– David Brevik, Diablo II design lead
Diablo and its sequels have become game industry pillars, but the series started out much more humble. In a new and lengthy oral history at USGamer, a handful of the series’ key original developers, Erich and Max Schaefer and David Brevik, walk us through its early days.
Speaking about Diablo II, Brevik talks about the “loose” design process of the game; he follows up the thought above with more detail: “And we’d mock it up. ‘Yeah, that’s great. Doesn’t make any sense in the story, but what the hell, it’s kind of cool.’ … It was like, as we played the game, we designed the game for features that we felt would be interesting additions to what we’re doing, or make whatever it is that’s broken better.”
That style of game development resulted in a game that became an instant hit, but feature creep and uneven project management also led to pervasive crunch, as the Schaefer brothers discuss openly: “None of us had any management experience, and kind of still don’t. We did a lot of things wrong,” Erich says.
“Actually, some of the darker times was the end of Diablo II, just because of the growth of the company and the growth of the project to the point where everyone was having to work seven days a week, all waking hours, for almost a year.”
The full story contains a lot more details on the development of Diablo II. Gamasutra also has a postmortem written by Erich Schafer, originally published in 2000, when the memories recounted in the oral history were still fresh.