10 ms·

Original Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]

291 points by eswat 11y ago

hobs 11y ago
Interesting to see what they pitched vs what they delivered, a turn based RPG with a real life collector card game is not what Diablo turned out to be.
midhir 11y ago
As a kid I loved the original Diablo game for how far they went into creating a dark, satanic atmosphere. The music still gives me chills! So I was worried this document would be over-corporate and spoil it. But those illustrations look like they came straight from The Goetia!
haddr 11y ago
The excellence of Diablo lies in the atmosphere of the game. I think it is one of the best games in terms of the overall atmosphere and that general feel of play. All the pieces work perfectly together to deliver this unique sensation while playing the game. Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack! PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...
- agumonkey 11y ago
  I only played the 1st half way but I think you're right. It had a very tangible aesthetic that I rarely felt in other games. I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.
  - rubber_duck 11y ago
    >I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3. The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
      - Scuds 11y ago
        > The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
        agumonkey 11y ago
        Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
        11y ago
- Reedx 11y ago
  Yeah, Diablo had an very well realized atmosphere and solidified tone. The soundtrack played a big part of that. I can still remember how great it felt simply walking around the town and being absorbed by the world. In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job. That worked out pretty well to say the least! [1] https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225 https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Interestingly that guy was working on Marvel Heroes until recently, having been hired after the initial launch went sour to help rework the game. Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
    - zf00002 11y ago
      The cool thing is that David Brevik didn't just work at Gazillion on Marvel Heroes, he actually played it. And he still does. He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        Yeah i think that quite a number of people in the game production business are basically not gamers. They are storytellers, they are animators, they are artists of various stripes, but they are just not gamers. Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.
- devonkim 11y ago
  I somewhat have to disagree in that the popularity of Diablo is similar to that of WoW - the underpinnings in pure addiction. Random positive reinforcers are really, really powerful.
  - kup0 11y ago
    Yeah and it doesn't seem that knowing about them makes any difference. I actively know that Diablo and other similar games are doing this and yet I find that I like it. The games do lose replay value over time a bit (I'm worn out on D3) but if you wait a while and go back it's fun again. For now, I'm playing similar games (Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) and finding I'm enjoying the different styles of art, even though it's essentially the same exact gameplay. Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
    - mbrock 11y ago
      There's a hymn in the ancient Rigveda scriptures, known as "Gambler's Lament." > The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited. > [...] > The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html
  - barbs 11y ago
    I would agree with you in the case of Diablo 2 (and probably 3, though I haven't played that one). But the first Diablo holds a special place in my heart precisely because of the atmosphere. Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat. Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items. That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying). Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Heh, i still recall me and friends checking out the demo with a lan setup and running into the butcher boss room. From the ouside you see a darkened room with some blobs that may be raw flesh inside. Open the door and you hear "ah, fresh meat" as a voiceover. Right after that a big, bulky demon with a bloodstained apron and a meat cleaver walks into view.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    That was a genuinely scary moment for me.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Yeah we all jumped in our seats and in-game scrambled away the first time.
  - brobinson 11y ago
    There was supposed to be a cutscene [1] which played when you opened the door (similar to when you first encounter Lazarus), but it was apparently disabled. The video file was still left on the game disc. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      And having the cutscene there would perhaps not have been as effective, as it would have removed the player from the "world" if only for a split second.
    - Raphmedia 11y ago
      When I was a kid, I was messing around with the files on the disc and stumbled on that. Showing it around was a nice 5 minutes of "fame" in school.
  - Jordrok 11y ago
    Yes! That's one of my all time favorite gaming moments/memories.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Negative1 11y ago
  While this is the pitch they made while David was at Condor it was not the origin of the idea for the game. As David mentioned on Friday at the GDC Post-mortem, he had the original idea in Highschool for a more traditional turn-based, tile-based RPG. The music, art direction and many other elements that made Diablo an innovative game actually came organically and much later.
- antjanus 11y ago
  I really loved that atmosphere. Can you recommend another game that captures the same kind of feel and atmosphere? The dark, brooding mythology, idk how to even describe it.
  - Vaskivo 11y ago
    I would say Dark Souls. But it's a different kind of RPG (third person, action oriented, difficult and unforgiving. But fun!)
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.
- bunnymancer 11y ago
  Pitches aren't sold through fi-fis, it's sold through pew-pews
falcor84 11y ago
"Diablo is a role playing game wherein a player creates a single character and guides him..." Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process. Note that in Diablo 1 (1996) and Diablo 2 (2000), the gender of each class was fixed (with more male than female options), but in Diablo 3 (2012) gender choices became available for each class. I think this should be considered a victory for feminism, and a real sign of progress taken over these past ~20 years.
- forgotpwtomain 11y ago
  > Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process. It's standard in English to use the male pronoun in cases where you would refer to both or either gender.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Its common. But standard? No, just woefully sexist.
    - dragandj 11y ago
      But wait - it's only a game. If you think this is important, you are free to start a competing company, create gender balanced games, and eat their lunch.
      - falcor84 11y ago
        Well,there's no longer such a need, since Diablo 3 is completely gender balanced (at least concerning the hero classes). I don't know what influenced this, but apparently change can also be made from within a company.
eswat 11y ago
The book Stay a While and Listen does a good job of explaining the background behind the pitch and subsequent changes that made Diablo what it is today: http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Blizzards-Video-Game-ebook/dp/B00G8UL474 http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Blizzards-Video-Gam...
mrits 11y ago
I love the 12 month development plan. I wonder how long it actually took them.
- alex504 11y ago
  I was very interested to see that the team they pitched included only 11 people, including designers and illustrators. Only three programmers ('One chief programmer and two junior programmers'). Am I correct in thinking that a team this size would be considered closer to an indy game in 2016? I am not a game developer but this seems like a very stark comparison to the current landscape / size of software teams (not just limited to games).
  - chongli 11y ago
    No, an indie game is 1-3 people. Often 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 musician.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      It's more flexible than that. A lot of indies are just one guy, but you certainly see small studios of 6-12 people doing e.g. Kickstarters.
      - yelnatz 11y ago
        I work in a game studio, I still can't wrap my head around one guy doing it all.
        mrits 11y ago
        My startup now has about 25 coders doing what 2-3 of us did for a few years. I'm still not sure what everyone does. We are actually moving quite a bit slower these days.
  - douche 11y ago
    For the time, that was a pretty good sized team. Id did most of their early games with Carmack, Romero, Abrash, and a few different artists/level designers.
tunichtgut 11y ago
I think from this draft, its quite hard to imagine how successfull diablo would become. It looks solid, but no revolution. The real magic of diablo is artwork, in music and design, the stories and chars. still amazing in 2016!
- SCHiM 11y ago
  And the music, wow. Never has a game had more fitting music than diablo. I still listen to it some days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyEb-jO9hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyEb-jO9hU
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    This is a fun story I like to tell about Diablo. In Paris, 2008, there was the "Worldwide Invitational", a Blizzard convention much like BlizzCon but much smaller scale (About ~7k people in total went). Many rumors were going around about the announcement of a new game. Even more rumors about "Diablo III", which had been said to be in the works for almost a decade. After the opening ceremony, Mike Morhaime gave his usual speech and started dropping hints, gave a long lead up to "Blizzard's newest game". And without saying any name, a musician came on stage and started doing the Tristram riff. Everybody immediately understands what's going on. The lights go red. Everybody yelling and clapping - unbelievable excitement. Cinematic starts. Chills. Still no name for that "new game". The cinematic starts cutting faster and faster, hinting more and more at Diablo until we see Diablo himself in a cut. And then... three fiery claws across the screen lead into the name: "Diablo III". There's no way I can do that story justice, but this was one of the most incredible announcement Blizzard has done - and since WWI doesn't get as much coverage as BlizzCon, not many people got to hear about it. Here's two videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQk_CT7fY9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQk_CT7fY9E (from the audience) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ogXqCNkyHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ogXqCNkyHE
    - pluma 11y ago
      That sounds amazing. Sadly I didn't find that D3 lived up to D2 and D1 atmosphere-wise. The ending of the first chapter put me off the game entirely -- I guess they were trying to shift the focus of the story to other characters for a new audience. I can't put my finger on it, but somehow D3 felt less connected to D1 and D2 than D2 did to D1.
dluan 11y ago
Does anyone know more about the history of Condor and it's original team? Wiki says Condor was bought by Blizzard nine months before Diablo launched. Then, after Diablo II the team split into two separate companies? Also, I'm guessing this pitch document was to investors for initial funding. I'm curious to know how much they raised and who from. This doc looks like it came from experienced game devs.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Condor became "Blizzard North" after Blizzard acquired them. They were put in charge of the Diablo series, after Blizzard made a lot of adjustments to it (including the move from turn-based, which we see in this draft, to ARPG). They were shut down after they failed to produce any progress on Diablo III for years (like I said in another post, Diablo III had been expected for almost a decade before its announcement). Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North Longer documentary that goes into the history of Blizzard, and talks a bit about Blizzard North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8
  - iolothebard 11y ago
    Had to stop watching. The Adham guy was beyond annoying. We were the first in everything.
- ido 11y ago
  There is a book titled "stay awhile, and listen" describing the early days of Condor/Blizzard North and Diablo.
thevibesman 11y ago
It is cool to see this on the front page at #6 and a post about NetHack at #5 (EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322591). Even though I sometimes wished for a deeper dungeon or perma-death like when I played Angband and ZAngband; but I do remember enjoying the atmosphere and story of Diablo and Diablo II and having a lot of fun playing multiplayer with friends. Even with more advanced games out, I remember getting together with some high school friends when home on a college break to setup a LAN and play Diablo II---five years old and still lots of fun!
smcl 11y ago
So they pitched it as ~1 year from inception to delivery, anyone got any idea how close they were to that schedule?
- Shizka 11y ago
  The document says 1994 and diablo was released 31st of December 1996(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29). So it was very delayed. I guess that the game underwent some huge changes to justify this delay. Some of the changes are described in this chapter of the book "Stay Awhile and Listen": http://www.shacknews.com/article/76406/chapter-8-finale-condor-and-blizzard-lock-horns-over-diablo http://www.shacknews.com/article/76406/chapter-8-finale-cond.... The part I found especially interesting was how they changed it from turn-based to ARPG: > Our company was saying, "We're going to take on this developer, Condor, and we're going to publish their game. It's called Diablo." And for a couple of months we were working on it not knowing that it was turn-based. When it came out that it was turn-based, we said, "No, that sucks." > We actually took a vote. They said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were turn-based." I think two people raised their hands. Then they said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were real-time." Everybody raised their hands. Allen went in and called Dave Brevik and said, "Look, you've got to make this real-time."
  - Scuds 11y ago
    Don't forget the addition of Multiplayer, and integration with Battle.net. Cheating was rampant in D1, in any case. The pitch doc also talks about ever popular roguelike trope of perma-death, it's a heavy pill to swallow for a commercial game in 1994.
    - brobinson 11y ago
      Gotta run that BobaFett trainer with the anti-PK mode!
Reedx 11y ago
At GDC last week there was a Diablo postmortem, which was the impetus for posting the design doc. The speaker (Blizzard North's co-founder) rhetorically asked the audience if they wanted to see the original doc. Gamasutra has a good writeup of that session: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_David_Brevik_shares_the_story_of_making_Diablo.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_Dav... Lots of interesting tidbits about the game's development and the company. Oh, and there was a nice moment during the Q&A - a fan who pirated Diablo back in the day walked up to the stage and gave them some money.
- dave2000 11y ago
  I'm still surprised bands, authors etc don't have some sort of "honesty box" where people can make payments directly to them to thank them, compensate for piracy etc. Would cost nothing but benefit them if only a little in most cases. Perhaps their labels etc wouldn't like it if people routinely downloaded their stuff and paid them directly though.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    The problem is how credit cards work. the companies take a fee out of the "store" for every payment. This in turn means the payment has to be large enough to cover the fee and still allow profit. The sum of said payment is likely to end up being above most people's "no worries" threshold. Never mind that now the card info is in yet another potentially hackable database.
  - Reedx 11y ago
    I wonder if that could have unintended consequences. Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed? It reminds me of the study in Freakonomics about day care centers and the problem of parents sometimes not picking up their kids on time. Which meant that employees would have to stay after closing. So they started charging parents a small fee for being late. The result was that parents were more late than ever, since it meant they no longer felt guilty. The fine removed the guilt associated with being late.
jwagenet 11y ago
It is interesting that the original marketing plan pitched micro-expansions that look a lot like the DLC of today. The expansions seem to serve as a marketing tool and collectors item rather than a cash grab, but I do wonder why there was no followthrough.
- codezero 11y ago
  Possibly because this posed the expansions as floppy disks costing $4.95 – by the time Diablo was released it was on CD, and presumably the art required for expansions was much larger than a CD, and CDs were not as cheap as a single floppy disk.
  - codezero 11y ago
    correction: much larger than a floppy :)
caretStick 11y ago
Look at that waterfall Gantt chart! Marvel of management!
- stygiansonic 11y ago
  I wonder how well it was reflective of reality, i.e. did Music really take from month 2 until the end, and did the DRLG take only two months?
EdgarVerona 11y ago
Where they're talking about the small, randomized packs of items... it almost sounds like they were intending a CCG in video game form originally?
njharman 11y ago
1st page sounds like it's describing every/any rogue like. end goal/boss, random generated levels, lots of race / class combos, turn based gridded movement, increasing danger with depth, improving characters, magic treasures to improve player capabilities. Maybe I only played DII+, but that doesn't sound like much like diablo that I remember. esp turn based?
- Fordrus 11y ago
  Original Diablo was originally going to be turn based, but that design was scrapped later, replaced by the more action-oriented stuff. :)
  - iolothebard 11y ago
    Baldur's Gate got it right. Best game since the Ultima Series IMO (well along with Bard's Tale, Wizardry, etc).
- stuart78 11y ago
  I read somewhere else about the move from turn based. If I recall correctly (sorry, no citation), the game was feeling a bit static, pretty much as you described. Somebody built a prototype live mode and that was when the game started feeling good.
- Fizzadar 11y ago
  So glad they dumped the turn based stuff! I've played through both I/II (prefer I) and it has some of these features. If I recall correctly the movement is somewhat grid based (but enables the player to move in more than 4 [8?] directions).
stuart78 11y ago
What is remarkable to me about Diablo is how little it has changed. Dungeons and environments are more sophisticated, but at its heart it remains the game described in that doc, just better.
wenbert 11y ago
I think the "randomness" is Diablo games is what makes it really addictive. I remember playing Diablo 1 and I couldn't stop playing because I couldn't wait for the next item to drop. Also, a low-end machine could run it! Diablo II, still the same thing - it was basically a better Diablo I. Diablo III on the other hand came out with an Auction House - which basically killed it. I played in the early parts of DIII, it was okay but not as fun as DI and DII. However, things are very different now. There have been lots of updates in Diablo III and Blizzard killed the Auction House - So can't say how it feels now. But I'm pretty sure the "randomness" is still there - which basically what drives the game.
- taneq 11y ago
  Intermittent reinforcement is the basis for a lot of behavioural addiction. Random loot games are basically just pretty pokies.
iolothebard 11y ago
Reminds me of Wizardry.
RussellDussel 11y ago
"No two games will ever be the same." Does anybody know how big the seed is for Diablo's RNG? I'm guessing it would have to be 1 value for the environment (to ensure saving/reloading into the same world) but would that 1 value determine all pseudo-randomness (AI aside) in the game (e.g. item drops and their stats).
- mewmew 11y ago
  The seed is a 32-bit signed integer [1]. Diablo 1 was using the Borland C/C++ pseudo-random number generator algorithm, with a multiplier of 0x15A4E35 and an increment of 1 [2,3]. A Go implementation of the PRNG used in Diablo 1 is located at [4]. So I guess there are 2^31-1 unique dungeons per level. Storing, rather than dynamically generating, these dungeons would require a huge amount of disk space. For each level, a 112x112 two-dimensional array of 32-bit integers is used to store the piece IDs which make up each tile (a tile consists of four pieces) [5], and a 40x40 two-dimensional array of 8-bit integers is used to store the tile IDs [6]. Thus, a total of 51776 bytes (roughly 50 KB) is required to store the contents of each generated dungeon. In total, more than 100 TB would be required to store the contents of each unique procedurally generated dungeon per level. The game contains 17 levels, so to store each unique dungeon for each level, a storage capacity of about 1.7 PB would be required. This might be possible today, but was definitely a challenge back in 1996. [1]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/engine.md#seed https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/engine.md... [2]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/functions/engine.md#engine_rand https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/functions/eng... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#Parameters_in_common_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#... [4]: https://github.com/sanctuary/d1/blob/master/rand/rand.go https://github.com/sanctuary/d1/blob/master/rand/rand.go [5]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.md#piece_id_map https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m... [6]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.md#tile_id_map https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m...

291 points by eswat 11y ago

hobs 11y ago

Interesting to see what they pitched vs what they delivered, a turn based RPG with a real life collector card game is not what Diablo turned out to be.

midhir 11y ago

As a kid I loved the original Diablo game for how far they went into creating a dark, satanic atmosphere. The music still gives me chills! So I was worried this document would be over-corporate and spoil it. But those illustrations look like they came straight from The Goetia!

haddr 11y ago

The excellence of Diablo lies in the atmosphere of the game. I think it is one of the best games in terms of the overall atmosphere and that general feel of play. All the pieces work perfectly together to deliver this unique sensation while playing the game. Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack! PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...

agumonkey 11y ago
I only played the 1st half way but I think you're right. It had a very tangible aesthetic that I rarely felt in other games. I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much.
- rubber_duck 11y ago
  >I always question the run for pixels and physics when a 'simple' 2d world sucked you that much. I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3. The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now. I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    For movies it's a bit different, when the appeal was the visuals in the context of the era then yes it will fail badly. But some movies used SFX for a different purpose, and not for themselves. Just bits of them to propel the imagination. I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover. What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful. The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
    - Scuds 11y ago
      > The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era. Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that. It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Very true, Valve crafted a wonderful story, environment. It had a better AI than most too. Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
        11y ago
Reedx 11y ago
Yeah, Diablo had an very well realized atmosphere and solidified tone. The soundtrack played a big part of that. I can still remember how great it felt simply walking around the town and being absorbed by the world. In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job. That worked out pretty well to say the least! [1] https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225 https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Interestingly that guy was working on Marvel Heroes until recently, having been hired after the initial launch went sour to help rework the game. Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
  - zf00002 11y ago
    The cool thing is that David Brevik didn't just work at Gazillion on Marvel Heroes, he actually played it. And he still does. He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Yeah i think that quite a number of people in the game production business are basically not gamers. They are storytellers, they are animators, they are artists of various stripes, but they are just not gamers. Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.
devonkim 11y ago
I somewhat have to disagree in that the popularity of Diablo is similar to that of WoW - the underpinnings in pure addiction. Random positive reinforcers are really, really powerful.
- kup0 11y ago
  Yeah and it doesn't seem that knowing about them makes any difference. I actively know that Diablo and other similar games are doing this and yet I find that I like it. The games do lose replay value over time a bit (I'm worn out on D3) but if you wait a while and go back it's fun again. For now, I'm playing similar games (Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) and finding I'm enjoying the different styles of art, even though it's essentially the same exact gameplay. Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    There's a hymn in the ancient Rigveda scriptures, known as "Gambler's Lament." > The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited. > [...] > The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/226.gambler.html
- barbs 11y ago
  I would agree with you in the case of Diablo 2 (and probably 3, though I haven't played that one). But the first Diablo holds a special place in my heart precisely because of the atmosphere. Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat. Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items. That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying). Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.
digi_owl 11y ago
Heh, i still recall me and friends checking out the demo with a lan setup and running into the butcher boss room. From the ouside you see a darkened room with some blobs that may be raw flesh inside. Open the door and you hear "ah, fresh meat" as a voiceover. Right after that a big, bulky demon with a bloodstained apron and a meat cleaver walks into view.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  That was a genuinely scary moment for me.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Yeah we all jumped in our seats and in-game scrambled away the first time.
- brobinson 11y ago
  There was supposed to be a cutscene [1] which played when you opened the door (similar to when you first encounter Lazarus), but it was apparently disabled. The video file was still left on the game disc. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75KB3swIuqU
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And having the cutscene there would perhaps not have been as effective, as it would have removed the player from the "world" if only for a split second.
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    When I was a kid, I was messing around with the files on the disc and stumbled on that. Showing it around was a nice 5 minutes of "fame" in school.
- Jordrok 11y ago
  Yes! That's one of my all time favorite gaming moments/memories.
deleted 11y ago
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Negative1 11y ago
While this is the pitch they made while David was at Condor it was not the origin of the idea for the game. As David mentioned on Friday at the GDC Post-mortem, he had the original idea in Highschool for a more traditional turn-based, tile-based RPG. The music, art direction and many other elements that made Diablo an innovative game actually came organically and much later.
antjanus 11y ago
I really loved that atmosphere. Can you recommend another game that captures the same kind of feel and atmosphere? The dark, brooding mythology, idk how to even describe it.
- Vaskivo 11y ago
  I would say Dark Souls. But it's a different kind of RPG (third person, action oriented, difficult and unforgiving. But fun!)
norea-armozel 11y ago
Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.
bunnymancer 11y ago
Pitches aren't sold through fi-fis, it's sold through pew-pews

falcor84 11y ago

"Diablo is a role playing game wherein a player creates a single character and guides him..." Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process. Note that in Diablo 1 (1996) and Diablo 2 (2000), the gender of each class was fixed (with more male than female options), but in Diablo 3 (2012) gender choices became available for each class. I think this should be considered a victory for feminism, and a real sign of progress taken over these past ~20 years.

forgotpwtomain 11y ago
> Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process. It's standard in English to use the male pronoun in cases where you would refer to both or either gender.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Its common. But standard? No, just woefully sexist.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    But wait - it's only a game. If you think this is important, you are free to start a competing company, create gender balanced games, and eat their lunch.
    - falcor84 11y ago
      Well,there's no longer such a need, since Diablo 3 is completely gender balanced (at least concerning the hero classes). I don't know what influenced this, but apparently change can also be made from within a company.

eswat 11y ago

The book Stay a While and Listen does a good job of explaining the background behind the pitch and subsequent changes that made Diablo what it is today: http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Blizzards-Video-Game-ebook/dp/B00G8UL474 http://www.amazon.com/Stay-Awhile-Listen-Blizzards-Video-Gam...

mrits 11y ago

I love the 12 month development plan. I wonder how long it actually took them.

alex504 11y ago
I was very interested to see that the team they pitched included only 11 people, including designers and illustrators. Only three programmers ('One chief programmer and two junior programmers'). Am I correct in thinking that a team this size would be considered closer to an indy game in 2016? I am not a game developer but this seems like a very stark comparison to the current landscape / size of software teams (not just limited to games).
- chongli 11y ago
  No, an indie game is 1-3 people. Often 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 musician.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    It's more flexible than that. A lot of indies are just one guy, but you certainly see small studios of 6-12 people doing e.g. Kickstarters.
    - yelnatz 11y ago
      I work in a game studio, I still can't wrap my head around one guy doing it all.
      - mrits 11y ago
        My startup now has about 25 coders doing what 2-3 of us did for a few years. I'm still not sure what everyone does. We are actually moving quite a bit slower these days.
- douche 11y ago
  For the time, that was a pretty good sized team. Id did most of their early games with Carmack, Romero, Abrash, and a few different artists/level designers.

tunichtgut 11y ago

I think from this draft, its quite hard to imagine how successfull diablo would become. It looks solid, but no revolution. The real magic of diablo is artwork, in music and design, the stories and chars. still amazing in 2016!

SCHiM 11y ago
And the music, wow. Never has a game had more fitting music than diablo. I still listen to it some days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyEb-jO9hU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyEb-jO9hU
- scrollaway 11y ago
  This is a fun story I like to tell about Diablo. In Paris, 2008, there was the "Worldwide Invitational", a Blizzard convention much like BlizzCon but much smaller scale (About ~7k people in total went). Many rumors were going around about the announcement of a new game. Even more rumors about "Diablo III", which had been said to be in the works for almost a decade. After the opening ceremony, Mike Morhaime gave his usual speech and started dropping hints, gave a long lead up to "Blizzard's newest game". And without saying any name, a musician came on stage and started doing the Tristram riff. Everybody immediately understands what's going on. The lights go red. Everybody yelling and clapping - unbelievable excitement. Cinematic starts. Chills. Still no name for that "new game". The cinematic starts cutting faster and faster, hinting more and more at Diablo until we see Diablo himself in a cut. And then... three fiery claws across the screen lead into the name: "Diablo III". There's no way I can do that story justice, but this was one of the most incredible announcement Blizzard has done - and since WWI doesn't get as much coverage as BlizzCon, not many people got to hear about it. Here's two videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQk_CT7fY9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQk_CT7fY9E (from the audience) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ogXqCNkyHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ogXqCNkyHE
  - pluma 11y ago
    That sounds amazing. Sadly I didn't find that D3 lived up to D2 and D1 atmosphere-wise. The ending of the first chapter put me off the game entirely -- I guess they were trying to shift the focus of the story to other characters for a new audience. I can't put my finger on it, but somehow D3 felt less connected to D1 and D2 than D2 did to D1.

dluan 11y ago

Does anyone know more about the history of Condor and it's original team? Wiki says Condor was bought by Blizzard nine months before Diablo launched. Then, after Diablo II the team split into two separate companies? Also, I'm guessing this pitch document was to investors for initial funding. I'm curious to know how much they raised and who from. This doc looks like it came from experienced game devs.

scrollaway 11y ago
Condor became "Blizzard North" after Blizzard acquired them. They were put in charge of the Diablo series, after Blizzard made a lot of adjustments to it (including the move from turn-based, which we see in this draft, to ARPG). They were shut down after they failed to produce any progress on Diablo III for years (like I said in another post, Diablo III had been expected for almost a decade before its announcement). Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North Longer documentary that goes into the history of Blizzard, and talks a bit about Blizzard North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8
- iolothebard 11y ago
  Had to stop watching. The Adham guy was beyond annoying. We were the first in everything.
ido 11y ago
There is a book titled "stay awhile, and listen" describing the early days of Condor/Blizzard North and Diablo.

thevibesman 11y ago

It is cool to see this on the front page at #6 and a post about NetHack at #5 (EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322591). Even though I sometimes wished for a deeper dungeon or perma-death like when I played Angband and ZAngband; but I do remember enjoying the atmosphere and story of Diablo and Diablo II and having a lot of fun playing multiplayer with friends. Even with more advanced games out, I remember getting together with some high school friends when home on a college break to setup a LAN and play Diablo II---five years old and still lots of fun!

smcl 11y ago

So they pitched it as ~1 year from inception to delivery, anyone got any idea how close they were to that schedule?

Shizka 11y ago
The document says 1994 and diablo was released 31st of December 1996(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_%28video_game%29). So it was very delayed. I guess that the game underwent some huge changes to justify this delay. Some of the changes are described in this chapter of the book "Stay Awhile and Listen": http://www.shacknews.com/article/76406/chapter-8-finale-condor-and-blizzard-lock-horns-over-diablo http://www.shacknews.com/article/76406/chapter-8-finale-cond.... The part I found especially interesting was how they changed it from turn-based to ARPG: > Our company was saying, "We're going to take on this developer, Condor, and we're going to publish their game. It's called Diablo." And for a couple of months we were working on it not knowing that it was turn-based. When it came out that it was turn-based, we said, "No, that sucks." > We actually took a vote. They said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were turn-based." I think two people raised their hands. Then they said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were real-time." Everybody raised their hands. Allen went in and called Dave Brevik and said, "Look, you've got to make this real-time."
- Scuds 11y ago
  Don't forget the addition of Multiplayer, and integration with Battle.net. Cheating was rampant in D1, in any case. The pitch doc also talks about ever popular roguelike trope of perma-death, it's a heavy pill to swallow for a commercial game in 1994.
  - brobinson 11y ago
    Gotta run that BobaFett trainer with the anti-PK mode!

Reedx 11y ago

At GDC last week there was a Diablo postmortem, which was the impetus for posting the design doc. The speaker (Blizzard North's co-founder) rhetorically asked the audience if they wanted to see the original doc. Gamasutra has a good writeup of that session: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_David_Brevik_shares_the_story_of_making_Diablo.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_Dav... Lots of interesting tidbits about the game's development and the company. Oh, and there was a nice moment during the Q&A - a fan who pirated Diablo back in the day walked up to the stage and gave them some money.

dave2000 11y ago
I'm still surprised bands, authors etc don't have some sort of "honesty box" where people can make payments directly to them to thank them, compensate for piracy etc. Would cost nothing but benefit them if only a little in most cases. Perhaps their labels etc wouldn't like it if people routinely downloaded their stuff and paid them directly though.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  The problem is how credit cards work. the companies take a fee out of the "store" for every payment. This in turn means the payment has to be large enough to cover the fee and still allow profit. The sum of said payment is likely to end up being above most people's "no worries" threshold. Never mind that now the card info is in yet another potentially hackable database.
- Reedx 11y ago
  I wonder if that could have unintended consequences. Would people feel better about pirating if such a thing existed? It reminds me of the study in Freakonomics about day care centers and the problem of parents sometimes not picking up their kids on time. Which meant that employees would have to stay after closing. So they started charging parents a small fee for being late. The result was that parents were more late than ever, since it meant they no longer felt guilty. The fine removed the guilt associated with being late.

jwagenet 11y ago

It is interesting that the original marketing plan pitched micro-expansions that look a lot like the DLC of today. The expansions seem to serve as a marketing tool and collectors item rather than a cash grab, but I do wonder why there was no followthrough.

codezero 11y ago
Possibly because this posed the expansions as floppy disks costing $4.95 – by the time Diablo was released it was on CD, and presumably the art required for expansions was much larger than a CD, and CDs were not as cheap as a single floppy disk.
- codezero 11y ago
  correction: much larger than a floppy :)

caretStick 11y ago

Look at that waterfall Gantt chart! Marvel of management!

stygiansonic 11y ago
I wonder how well it was reflective of reality, i.e. did Music really take from month 2 until the end, and did the DRLG take only two months?

EdgarVerona 11y ago

Where they're talking about the small, randomized packs of items... it almost sounds like they were intending a CCG in video game form originally?

njharman 11y ago

1st page sounds like it's describing every/any rogue like. end goal/boss, random generated levels, lots of race / class combos, turn based gridded movement, increasing danger with depth, improving characters, magic treasures to improve player capabilities. Maybe I only played DII+, but that doesn't sound like much like diablo that I remember. esp turn based?

Fordrus 11y ago
Original Diablo was originally going to be turn based, but that design was scrapped later, replaced by the more action-oriented stuff. :)
- iolothebard 11y ago
  Baldur's Gate got it right. Best game since the Ultima Series IMO (well along with Bard's Tale, Wizardry, etc).
stuart78 11y ago
I read somewhere else about the move from turn based. If I recall correctly (sorry, no citation), the game was feeling a bit static, pretty much as you described. Somebody built a prototype live mode and that was when the game started feeling good.
Fizzadar 11y ago
So glad they dumped the turn based stuff! I've played through both I/II (prefer I) and it has some of these features. If I recall correctly the movement is somewhat grid based (but enables the player to move in more than 4 [8?] directions).

stuart78 11y ago

What is remarkable to me about Diablo is how little it has changed. Dungeons and environments are more sophisticated, but at its heart it remains the game described in that doc, just better.

wenbert 11y ago

I think the "randomness" is Diablo games is what makes it really addictive. I remember playing Diablo 1 and I couldn't stop playing because I couldn't wait for the next item to drop. Also, a low-end machine could run it! Diablo II, still the same thing - it was basically a better Diablo I. Diablo III on the other hand came out with an Auction House - which basically killed it. I played in the early parts of DIII, it was okay but not as fun as DI and DII. However, things are very different now. There have been lots of updates in Diablo III and Blizzard killed the Auction House - So can't say how it feels now. But I'm pretty sure the "randomness" is still there - which basically what drives the game.

taneq 11y ago
Intermittent reinforcement is the basis for a lot of behavioural addiction. Random loot games are basically just pretty pokies.

iolothebard 11y ago

Reminds me of Wizardry.

RussellDussel 11y ago

"No two games will ever be the same." Does anybody know how big the seed is for Diablo's RNG? I'm guessing it would have to be 1 value for the environment (to ensure saving/reloading into the same world) but would that 1 value determine all pseudo-randomness (AI aside) in the game (e.g. item drops and their stats).

mewmew 11y ago
The seed is a 32-bit signed integer [1]. Diablo 1 was using the Borland C/C++ pseudo-random number generator algorithm, with a multiplier of 0x15A4E35 and an increment of 1 [2,3]. A Go implementation of the PRNG used in Diablo 1 is located at [4]. So I guess there are 2^31-1 unique dungeons per level. Storing, rather than dynamically generating, these dungeons would require a huge amount of disk space. For each level, a 112x112 two-dimensional array of 32-bit integers is used to store the piece IDs which make up each tile (a tile consists of four pieces) [5], and a 40x40 two-dimensional array of 8-bit integers is used to store the tile IDs [6]. Thus, a total of 51776 bytes (roughly 50 KB) is required to store the contents of each generated dungeon. In total, more than 100 TB would be required to store the contents of each unique procedurally generated dungeon per level. The game contains 17 levels, so to store each unique dungeon for each level, a storage capacity of about 1.7 PB would be required. This might be possible today, but was definitely a challenge back in 1996. [1]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/engine.md#seed https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/engine.md... [2]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/functions/engine.md#engine_rand https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/functions/eng... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#Parameters_in_common_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#... [4]: https://github.com/sanctuary/d1/blob/master/rand/rand.go https://github.com/sanctuary/d1/blob/master/rand/rand.go [5]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.md#piece_id_map https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m... [6]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.md#tile_id_map https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m...