During David Brevik’s GDC talk this week, he promised to release his original design pitch document for Diablo from 1994. Today he has delivered on said promise.
To read more about Brevik’s insights in the development of Diablo, read our coverage of his GDC talk.
Complete with coffee stains and 22 years of wrinkles, the PDF shows the original turn-based roguelike ideal for the gameplay and a Gantt chart predicting a rapid 12-month development time. It also has some nice doodles of goblins and demons, just in case the guys at Blizzard weren’t sure what kind of game they were reading about.
Brevik spoke earlier this week about the great pains he had taken to completely redesign the gameplay in just a few hours to make it real-time rather than turn-based. As if inventing the ARPG overnight wasn’t enough of an accomplishment, 20 years on from release the franchise is still going strong with Diablo III as one of Blizzard’s front runners on Battle.net.
The sequel, Diablo II, has been resurrected recently with Blizzard’s Classic Game Group applying patches to legacy titles to allow them to run on newer operating systems without third-party tools.