality, and were reasonably sure people would like it. But we were shocked by the scope, the success, and the influence it had on games since.”For Schaefer and the team at Blizzard North, getting Diablo onto retail shelves was a monumental task for a small and relatively inexperienced team. For the founders of the studio, they saw Diablo as the realisation of years of game development hopes and dreams. “After we finished Diablo, there were other games that we wanted to make. We had just crunched hard, and we were kind of sick of Diablo at that time,” David Brevik recalls.“We knew that we had to fix things and stuff like that, but we really wanted to put Diablo behind us and move on. We had been doing it for a few years, and it was one of the longest projects we had ever worked on.” As the team at Blizzard moved on from Warcraft to StarCraft, Blizzard North began to imagine its next project being a similar departure. But as work continued on patches, and cheating began to rear its head thanks to the first version of Battle.net being built on a peer-to-peer connection model, the team started to see numerous ways in which it could improve the experience.
And in much the same way that Blizzard would dramatically improve on a formula when it moved from Warcraft to Warcraft II, the idea of creating a Diablo II began to feel like a sure thing. “It took probably four months after the release of Diablo before we started working on Diablo II. It quickly became what we wanted to do,” Brevik explains. “We were ready take the plunge again, ready to go in and make it better."“We sat down and decided that we were going to break this thing into Acts,” he tells me. “We realised we could do outdoor stuff, and I thought of a way to remove load screens. And together we came up with all kinds of advancements. Right off the bat, Diablo kind of changed and we thought we could make a much better game because of it.”
Bouncing Around Ideas
One of the ways in which games feel very different to say, movies, is in how sequels and ‘second ones’ often serve as superior or more memorable experiences. For a game like Diablo, built on RPG mechanics, simple controls, and deep customisation, Diablo II offered a way to not only refine and improve on what was already there but also expand the scope of both the world and the overall ambition of what it could be.“It was a pretty simple process of half a dozen of us brainstorming for a day or two,” Erich Schaefer says of the time spent coming up with all the new places players would be able to visit in the sequel. “We threw out the source material and picked up several new ideas. So it became Irish countryside, then desert, then jungle, then hell.” This process of getting together, bouncing ideas around a room, and then iterating, testing and finding the best fit is one that could be found throughout the teams at Blizzard - North and South. Past and present.“I think it starts with these pillars. It starts with these basic ideas,” Rob Foote adds. “Not necessarily detailed 200-plus page design documents. But more of ideas to make the game great, and then it goes where it goes.” As an example, Rob cites the implementation of Adventure Mode in Diablo III’s Reaper of Souls expansion released in 2014.
“One of the requests was, ‘We want you to be able to move between Acts, go to any Waypoint in the world,’" he tells me. “That was the original request. We just wanted to be able to open-up one building to the next. And the engineers worked on it, and then slowly that turned into, ‘Well what if we put bounties in every Act?’ And then ‘Well what if’ took over. We had someone else working on this parallel game mode creating Rifts and so this idea of being able to move between Waypoints ended up becoming Adventure Mode. It was a small task that turned into months and months of work. And it could have easily been shot down.”
“We felt like we could make [Diablo II] 3D. But after seriously considering it we… realised that the game could look better and have more stuff on the screen, and more action as a 2D game.” - David Brevik.
This thread of being open to ideas is one that can be seen throughout all 20 years of Diablo. During the early stages of developing Diablo II the team explored the idea of switching the game to 3D. Launching in the year 2000 for PC, this was a time when most high-profile releases were taking advantage of new and powerful 3D hardware. “We felt like we could make the game 3D,” David Brevik recalls. “But after seriously considering it we felt that 3D wasn't quite there. We realised that the game could look better and have more stuff on the screen, and more action as a 2D game.”“
Launching over a decade later, in 2012, the Diablo III team found the transition to render all the action in 3D was a lot easier thanks to even more powerful hardware. This time though, the debate shifted towards perspective. With the success of World of Warcraft, and how it took the top-down isometric perspective of the Warcraft strategy games into the realm of third-person action, the question became whether Diablo III should make a similar switch. Thankfully, it didn’t.
Back from the Dead
“There was a lot of heavy iteration going on, and the methodology at the time was to really just throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall and see what stuck,” Julian Love says of the early days on Diablo III at Blizzard North. “And that meant that sometimes you were trying a lot of things that you just weren't sure how they were going to pan out. Those first couple of years, that's really the state that the project was in.”“When I left Blizzard North there was a team working on Diablo III, but I had only incidental involvement. It was a vastly different game, it was a true MMO with a stronger faction and PvP focus.” - Erich Schaefer.
When discussing the twenty year history of the Diablo series it’s hard not to notice the long gap between Diablo II and III. Diablo III actually began development at Blizzard North after the release of Diablo II, but moved to Blizzard Entertainment once Blizzard North closed its doors in 2005. “When I left Blizzard North there was a team working on Diablo III, but I had only incidental involvement,” Erich Schaefer tells me. “It was a vastly different game, it was a true MMO with a stronger faction and PvP focus. But it was still in early development. And really, I don't remember much about it.”“
For both Blizzard studios, the period of the mid-2000s were incredibly hectic. During the release of Diablo at the tail-end of 1996, the team down south were working solely on StarCraft. Both studios were single-project, and it was over the course of the next decade that this expanded to a system where Blizzard could work on multiple games at any given moment. And this idea of a multi-studio approach working on multiple games slowly became a singular entity working on several games – Blizzard Entertainment. The team that was left working at Blizzard North were absorbed down south, and Diablo III became a project that would spend the next several years finding its voice.
“There were two goals,” Julian Love says of the transition away from Blizzard North. “One was to make a great Diablo III game. But the second goal was to make a great Diablo III team. One that could go on and keep making Diablo games. That was a big hurdle, and we really needed to be smart in the way that we assembled the team, and be careful and take great care to not just build the next Diablo. But build a team.”
Even though this process took several years and culminated in the release of Diablo III in 2012, the Diablo III of 2017 is very different from the one from five years ago. “I think that over the years we've just gotten better and better at taking that moment-to-moment aspect of the gameplay and bringing it up to new, higher heights.” Love continues, summing up the transition from the core game to the Reaper of Souls expansion and on to the release of the Necromancer this year. “We really cranked it up in terms of the amount of reward that you get in terms of the effort that you put into it. What you get back from it. I feel like it's now a game that always gives you way more back than what you put in. And that has just steadily improved over the years.”“A lot has changed in twenty years,” says David Brevik, looking back at the legacy of the series. “Diablo III is a very different game than Diablo II and Diablo I. Also, Diablo II is a very different game than Diablo I. There's different people involved and things like that, but the thing that has stayed the same is that people love Diablo. And people love the Diablo franchise. No matter which version is your favourite, people know Diablo. People play Diablo and masses of people love Diablo.”
“People mostly come back for the gameplay and loot,” Erich Schaefer adds. “Other games have done that stuff well since, but we killed it with sheer amounts of quality content. And I think Diablo III continued that.”
Three games across twenty years may not sound like a lot, but in a way, this scarcity has only helped solidify Diablo’s legacy in the eyes of both fans and the industry. Prior to 1996 a game like Diablo was a risky proposition for a publisher to invest in, and now twenty years later you can see its influence in many of the biggest games being released each and every year. This series set the bar for character customisation, for accessible controls, for fast and fluid combat, and for the simple act of opening chests and seeing an explosion of items gush out in all directions.
Diablo is everywhere. Happy anniversary.
Special thanks to Rob Foote, Joe Shely, Julian Love, Russell Brower, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik for their time and making this possible. And to all the great Blizzard staff in Australia and the United States for being so accommodating. Kosta Andreadis is an Australian musician and freelancer who wrote a cool piece on Diablo III's necromancer earlier this year. Check out his tunes and follow him on Twitter.