War Stories: Diablo’s loot lottery was almost a turn-based affair

Produced by Justin Wolfson, edited by Jeremy Smolik. Click here for transcript.

The year 1997 means a lot of things to me-it's not only the year I met my wife, but it's also the year wherein I sacrificed hundreds of evenings and nights to Diablo, the newly released grandpappy of loot lottery games. No game I'd played before had anything like Diablo's raw power to alter the flow of time-like, you look at the clock, see that it's a bit before midnight, you smash a couple of monsters, and then suddenly the sun is peeking through the window.

If the Lord of Terror could be said to have a father, it would be lead designer David Brevik. Much of what would become Diablo sprang from his mind, including the name itself (taken from Mount Diablo, situated close to where Brevik lived at the time of Diablo's inception). All those lost nights and bleary-eyed mornings should properly be laid at his feet-although as Brevik originally imagined it, Diablo would be more of a traditional Rogue-esque affair of turns and sub-turn actions. Diablo's signature real-time loot-spewing combat was somewhat of a late addition-and one Brevik himself opposed.

Smash and grab

As Brevik explains, it came down to a simple show of hands in the office at the end of a long week. Brevik and perhaps two or three others wanted to keep the game turn-based, and more than a dozen others voted to convert the title into a real-time game.

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