Diablo started life as a turn-based game. You took a step, and then the monsters took theirs. It was Blizzard that asked Condor, the small studio making it, to switch to real time, and David Brevik, who had been planning a game like it since school, made the change himself. “The moment I put the change in, clicked on a skeleton and my character walked over and smacked it to pieces, the clouds parted,” he told Edge. The finished game gave the player a town, a single dungeon of 16 levels that was built afresh for every new game, and a mouse. Left-click to walk, left-click to fight, left-click to pick up what the monster dropped. It shipped with a free way to play it over the internet, and it was a hit, though several of the reviewers who first played it were not convinced.
Fast facts
- Developer: Condor, renamed Blizzard North when Blizzard bought it during development.
- Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment; Zablac in the UK at launch.
- Released: at the turn of 1997 for Windows 95. Blizzard’s official date was 3 January 1997, but Brevik has said shops on the American West Coast were selling it on 31 December 1996. Later versions for the Macintosh and, from Electronic Arts, the PlayStation.
- Designers: David Brevik (lead programmer), Erich Schaefer (art lead) and Max Schaefer.
- Players: one, or up to four over a network, a modem, a serial cable or Blizzard’s free Battle.net service.
- Classes: Warrior, Rogue and Sorcerer.
- Expansion: Hellfire (1997), made by Synergistic Software for Sierra.
Condor and the turn-based dungeon
Condor was founded in 1993 by Brevik and the brothers Max and Erich Schaefer. Its first job, on the day of its first meeting, came from Sunsoft: the Mega Drive version of Justice League Task Force. The Super Nintendo version was being written by a studio in Irvine that became Blizzard, and the two teams met at a trade show. Blizzard had just released Warcraft and wanted more PC games, and Condor had one ready to pitch. “I started working on it in high school around 1985,” Brevik told Edge. “The biggest influence was playing Moria and Angband on Unix machines.” Erich Schaefer pointed to X-COM instead, for “the size of the characters, the camera angle and the tile-based random maps”. For a short time the team also considered making the characters out of clay and photographing them, as Primal Rage had; Max Schaefer later called it something that “would have been a disaster”.
The first version worked like the roguelikes Brevik played, Rogue and NetHack: everything happened in turns. Blizzard suggested real time. The two tellings of the switch differ in length. Edge reported in 2010 that Brevik locked himself in his office for a week to rewrite the code. At the Game Developers Conference in 2016 Brevik said that he first asked Blizzard for a milestone payment, got it, and then had real-time combat working within a few hours: every action already took a number of turns, “so I just made the turns happen 20 times a second, and it all worked magically”.
Blizzard North and Battle.net
About six months before the game was due, Condor ran short of money. “The taxman was literally at the door, threatening to shut us down,” Erich Schaefer told Edge, and Blizzard offered to buy the studio. Max Schaefer said the budget until then had been “under half a million dollars”. With Blizzard’s backing they asked how to make the game “as big as possible”, and the answer was Battle.net, built by Blizzard’s own team in Irvine. Diablo had been designed for play over a local network; Battle.net let a player click a menu button and join people anywhere in the world, at no charge beyond an internet connection.
Computer Gaming World found the setup “unbelievably painless”. Four months after launch PC Zone reckoned that about 150,000 people were playing on Battle.net, and warned British readers that two hours a night would cost around £40 a month in phone calls, since there was not yet a European server. The same article described what the players had made of it: traders, clans, bounty hunters, and “Player Killers” who turned on their own parties and took their victims’ ears as trophies. Games were hosted on the players’ own machines, and edited characters were common. “It was foreign to us to have a hit game, to have a million people playing,” Condor’s founders told Edge. “It meant that thousands of people were cheating, and we were totally unprepared for it.”
Reviews
The British reviewers were cool. Edge gave it seven out of ten in February 1997 and called it “essentially a Gauntlet clone” that had also borrowed its random dungeons from Rogue. It admired the light-sourcing and the monsters’ intelligence, which could make small creatures flee when a comrade died, but concluded that “it’s a shame that Blizzard doesn’t appear to have the creative flair and imagination to complement its unquestionable talent for producing slick, clever games”. PC Gamer gave it 74%. Its reviewer, Steve Faragher, also called it a Gauntlet clone, “fun but unoriginal”, and thought it had been designed for Americans with free local phone calls; it was “well worth buying if you can get at the multi-player side of things”. PC Zone‘s buyers’ guide later rated it 88: “standard hack ‘n’ slash fare, but it’s pulled off with such style that the overall game experience is addictive.”
Computer Gaming World’s headline in March 1997 crowned it “the new king of action-RPGs”. Greg Fortune praised the interface and the combat, and a panel alongside his review wished the town of Tristram felt more like a place where people lived. Multiplayer, he wrote, made it “an instant must have for everyone on the staff”. The designer of Ultima, Richard Garriott, told Edge that it was “fabulously beautiful”, but “fantasy C&C”, a hack-and-slash game rather than a role-playing game in the Ultima sense.
Sales
Blizzard said in September 1998 that Diablo had been the best-selling game in its first month in the shops and the best-selling role-playing game of 1997, and had sold “nearly 2 million copies worldwide”. Computer Gaming World counted it among Blizzard’s “back-to-back million-sellers” later that year. Edge’s 2010 retrospective summed up what came next: “Massive sales followed, and with them came clones, expansions and a sequel.”
Hellfire, the PlayStation and the sequels
The expansion, Hellfire, did not come from Blizzard. Synergistic Software made it for Sierra, and Computer Gaming World reviewed it in April 1998. It added a Monk character, new areas, faster walking in town and more items, but no multiplayer. The PlayStation version, published by Electronic Arts in 1998, replaced the mouse with direct control from the joypad and let two players share a screen. Edge thought it “a relatively painless introduction to the often confusing world of computer roleplaying games”.
Blizzard North made Diablo II (2000). In June 2003 Brevik, the Schaefers and Blizzard’s Bill Roper left to found Flagship Studios, which made Hellgate: London; the Schaefers went on to make Torchlight. Blizzard continued the series with Diablo III (2012) and Diablo IV (2023), which Blizzard announced as its fastest-selling game. The original returned in March 2019 on GOG.com, bundled with Hellfire and in two versions: the original, and one updated for modern Windows.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World, issue 152, March 1997: Greg Fortune, review (three classes, up to four players, Battle.net’s setup, the town).
- Edge, issue 42, February 1997: review, seven out of ten (Gauntlet, Rogue, the AI; Zablac, £50); interview with Richard Garriott.
- PC Gamer (UK), issue 40, February 1997, pp. 82–83: Steve Faragher, review, 74%.
- PC Zone, issue 50, May 1997: Raza Toosy, Battle.net feature (150,000 players, phone costs, 16 levels, Player Killers, cheating). Issue 55, October 1997: buyers’ guide, 88.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 165, April 1998: Scorpia, Hellfire review (Synergistic Software, Sierra On-Line, the Monk, no multiplayer).
- Edge, issue 58, May 1998: PlayStation review.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 173, December 1998: “back-to-back million-sellers”.
- Edge, issue 150, June 2005: Flagship Studios and Hellgate: London (the departure from Blizzard North in June 2003).
- Edge, issue 210, January 2010: “The Making Of… Diablo”, with David Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer.
- Retro Gamer, issue 103, June 2012, pp. 70–72: Diablo series feature (the 16-level dungeon, Battle.net’s late addition, the PlayStation version, Hellfire).
- Blizzard Entertainment, press release, London, 8 September 1998: “nearly 2 million copies worldwide” (web, secondary). https://web.archive.org/web/19990218052222/http://www.blizzard.com/PRESS/980909d2.htm
- Sam Machkovech, “Post-mortem: Ms. Pac-Man, Diablo dissected by their original devs”, Ars Technica, 26 March 2016 (web, secondary): the release date, the switch to real time. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/post-mortem-ms-pac-man-diablo-dissected-by-their-original-devs/
- “Diablo (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the official release date of 3 January 1997; Macintosh version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(video_game)
- Sam Machkovech, “Blizzard has handed Diablo 1’s keys to GOG”, Ars Technica, 7 March 2019 (web, secondary); Diablo + Hellfire store page, GOG.com (web, secondary). https://www.gog.com/en/game/diablo
- Blizzard Entertainment, “Diablo IV Launches, Immediately Sets New Record as Blizzard Entertainment’s Fastest-Selling Game of All Time”, press release, 6 June 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230606005812/en/