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Comment by zawerf | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was weird to credit someone as Diablo's "creator" since there must've been a large team given how long I remember the credits being. But indeed if you look at the wiki he seems to be the main programmer listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(video_game)

Some other team members such as Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer (co-designers of Diablo and Diablo II) went on to make Torchlight so many consider it to be Diablo's spiritual successor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torchlight

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I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code as a starting point for some features - all of the source files I looked at had David Brevik as the author, it was very straightforward C that one person could keep in their head.

> I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code

Don't leave us hanging, is there a hidden cow level in the Diablo 1 source?!

Ha - that would require some time travel plot twist, IIRC the cow level got added late in the D2 development as homage to the fans - I wrote the code for the Horadric Cube UI and the triggers to call the level/item changes (other programmers wrote the level stuff and item stuff separately). The gem that did nothing in the Battle.net chat was added just to spur rumors.

It's quite a serendipitous surprise to be able to meet the creators of one of the most played video games of all time (or at least me) on a random thread here.

What are you working on these days? Are you still in the games industry?

Programming, not games right now. Switched to mobile/server stuff so it might be difficult to change back.

Just so you know: my childhood and I love you.

Nooooooo! Why spoil the mystery of the chat gem!?

But also thanks for your work, still playing D2 :)

There's hope for a mystery, I only worked on D2 until 1.10 so they could have added a feature to the gem in a later version.

You tease :P

>> I was a programmer on Diablo 2 and used the Diablo 1 source code

> Don't leave us hanging,

Yes, don't leave us hanging!

Did you ever work on the problems of item duping on Closed Battle.Net?

I never understood why some games were "bugged": Certain characters would leave a game and find that their inventory would not save. This meant they could go back in the game, drop all their items, leave the game, and repeat this while the characters that did save could pick it up, creating copies of good items. The mule character could even join another game where it would save, stock up on good items and drop those.

I also never understood what would trigger a bugged game. We used IRC for announcing whenever a "run" turned out to be buggy for a single player. And I wrote an IRC bot for keeping track of item trades for some dudes who gave me several accounts full of characters full of really good items. I gave it to my brother who eventually made thousands selling those items.

> is there a hidden cow level in the Diablo 1 source?!

Diablo I has a ton of lost treasure hidden in diabdat.mpq. I recall that they shipped the game prematurely and simply dropped a large chunk of the storyline; full characters, dialogues, items, plot triggers. Some of that storyline ended up in Diablo II. I can't find a good archaeological overview online - perhaps this isn't as well-documented as I assumed.

If anyone feels nostalgic, there's a really good Diablo I mod called The Hell out there. I believe mods are written by disassembling the original game, extending this with your own, custom assembler code, and reassembling it. What a beautiful consequence of the simplicity of writing games in C.

OK, one of the item duping bugs was my fault. It took a while for one of the battle.net moderators to tease how to do it from one of the Chinese players using it to make a killing in real world cash. At some point we made the single player game that worked into a multiplayer game without changing anything else or reviewing the code for exploits - I did all the code for the interactive objects in the game and there was a trigger on objects that we should have made authoritative on the server ( and that million dollar lesson that I always learned to do nowadays in client server projects...) but wasn't for opening chests so people with modded clients we're able to open chests an infinite amount of times. I don't know about the bug you are describing - was it peer to peer or b.net multiplayer? Though it sounds like it would depend upon some server/client synchronization timing that was not working in all situations correctly, I didn't work on the network/server team, but we must have missed something like the other bug, where it made sense in single player but should have been thoroughly rethought.

A lot of the features we added to D2 were things the original creators wanted to do in D1 or even the D1 expansion, the D1 expansion was outsourced and they were really unhappy about the quality of the add-on and were determined to make things right with D2 and do the expansion in house as well. I finished my work early so I added the keyboard customization feature for fun. There's a making of book about Diablo 2 that interviews the guys who also started Blizzard North/made Diablo 1 so a lot of information about the process is in there.

Absolutely fascinating read. Thanks for sharing, strange to think that my computer has run your code countless times and contributed to years of enjoyment.

Usually a character leaving a game without having their inventory saved indicated a desync between the game server and the MCP servers. The game server was authoritative over your character for a specific game, while the MCP server was authoritative for your character between games. If the game server became disconnected from the MCP server for whatever reason, you could drop all of your items, leave the game, and the MCP server would still believe you had those items as the game server never saved your character's state with MCP.

This desynced state resulted in a ton of commonly known dupe methods in 1.11 and 1.12 where you forcefully disconnect the GS from MCP. The popular one was spamming bone wall (creating entities on the map), then spamming AoEs which interacted with said entities. The game server would have to loop over all entities for each AoE spell you cast to determine if the spell applied to it, which caused the single-threaded game server to spend too long in each iteration of the main game loop that caused it to desync from the MCP. Blizzard eventually "fixed" this by adding a check for how long the main game loop took to complete. If it hit a certain value, it would disconnect all players from the game to despawn entities and 'prevent' dupes.

There were more fun bugs between GS <-> MCP as well. For example for many patches there was a size limit on your character. If your character data was over a set size, the GS wouldn't even try saving your character to the MCP and would roll it back to the last valid save. If you joined a game near the limit, dropped an item, picked up an item that was larger in size (had more stats etc) which pushed you over the limit, then left the game, the server would revert your save back to when you had the original item.

D2 was full of esoteric exploits like these. It was made worse by some Blizzard developers going rogue and abusing the buggy state of the codebase to assist third party item sellers for personal profit.

You definitely have more expertise at your fingertips on the server side of D2 than I do!

I vaguely remember the strike team talking about those game server issues, it's been so long I totally forgot about it. We had the servers on racks in the data centers running Windows NT and I remember the very first problems were trying to get the game to support hundreds of games per server and finding all sorts of memory issues and network issues that caused the games to crash or run out of memory. I was unaware of the developers going rogue - that's wild.

But there was one guy in our office who got hauled away by the FBI because he was hosting a file sharing node using the office T1.

Just wanted to let you know I had countless hours of fun playing Diablo && Diablo 2. Thank you, those were great games!

Thank you for your work. I have spent thousands of hours playing your game, and even more than that trying to exploit it. Many of my dearest friends today are people I met 15 years ago while playing D2. The game has had a massive influence on my life.

You're welcome, there was a team of talented artists and programmers at Blizzard North and Blizzard South working together to make D2 so just my two cents.

I agree with your first line. I'm a coder (sometimes a game coder, even) and I'm all for giving credit where credit is due, but the main programmer on a game isn't the game's "creator". The software which renders the sprites and plays the sound effects is the game engine, and Brevik is undoubtedly the game engine creator, but the actual game itself is in the story and characters and game mechanics and challenges that the player experiences while playing the game. These are created by the game designers (both gameplay and artwork), and it's these people, if anyone, who are the "creators" of a game.

If you read the back story of Diablo, Brevik was definitely involved in the decisions one would typically attribute to one credited with creating the game, it was certainly a team effort so he definitely wasn’t the only creator. Keep in mind this was a different time and everyone was generally expected to wear more hats back then and blizzard north wasn’t that big of a company at that time regardless.

Particularly he had a lot of experience with the rogues which heavily inspired the original Diablo. Because of this he was initially opposed to making the game real-time as opposed to the traditional turn based, enemies only move when you do rogue style.

However as he tells the story he programmed real time movement in a few hours on a Friday night just to see what it would be like. When he tried it out for the first time and clicked the mouse; almost magically the warrior walked over and smashed a skeleton into a pile of bones.

He was convinced right then that real-time was the right choice.

That moment may have been the birth of the ARPG genre.

> That moment may have been the birth of the ARPG genre.

Gauntlet (1985) had real-time combat, and predated Diablo by at least a decade. If that isn't RPGish enough, Ultima Underworld came four years before Diablo.

Diablo definitely perfected the ARPG, though.

I'm also mindful of an amiga game I only played the demo of, "Shadowlands" from 1992:

http://hol.abime.net/1898

The first graphical game I played that leveraged the need for a lightsource similar to Moria. Not sure if you also needed food for your team.

Like a mix of rouge-likes and isometric/3d real-time with a pinch of "eye of the beholder".

Brevik was one of the founders Condor (Brevik was the president while the Schaefer brothers were vice-presidents) which later became Blizzard North when Blizzard bought them. The work on Diablo started before Blizzard bought them. He really was one of the "creators". IIRC they made the first Diablo game with a team of 15-20 people. In a team that small pretty much everyone is a "game designer" as in everyone wears many hats (especially the president of the company)

If you are interested you really should check the postmortem from the GDC a few years back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

In this case he really did invent the "Realtime-RPG" that made Diablo what it is.

In his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

They did not invent the 'realtime-rpg'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian...

Yes, you're right -- Diablo did a lot for the ARPG genre, but if you enjoy digging through the history of games there is a ton of interesting ARPG stuff from at least the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game

I came here thinking that "they again mistake game designers for game creators". And found out that this is actually by a main programmer of the game - I was pleasantly surprised.

From my experience programmers influence the way a product looks like, they are not merely "engine creators". They have too kill some "features", create new ones that designers didn't think of.

Programming is not a simple assembly line, where designers create the whole product and workers do it as they are told.

Oh, game programmers absolutely do affect the resulting game design! But when they do so, they're designing, not programming.

He's the main designer as well.

Personally I consider Path of Exile to be the best successor to Diablo I/II. If you were a fan of Diablo and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it.

I'd also say Path of Exile does the [PC] free-to-play thing right. They offer an extremely good product up front for free, they don't have any of the time counters or other F2P bullshit from mobile, and they don't put up arbitrary gates to any of the gameplay. They just sell cosmetic stuff for your in-game avatar. And the game is so good, and they know their fanbase so well, that they have apparently been doing well with that model considering the game has been around for a good while now and they keep putting out expansion packs and such.

Brevik does/has done consulting and currently does some sort of ambassador type role in China for Tencent's version of Path of Exile too.

Maybe games need the director concept from movies where one person can act as the face of the project. I think it helps everyone that group efforts are projected through single person who carries responsibility of the outcome.

I wasn't a huge fan of Torchlight but it's still such a solid game.

He didn't work on torchlight.

He did hellgate london (pile of shit) and Marvel Heroes (kinda a mmo successor to the marvel ultimate alliance games but deeply diablofied (didn't play much but it seemed .. ok))

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