Table of Contents

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note: How to Stay Awhile and Listen More

Prologue: The Corpse Run

Act I: No Experience Necessary

Chapter 1: Silicon and String Bikinis

Chapter 2: Desktop Heroes

Chapter 3: Project Condor

Chapter 4: Superman Can’t Kick

Act II: Synapses and Snowstorms

Chapter 5: The Business Plan Du Jour

Chapter 6: The World of WarCraft

Act III: Descent into Hell

Chapter 7: The Game We’ll Make Someday

Chapter 8: The Velvet Hammer

Chapter 9: The Condor Test

Chapter 10: Spit, Bubblegum, and Floppy Disks

Chapter 11: Light and Dark

Chapter 12: Battles and Battle.net

Chapter 13: The Golden Times

Epilogue: Phenomenon

Side Quests

Side Quests: Chapter 1

Side Quests: Chapter 2

Side Quests: Chapter 3

Side Quests: Chapter 4

Side Quests: Chapter 5

Side Quests: Chapter 6

Side Quests: Chapter 7

Side Quests: Chapter 8

Side Quests: Chapter 9

Side Quests: Chapter 10

Side Quests: Chapter 11

Side Quests: Chapter 12

Side Quests: Chapter 13

Bonus Rounds

Bonus Round 1: Condor’s Lost Games

Bonus Round 2: “Rock Balls” - The Making of WarCraft II

Bonus Round 3: Cartridge Chronicles

Bonus Round 4: Interview with Brian Fargo, Founder of Interplay Productions, Inc.

Bonus Round 5: Interview with Feargus Urquhart, Producer at Interplay Productions

Bonus Round 6: Interview with Scott Coleman and Jay Cotton, Creators of Kali

Bonus Round 7: Interview with Efraim Wyeth and Mike Sigal, Founders of FM Waves

Bibliography

Credits

Notes and Citations

About the Author

About Digital Monument Press, LLC

Copyright

Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I - Copyright

Text copyright © 2013 David L. Craddock

Cover art copyright © 2013 Amie C. E. Kline

Photographs copyright © their respective owners

Editing services provided by Andrew Magrath, editor-in-chief at Digital Monument Press, LLC; Amie C. E. Kline, CEO, Digital Monument Press, LLC; and Monica Cesario, independent consultant.

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published in the United States of America.

ISBN-10: 0-9884099-0-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-9884099-0-3

Digital Monument Press, LLC

P.O. Box 36452

Canton, OH 44735

www.dm-press.com

info@dm-press.com

Acknowledgements

To all my contacts—and friends—who agreed to interviews for this book. Thank you for offering up your lives to me for scrutiny, and for creating games that have given me and millions of others so many hours of entertainment. I hope I did your story justice.

To Andrew, my friend and editor-in-chief at Digital Monument Press. Andrew was the first person to edit Stay Awhile and Listen, making him my first line of defense in not completely embarrassing myself when I delivered this book into your hands. (Consequently, please direct all complaints and corrections his way.)

To Monica, my friend and editor. Her attention to detail helped me turn the almost-right words into the right words, and her perspective as someone only passingly familiar with video games helped me make the story more accessible to all types of readers.

To my dad. I hope I made you proud.

To my mom. Mom stuck by my side through every career change, from wanting to write games for Blizzard Entertainment to wanting to write about Blizzard Entertainment. She did waver when I announced my intention to become a professional wrestler, but that was for the best.

Last but never least, to Amie Christine, my partner in business and in life. Without her support, encouragement, wisdom, patience, and sacrifices, this book would not exist. Thank you.

Author’s Note: How to Stay Awhile and Listen More

I accumulated a dragon’s horde of material over five years of research and interviews for Stay Awhile and Listen. So much material, in fact, that I risked cramming chapters so full of information that they became weighty and tangential. Rather than stuff each chapter to excess, I spread content across three sections: the main book, Side Quests, and Bonus Rounds.

Main Book

The meat and potatoes of Stay Awhile and Listen consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, and an epilogue. You can skip the Side Quests and Bonus Rounds if you like, but you’ll miss out on lots of behind-the-scenes stories and information if you do.

Side Quests

Side Quests collect supplementary material. As you read, you’ll come across “[SQ]” markers. Touch a marker and you’ll jump to an anecdote or bit of history relevant to the passage you just read in the main book. From there, tap “[Return to Chapter]” to zip right back to where you left off. Or, if you like, you can save the Side Quests for after you’ve finished the main book.

Side Quests come in seven varieties:

- Level 1: Game developers relate how they went from playing games to making games for a living. Readers who aspire to do the same should take these stories to heart.

- Byte-Sized History: Anecdotes from developers and historical overviews of studios, game hardware, and important figures in the games industry.

- Game Design 101: Lessons concerning play testing, storytelling, difficulty, pacing, how visuals and music enhance gameplay, and other areas of game design.

- Behind the Code: A peek behind the curtain to learn technical details such as implementing features in a game’s code and creating art for characters and game levels.

- Cutting Room Floor: Game content that was conceptualized or developed, but left unused.

- Sanctuary Speaks: We asked various online communities to submit their most memorable anecdotes related to games covered in Stay Awhile and Listen. Sanctuary Speaks (Sanctuary being the world where Diablo unfolds) shares those stories.

- Author’s Note: An introduction or explanation that provides a frame of reference for the content that follows the note.

Please note that many Side Quests include optional links to websites that provide more information on particular tangential subjects. Some e-reading devices lack the functionality to launch web browsers via links found within books, and may be unable to open these links.

Bonus Rounds

Bonus Rounds are extra chapters that expand on people, events, and games covered in the main book. You can read the Bonus Rounds whenever you choose, in any order you choose, but they are best absorbed after finishing the main book.

However you choose to tackle Stay Awhile and Listen, I hope you “stay awhile” and enjoy all that the book has to offer. Happy reading!

David L. Craddock

Prologue: The Corpse Run

A lot of the fun of Diablo was going back to get your stuff [after you died]. It was a challenge knowing, Oh, man, I can’t leave that item behind. It’s too good. I’ve got to go back and get it. It was something you had to be wary of. There was a lot of risk involved with Diablo.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Blizzard North

Max Schaefer moved the mouse cursor to the tile just in front of his character and clicked. On the screen, his Warrior took one step forward across a cavern bordered by lakes of bubbling lava. Just one. That was the best way to move in Diablo, Max knew. Better to inch forward than march brazenly into uncharted territory and wake up the demons lurking in the cave. Max had a good idea of the monsters that lurked on this level. His artists had created many of them.

He sent his cursor scouting ahead like a hunting dog. It landed on a treasure chest highlighted in gold. The chest sat just up ahead at the edge of the screen.

Max furrowed his brow, thinking. Maybe a shiny coat of mail would pop out of the box to replace his ravaged chainmail, or a new helmet, or gold. Maybe cracking the lid would trigger a burst of lightning that fried what little remained of his health. Or maybe the box held nothing at all. That was the thing about Diablo. You never knew what the game might spring on you.

Caught up in the moment, Max clicked the chest and the Warrior took off into uncharted territory.

What would happen was, you were in the cave levels, and you learned early to be very afraid of the acid-spitting dogs. You could see their splatters of acid on the ground before you saw the dogs themselves, and it would induce authentic fear in you.

You would either run away, or sit up in your chair, take notice, and put full effort into trying to beat them.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

A glob of acid sailed across the screen and smacked against his chest. His Warrior grimaced in pain. Max straightened, gripping his mouse. Two more wads of corrosive spit flew at him. Behind them, a pack of Poison Beasts, dog-like monsters that ran on all fours and hocked gobs of acidic slime at machine-gun speed, loped into view.

In a split second, Max made the choice to attack. He clicked from side to side, weaving his Warrior through a torrent of acid, but too many of the globs bit through his armor and deep into his flesh. Up ahead the pack dug in their heels and vomited an unending stream of poisonous discharge. Pushing forward to get within sword range was like shouldering through a tidal wave.

At last, he reached the front line of monsters and pounded the mouse button. Max’s sword, enchanted to swing twice as fast as a normal blade, flashed through the air again and again. In seconds, two had fallen. That was no good either. The beasts dissolved into a pool of bones, scabrous flesh, and acid that boiled at Max’s feet, chewing through the remains of his health globe. His muscles tensed. He couldn’t back off now; the dogs would volley acid at his back. Cursing, he mashed a key assigned to swig a healing flask—but he had no flasks left. He thought about turning around and seeking cover, but couldn’t. He was caught between the tidal wave and the acidic puddles at his feet.

Abruptly, his Warrior screamed. All of his gear—enchanted rings, dented chainmail, scuffed shield, and his coveted blade—burst from his body like prizes from a piñata and fountained over the ground. His avatar dropped limply, settling in a pool of blood. The monsters surrounded him, growling over the corpse as if chanting some dark ritual.

After staring slack-jawed at the screen for several moments, Max weighed his options. He could warp back up to town and pick his way back to his body in a bid to take back his spilled treasures. But the dogs would be there, waiting, and he was unarmed. That left two possibilities. He could either abandon his gear and start fresh or beg his friends for help hacking through the spitters. He thought of the haste-imbued sword and scowled.

You never wanted to ever ask anyone for help because it was embarrassing. So what you did was you tried to deal with it yourself first. You went past the dogs and tried to draw them away far enough that… Well, they were going to kill you. You didn’t have any armor on so they’d kill you faster than usual. But you wanted to [lure] them far enough away that, after dying, you could go and rescue your corpse.

The monsters had a long range of sight. They would come running at you, and they would kill you, and you hoped that you had moved them far enough away from your corpse.

Now, um, the problem was that if you accidentally moved the pack of acid-spitting dogs closer to the level entrance, you had all the spitting dogs around the entrance [when you returned].

-Max Schaefer

Max slumped in his chair. It was time to face facts: he either had to cut his losses and start from scratch, or ask the guys for help. His thoughts turned again to his sword lying abandoned on the dungeon floor. Sighing, he went to find his friends.

Almost all of us fell in love with the corpse run: you died somewhere, and there’s a pack of monsters, and you can’t get to your corpse to retrieve your gear. So we’d rally people in the office to help us get back to our corpse.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

One night, I actually logged in with Erich’s character, and I lost him down in the dungeon. It took me three hours to get my character and his character back up to town with all his stuff.

-Chris Root, artist, Blizzard North

Max entered Blizzard North’s common room and stood amid desks cluttered with action figures, smelly hockey jerseys, and sketches depicting acid-spitting dogs and other horrors that haunted Diablo’s depths. He explained the situation to his colleagues: his corpse lay prone, a hero-turned-chew-toy for a pack of slobbering hell hounds down in the caves. He wanted it back. More than that, this was a situation players would face when their game released. They needed a solution, stat.

Blizzard North’s small cadre artists and programmers leapt into action. Anyone not already playing the game—their game—saved their work, closed programs, and booted up Diablo. The game’s network mode only accommodated four players. The remaining three slots filled up quickly. Max’s friends’ names flashed on his screen moments before their characters materialized in town.

Chatter broke out around the room as the three saviors clicked their way across town, over a rickety bridge, and into a cave opening that led deep into the earth’s belly. A plan took shape: one hero would cast a resurrection spell on Max while the others acted as bait to the demonic hordes, drawing attention from Max while he snatched up his fallen implements.

Anyone not playing crowded around monitors to watch, share tips, and cheer the party on. Dave Brevik and Erich Schaefer, Blizzard North’s other founding fathers, came out of their offices and huddled around to watch. Fixing errors in code and animating monsters could wait a few minutes, or even a few hours. At Blizzard North, snatching buddies from the jaws of Hell was work, too.

We were just along for the ride. We knew we were making something pretty cool, but to be honest, we didn’t really know what that meant. What happens when you make a great game? I don’t think we even really knew.

-Max Schaefer

We were psyched. I ended up working ridiculous amounts of hours. I was living the dream. I was making the game that I wanted on the platform I wanted, with the funding to make the game.

We were doing everything we wanted to do. Those were the golden times.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

Act I: No Experience Necessary

Chapter 1: Silicon and String Bikinis

I knew in high school that I wanted to make games. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I mean, almost anything else in my life wasn’t as important as anything that had to do with games or computers, which kind of hurt me in some ways and helped me in others.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

David Brevik fell in with the other boys clomping down the stairs to the basement. Gathering around a table, they unloaded pencils; colored dice, some with as many as twenty sides; character sheets describing the brainy and sturdy heroes each youth controlled; and tomes detailing carnivorous demons, magic spells, razor-sharp swords and axes.

One of the boys took his place at the head of the table, shuffled through his papers, and began to speak. With every word, the modern world melted away. The basement, already dimly lit, faded into a dank and moldy dungeon lined with cells bursting with treasure. The laundry detergent, spare batteries, and other knick-knacks cluttering the shelves became shrunken heads and magical potions.

The dungeon master, the storyteller in charge of moving the band of heroes along their quest, nodded to David. Reaching across the table, David took up a pair of dice, gave them a rattle, and sent them clicking across the table. The roll was a good one, the dungeon master said, and described the huge stone doors of the tomb opening wide.

David had homework to do and boxes to pack, but those were earthly concerns. Right now, he had a tomb to plunder.

I was a big Dungeons & Dragons fan. My friends and I would stay up many late nights. This is right around the time of Pac-Man, Asteroids. We’d play those games, or we’d play D&D—that’s pretty much all we’d do. We’d paint lead figures and stuff like that. I have fond memories of those times.

-David Brevik

Born on February 14, 1968, in Madison, Wisconsin, David Brevik spent as much time in fictional worlds as possible. After nights spent raiding dungeons, he and his friends would drag themselves out of sleeping bags on weekend afternoons and pedal down to the local pizza parlor or Blimpie sub shop to feed quarters to coin-op video games. A few of his friends even owned their own pinball machines, the perfect way to keep the games going once they ran out of quarters.

Blasting alien invaders and space rocks to smithereens lasted only as long as David’s supply of quarters. Back at home, larger worlds beckoned. David’s father, Colin Brevik, a salesman for U.S. Leasing, often brought home new gadgets for his kids to check out. One day, he brought the Atari Video Computer System, a black box that could play hundreds of different games simply by swapping out cartridges. David’s favorite was Adventure, a maze game where players guided a colored square through dungeons in search of a magical chalice.

The fun continued at school. One of David’s teachers owned an Apple II Plus, a home computer compact enough to fit on a desk, and kept it in the classroom for the kids to use. After waiting patiently for his turn, David sat down at the computer, slid a floppy disk labeled The Wizard and the Princess into the disk drive, and watched in amazement as a world of fairy-tale characters and settings sprung up on the monochrome screen. The graphics were in black and green, but they were still much more sophisticated than the Atari’s simple, square-shaped visuals.

David wished he never had to tear himself away from the keyboard. Through his work, Colin Brevik was able to grant his son’s wish. One afternoon in the fall of 1979, Colin brought home an Apple II Plus, his latest leasing charge. From the moment David switched on the screen and the disk drives began to purr, the Atari was forgotten. [SQ1]

No hard drive, 64K of RAM. It didn’t even have upper and lowercase on the keyboard; we didn’t get that until the Apple IIe. It had two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives, which was a luxury, and a monochrome green-screen monitor.

That was state of the art, baby.

-David Brevik

It kind of felt like as soon as the Apple II [Plus] came out, he no longer wanted to go outside and play. He wanted to stay inside and play video games.

-Peter “Pete” Brevik, programmer, Condor [SQ2]

The sleek new machine also came outfitted with a modem. Using a modem, he could dial into bulletin board systems, virtual message boards where users could swap software.

I’d sit at home and play a lot of games. I had a 300 baud modem, and I’d call up BBSes and download hacked versions of games. That was very common. My friends would have shoeboxes full of games on floppy disks and we’d swap them.

I bought some games, too, but I couldn’t afford everything. I remember one of my favorite games I bought early in that time was Wizardry. I bought Ultima I through IV.

-David Brevik

Eventually, David developed an interest in games that went deeper than just playing them. He wondered what made the computer draw characters and monsters on the screen, and how it processed the commands he entered using his keyboard.

I think that [Dad bringing home an Apple II] was really the catalyst for me growing as a programmer. Around that time you could buy magazines like Apple inCider that published articles about how to make games. It would have the code for a complete game inside these magazines.

So I would spend hours and hours typing code, and I didn’t even know how to type. I was hunting and pecking.

-David Brevik

David glanced at the issue of Apple inCider spread across his lap, typed in the last line of code, pressed a key to run the program, sucked in a breath—and let out a string of curses when error messages flooded the screen. Either he’d made a typo, or the magazine editors had messed up while filling their pages with code. Painstakingly he read back through the hundreds of lines he’d pecked in.

At first, his corrections were timid. There was no reference manual built into the program that explained how to straighten out mangled code. He had to figure out what had gone wrong based on lines of code that did work. With each logic error and typo he smoothed out, his comprehension grew.

He made one final adjustment, ran the program, and sat back in his chair as the game bloomed on his screen, in awe of what he’d done. His mind and fingers tingled. He’d seen countless games run before. Starting one was as simple as inserting a disk and flipping the power switch. But those games had been written by other people. He had made this one, assembled it line by line like a model car that had started out as a pile of wood and wheels and screws.

Over time, David’s experiments grew bolder. Sometimes the editors of InCider printed smaller routines that manifested a feature such as making the computer beep in a set musical rhythm or draw colored lines on the screen in preset configurations. He manipulated the commands to rearrange the rudimentary musical patterns and graphics, twisting and bending the code to rework the games provided in the magazine.

By the time David entered high school, he was writing small games from scratch while his peers labored over the simplest commands and statements. [SQ3]

When I was a freshman in high school, I spent a long time making a BMX bicycle game. It used the paddle available for the Apple II. The bike would come across the screen, go down hills, go over jumps. You’d press the button to bunny hop, and you had to make jumps and stuff to get to the end. The game could scroll, too. I sent that off to be published in Apple inCider.

So I knew at the time that this was a passion: I wanted to make games and I wanted to put them out there. I was very serious about it even at a young age.

-David Brevik

Not even programming could disrupt David’s gaming sessions. At nightfall, his gang of friends would seize control of the closest basement or rec room, spread out their Dungeons & Dragons materials, and gleefully re-enter fantasy land. Every few months, he underwent more dramatic scene changes. His father, able to lease anything from computers to trains, flew up the corporate ladder.

My parents met at the University of Wisconsin in a little suburb right outside of Madison. We only lived there for a very short time. We moved around a lot so I didn’t really grow up in one particular place. I never went to the same school more than two years in my entire life, until college.

We lived in Ohio, we lived in Illinois, we lived in Georgia, and then we moved a couple times within those states as well.

-David Brevik

David’s friendships were about as solid as the dungeons he and his fifth grade buddies had sketched for their Dungeons & Dragons games. Every new city meant leaving behind friends and swimming against the current of established friendships and cliques at a new school.

During David’s sophomore year of high school, Colin transplanted his family to Georgia. This time, he promised, would be different. Permanent. David’s mother meticulously designed the dream home where her family would finally plant roots: cathedral ceilings, second-floor mezzanine that looked out over the living room and a cozy fireplace, kitchen to one side where stools bordered an island where the kids could spread out their homework, and a quaint little breakfast nook that offered a view of the pool in the backyard.

A few months after the move, the family released a collective breath. They had actually unpacked all of their boxes. For the first time, the Brevik clan felt settled.

Ten months later, Colin called the kids into the living room. They were moving. Again.

My mom’s still crying about that one.

-David Brevik

Resigned, David asked his dad where they were off to next. Colin’s reply stole his breath. California. Sand and surf, palm trees, string bikinis, flip flops, tech companies, sports cars—and video games.

When the family meeting adjourned, David shot upstairs, burst into his bedroom, and cheerfully commenced tearing down and boxing up his best friend.

When I invested in games and programming, those things stayed the same in my life. They were kind of an anchor. They were consistent. No matter where I ended up, people played the games that I was playing. No matter where I went, the computer was with me. I could grow as a person and have something consistent as opposed to my friends who were always swapping.

My school, my house—all those things were always swapping. But games and computers allowed me to meet people with similar interests at each new place.

-David Brevik

In the summer of 1984, sixteen-year-old David and his family abandoned their Georgia dream home and trekked across the country to Danville, California. The small town was nestled near the base of Mount Diablo, a 3,864-feet-high landmark that would one day make a significant impact on David’s life.

The idea for Diablo came about when I was in high school. I lived at the base of Mount Diablo. That’s where I got the name from.

I didn’t know any Spanish when I came to the Bay Area. Then I moved out here and took a Spanish class in high school, and one day I was like, “‘Diablo’ means ‘devil’. That’s awesome!”

-David Brevik

That fall, David entered his junior year at Monte Vista High School. Once again, he found his computer skills far ahead of those of his classmates, and even his programming instructor. She asked him to take on the role of co-teacher as he entered his senior year. David made the rounds from student to student, alternating between teaching and guiding individual students as they built projects demonstrating concepts learned during lessons. All the while, he continued playing and writing games, filing away features he liked for usage in his Diablo game.

In between marathon sessions of playing and programming, David noticed specimens rarely seen around the computer lab. Girls, it seemed to him, were more interested in guys who preferred footballs over machines. Emerging from the darkness of the computer cave, he took stock of his social skills and decided to try his hand at sports. He had always loved sports, and, in the days before the Apple II had appeared in his living room, had been known to toss the pigskin around with his younger brother, Pete.

As talented as he was with computers, David was awkward and clumsy on the field. There was also another problem no amount of practice could smooth out. He was blind in his right eye.

I was born this way. There was no accident or anything like that. I had a small bit of sight when I was young. They knew that this was a problem for me. I’d go to the eye doctor and look at the charts and close my right eye, and he’d say, “Read the letters,” and I’d say, “Um, what? Who turned out the lights?”

I am Mr. No-Depth Perception. That was a joke on Saturday Night Live, but that really is me. I’d go to pour wine into a glass, and I’ve got to push the bottle until it hits the glass: “Oh, there it is.” So I get a lot of sense of depth from kind of moving my head and things like that. I can judge things pretty well, but it ruined my sports career. It’s really hard to tell how far away that basket is!

Looking back on it now I realize how much of a handicap it was, but at the time it was never really an excuse. I was cursed with both terrible athletic ability and no depth perception. That makes a winning combination of “not a sports guy.” My talents lay somewhere else.

It was the genetic pool trying to tell me, “Damn it, that’s not the direction you’re going to be heading.”

-David Brevik

Shortly before graduation, David decided to attend college, but not to learn a trade. He was already working for Pacific Bell learning how to write the code that made modems speak to one another over telephone lines in their crackling language, and he already knew how to make games. Starting his first semester at California State University, Chico, in 1986, he was more interested in seeking out the sort of education not available in the course catalog.

The only reason I went to college, probably the only benefit, was it [gave me time] to grow facial hair so people would take me seriously. I became more of a man. I went to college when I was 18, but I looked like I was 12. I mean, I was as thin as a rail, lanky, goofy, short haircut. I had no life experience. I was a dorky little geek.

I learned how to drink, and how to have a girlfriend, all of these things that were very important. There were so many educational things I learned very little about, especially things that applied to what I do.

-David Brevik

Not even his growing social circle could keep David away from his passion. Saving the parties for nights and weekends, he treated the computer lab like a bunker, holing up for hours and dialing into other universities connected to the fledgling network that would one day blossom into the Internet. David’s explorations through the growing snarl of online tubes led him to the “roguelike,” a type of game created by Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy, programmers who had studied at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Derived from Wichman’s and Toy’s seminal Rogue game, roguelikes drew dungeons made out of text characters like “-“, “#”, and “!”. [SQ4] Players guided an adventurer, represented on the screen by an “@” sign, through dungeons and battled monsters represented by capital letters. The text-based graphics were crude, but the emerging genre’s appeal lay in its random elements. By following a complex series of algorithms, roguelikes drew new levels every time the player started a new game, offering endless appeal. The randomness also extended to items. Like a Vegas slot machine, some defeated monsters offered nothing. But every so often, they coughed up a weapon, a potion, or a spell that made characters stronger.

As much as David enjoyed fraternizing with his cool-crowd friends and spending time with his new girlfriend, Wendy Shimada, he gave himself willingly to his newfound addiction to roguelikes. Two of his favorites were Moria and Angband, games based on settings and characters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books. In each game, players created a character and started in a town where they could stock up on supplies before descending into the dungeon. Each level took players deeper beneath the earth, and the goal was to hack, slash, and spell-cast all the way down to the lowest level where the final boss waited. The goal was easier said than done. Each character had only a single life. If the character died, the game erased their progress forever.

David wasn’t alone in his addiction. Every day he sat beside other students in computer labs as dark and silent as the crypts they explored—silent except for the click-clack of computer keys, the hum of fans, and the eerie glow of screens reflected off spectacles. By the time he finished at Chico State in 1991, he knew exactly what type of game Diablo had to be.

Right out of college, I wanted to make games. My parents weren’t super-pleased with this decision, but they were fairly supportive. They were hoping I would work for IBM or someplace like that, especially because games weren’t the most secure business in the world. This was the [Sega] Genesis and Super Nintendo era.

So I said to my parents, “Well, how about I try making games for a little bit? If it doesn’t work out, I’ll try making your boring-ass spreadsheet programs or something.”

-David Brevik

David’s parents weren’t the only ones nervous about his interest in working in an industry that barely existed. A few months after finishing up at school, he and Wendy married and moved in with his new in-laws until they could afford their own place. Hoping to get a job making games, David enlisted the help of a recruiter who came back to him with an offer that seemed off the mark. A clip art company called FM Waves needed a programmer.

David rolled his eyes. He had no interest in writing graphic design programs. Then the recruiter clarified: the clip art company was transitioning to video game development and needed a programmer to write code for their first game.

In a small-world situation, there were two guys who worked at the clip art company, Max and Erich Schaefer. That’s where we met. I was a programmer; they were artists.

-David Brevik [SQ5]

Chapter 2: Desktop Heroes

We definitely played Dungeons & Dragons. This was during my young teen years back in the ’70s and ’80s. At the time I never considered it as a career. It didn’t even enter my mind.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

I would say our D&D games pretty closely mirrored what Diablo was like. We weren’t too focused on lore or rules or anything. It was all about killing monsters and finding good stuff.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

Deep beneath Southern California, an ancient evil slumbered. The sleepy neighborhood, its streets lined with quaint ranch houses, remained oblivious to the threat. Fourteen-year-old Erich Schaefer, the architect of that evil, leaned over his graph paper and drew a line to close off a large rectangle. That was the treasure chamber, the heart of a dungeon riddled with demons, traps, secret passageways, and treasure. All Erich needed now was a party of adventurers to go in after the spoils.

He glanced out the window. The sun was setting, which meant the other boys—including his little brother, Max—would come in soon. Normally, Erich bummed his way around the beach alongside them. Not tonight. Tonight he wanted to finish his dungeon of death traps before the other guys got home. Once they cooled off and gathered ‘round, he would pass around their character sheets and invite them to tour his tomb of horrors.

Starting their quest would not take long. Erich had kept the story for his campaign nice and lean: enter the tomb, fight monsters, and load up on anything that glittered. It was simple, heavy on action, and fun—just the way the Schaefer boys liked it.

Born eighteen months apart in New Mexico in 1965 and 1966, respectively, Erich and Max took part in hobbies common between brothers: playing sports and trading knuckle sandwiches.

Growing up, we had a close but often adversarial and violent relationship. We fought all the time. But we were pretty close, even though we were contentious. We often did the same things, had the same friends, played the same sports.

-Erich Schaefer

I was the younger brother, so I was always picked on no matter what we were doing, and kids are unfailingly cruel, so it would often become Erich’s point to enrage me—which I would oblige, of course. I should point out: he was always a foot and a half taller than me, and outweighed me by about 50 pounds growing up.

That’s not really the case anymore. Once we got into high school, everything kind of evened out.

-Max Schaefer

By the time Erich was four, the family had moved from New Mexico, to San Diego, and circled back to New Mexico. The transplantable nature of his and Max’s shared pastimes made it easy for the brothers to meet new friends. Just before Max started kindergarten, their father took a job at RAND Corporation, a think-tank devoted to exploring projects and picking through data for the U.S. Armed Forces. Leaving New Mexico, the Schaefers settled in the Pacific Palisades, a small Los Angeles suburb on the coast. Starting kindergarten that fall, Max made a new friend, Kenny Williams, who lived just a few blocks away and spent every spare minute palling around with the Schaefer brothers.

Almost every day we were outside playing sports. And we lived right near the beach, so it was sort of a surfer vibe in the town at the time, and our summers were consumed with going to the beach.

-Max Schaefer

Summers were the best. No homework, no sitting behind a desk for seven hours a day. Just three solid months of sports, sun, and goofing off. Every morning, Max and Erich rolled out of bed, wolfed down breakfast, and charged outside to round up friends. Activities were rarely planned. If backyard football sounded fun, they would break off into teams and start tackling. Maybe later they’d hop on skateboards or grab a boogie board and catch a wave. When something came up, it came up.

Other than schoolwork and sunset, only the rainy season could keep the Schaefer brothers housebound. Every fall through early spring, rain clouds played tug of war with the sun, battling for control over the climate. To keep their boys from releasing pent-up energy on the furniture and themselves during rainy days, their parents invested in a new technology.

My parents brought home this weird dedicated console Pong game. That’s the first I really remember. All it played was Pong.

-Erich Schaefer

Well, we didn’t have Pong. It was a Pong imitator. I’d say we were right at the beginning of people playing video games at home.

-Max Schaefer [SQ1]

Even for its time, the table tennis game was simplistic. By twisting knobs on paddles, two players moved rectangular bats up and down on the screen to bat a square ball back and forth. To Max and Erich, the simplistic table tennis game was a marvel. Their friends agreed. Virtual table tennis made the Schaefers’ living room an even more popular hangout spot than the beach. When they needed a break from the living room, the gang hopped on skateboards and spent hours in the cool darkness of the video arcade to get their video game fix.

Eventually, the Pong knockoff wore thin. The threat of fratricide once again loomed large, and the Schaefers intervened.

We were also fairly early adopters of the home computer. I think an Apple II Plus was the first computer we ever had. We were probably the first kids on the block with one. We bought some games, and we copied a bunch. We didn’t even think about things like piracy. We were 12.

Our friends had a whole stack of disks, and we’d just gotten a second disk drive on our machine and thought we were hot stuff because of that. That made copying games very easy, so we just copied whatever our friends had and they copied whatever we had.

-Max Schaefer

I got much deeper into gaming when our parents brought home an Apple II computer. That’s when I played a lot of Wizardry and the first Ultimas and stuff like that. I think they thought it was weird that I spent so much time with games, but they didn’t discourage it.

-Erich Schaefer

The breadth of options and action available in computer games amazed Erich. In Wizardry, players controlled a party of six characters made up of combinations of races and classes such as human fighter and elven priest. Lore and dialogue tended to be poorly written and perfunctory—a way to transition players from one brawl to the next. That was fine by Erich. Bashing skulls with bigger and better weapons was his favorite part of the game.

On that, Max agreed with his brother: whether hacking and slashing through a fantasy world or drifting through the starry fields of space, action always trumped slow, plodding stories. That preference spilled over into another passion.

I remember getting the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set probably in ’77 or ’78, maybe as late as ’79. My father bought it and brought it along on a vacation just as something for the kids to do.

I’m not sure we played it much on that trip, but I read all the instructions and later sought out the Advanced set and any other rule books I could find.

-Erich Schaefer

Played with pen and paper instead of buttons and joysticks, Dungeons & Dragons let players design fantastical personalities from scratch. Erich found some amusement in controlling brainy wizards and burly fighters, but what he enjoyed most was playing the role of dungeon master, the architect behind campaigns who designed adventures and drew elaborate dungeons for players to brave.

I actually spent more time on my own just making maps and reading the books. Most of my friends just weren’t all that interested. They would be willing to play a little bit, but the group I ran around with wasn’t that big into D&D.

But I didn’t mind. I just liked the rules, making maps, and designing campaigns, even when I was a little kid.

-Erich Schaefer

When Max and their friends did sit down to play, Erich’s rip-roaring campaigns always entertained. Just like the video games he enjoyed, his D&D campaigns kept stories short and sweet: there’s a temple filled with monsters and treasure, so go loot it. Immediately after creating their characters, Erich whisked his friends into desecrated crypts and crawls, where they happily cracked skulls and collected riches.

Although their parents didn’t mind their boys playing games and running the beach from dawn until dusk, they gently guided the boys toward bigger concerns as they neared high school graduation.

It’s kind of strange: we didn’t have any particular main creative focus. We were particularly poor artists. My dad was a physicist, and my mother was in real estate, so there wasn’t a lot of artistic stuff going on. We were math and science students for the most part.

-Max Schaefer

Wracking his brain to decide on a college major, Erich gave no thought to Dungeons & Dragons or his favorite video games. Those were fun hobbies, but people didn’t get paid to do that stuff. He did, however, take pleasure in the mathematics involved in creating D&D settings: the geometry and construction of maps, the number crunching involved in determining statistics and the outcome of battles. He also enjoyed manipulating data on computers. Eyeing computer programming, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh in 1984.

Soon after starting, Erich decided computer science wasn’t for him.

The computer science degree at Carnegie Mellon was called Applied Mathematics. Then I got kicked out of Carnegie Mellon because my grades were really low, and ended up floating around to a bunch of places, ended up at San Francisco State. I was in the film program there. That was half because I loved movies and half because it looked like an easy way to get a degree.

I was not a fan of school of any kind, but I did like just living the college life with no job. Until my parents cut me off.

-Erich Schaefer

After five and a half years wandering from one major to the next, Erich dropped out of school and returned home to the Bay Area, where his parents had relocated, and contemplated what to do next.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Max decided to pursue a degree in physics. He enrolled at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1984, one year after Erich started classes in Pittsburgh, and quickly decided to shift his focus.

I had sort of an epiphany one night about a semester in that I was just doing way too much math and way too many physics problems. It was kind of frustrating that I could barely draw my name, much less something artistic.

So I made a switch in my major to environmental design, just to cultivate the creative side of my brain a little bit, because I felt like it was sort of shriveling, and I was going crazy juggling numbers.

-Max Schaefer

Environmental design was more Max’s speed. He didn’t fancy himself a stellar artist when it came to anatomy, but he didn’t need to draw people. Instead, he composed detailed architectural drafts, all by hand. The work clicked with him and offered a more gratifying balance of mathematics and creativity. When he wasn’t drafting, he and his college buddies hiked, climbed, and skied their way around Boulder’s snowy slopes.

Four and a half years later in December 1988, Max returned home to the Bay Area sporting a college degree. By that time, Erich had returned too. Despite embarking on two different paths, the brothers remained on the same wavelength. Max held a college degree and a newfound realization that he enjoyed drafting blueprints, but for college credit, not a career. Like Erich, he had no idea what he wanted to do next. A few weeks later, Santa deposited their answer underneath their Christmas tree.

I was living in my mom’s basement after college, and then Max graduated from college. His graduation present was a Macintosh computer.

-Erich Schaefer

I was hoping for a car. I was thinking, Cool, I’m going to graduate, and my parents will buy me a car. That will be awesome. I unwrapped a computer, and that was pretty awesome, too.

-Max Schaefer

We somehow got copies of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator back when they were just getting started. In fact, they were black-and-white programs back then, they were so old. But I loved them so we decided to learn them.

I was sort of computer literate and I would do part-time jobs for my parents’ friends. My mom worked real estate, so I did a lot of stuff with them. My dad worked in science. I remember going after school and plotting out stuff, doing graphic stuff for their presentations [at my dad’s office]. This was even during high school.

-Erich Schaefer

After a bit of extra experimentation on Max’s new computer, the brothers hit on an idea. They had the computer, the software, and a burgeoning skill set. Why not start a desktop publishing business? The idea resonated. To get started, Max and Erich Schaefer reached out to a mutual friend, Craig Sarachene, who shared the Schaefers’ talent for graphic design.

Pooling their resources, the trio leased a cramped apartment in San Francisco and dubbed their start-up Desktop Heroes. Hitting up their parents for contacts who might need business materials, they set to work making banners, business cards, and menus. What they knew how to make, they cranked out. What they didn’t, they tinkered with until the printer spit out materials that looked professional.

There was only one bottleneck: three artists sharing one computer. Nobody seemed to mind. While one guy occupied the Mac, the others moseyed over to the park across the street, kicked back with friends who had access to beer and weed, or hit the pavement in search of more work.

On his own time, Erich commandeered the Macintosh to try his hand at a new hobby. He browsed texts at bookstores and strung chunks of code together until he finished programming his masterpiece: Death Balls, a game where players shot at balls that bounced around the screen. Despite his satisfaction with the end result, Erich was comfortable enough in his own skin to admit that he would never be a great programmer. What he had really enjoyed was designing the game, a process that recalled fond memories of mapping out dungeons on graph paper and arranging them into action-packed Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. In an ideal world, he would design games and leave programming to someone better suited to the task.

After several hard months of turning over every rock to bring in work, Desktop Heroes struck gold when Max received an interview at a small company called FM Waves, a small company that generated graphics called clip art that users could paste into documents like pamphlets and menus.

Max was introduced to us by a woman named Karen Weiss, who was our marketing director. They [Max and Karen] were good friends. This was around the time when the company outstripped my and Ef’s [FM Waves co-founder Efraim Wyeth] ability to do the production work ourselves, so we brought Max in.

-Mike Sigal, co-founder, FM Waves

Max arrived at the interview location and immediately entertained second thoughts.

The business was located in a scary alley in San Francisco called Derby Alley. [Efraim Wyeth’s] father owned David’s Deli and Hotel on Geary Street in San Francisco, and this was sort of an extra building in back.

The alley frequently featured people shooting up various drugs, and on the corner was a “massage parlor.”

-Max Schaefer

Once inside, Max found a lot to like about his new employers, two guys in their mid-twenties who wanted to produce clip art in a wide array of themes that appealed to numerous industries. FM Waves employed only ten people, including Ef and Mike. The cramped setting, high workload, and small team fostered an intimate environment where something exciting was always happening.

FM Waves was making clip art at the time, and I was hired to make borders for people to put on their brochures. It was basically sitting at the computer, using Adobe Illustrator, and making border, after border, after border.

They had a bunch of other work they were putting together, too. Eventually my brother got hired on as well, and our friend Craig also spent a little time there.

-Max Schaefer

Desktop Heroes was no more, but that didn’t bother the Schaefers. They were living the dream: an apartment of their own, cash to pay bills and buy booze, and a job that let them flex their creative muscles. Shortly after the Schaefers came aboard full time, Efraim and Mike gave them the chance to stretch their creativity even further.

Along the way, I had an opportunity to have a discussion with the head of Atari, Jack Tramiel. It turns out that the head of Atari was from the same town in Poland as my father. They were chatting it up, and I was introduced. Jack Tramiel said, “Can you make games?” I said, “Sure!” But I had no idea what would be involved.

He said, “Great. Show up on Monday with some proposals.” So I stayed up for about 72 hours and came up with about 12 game ideas. I drew up some proposals, went in and spoke with the Tramiel family, and they picked one, which was The Emancipation of Gordo 106: The Mutated Lab Monkey.

-Efraim “Ef” Wyeth, co-founder, FM Waves

The owner said, “Hey, you’ve got to make art for this video game.” And I had no clue what that meant. So we had to make it all up from scratch.

At the same time the owner hired David Brevik, a programmer right out of college who was interested in making games. So it was David Brevik, Max, and me making this game called Gordo 106.

-Erich Schaefer [SQ2]

Chapter 3: Project Condor

Gordo 106 was fun. It came out right at the end of the Lynx cycle, which wasn’t very long anyway. There was probably a very limited amount of people who played or even saw this thing. But the three of us, Max, and Dave, and I, we all knew that video games were the thing for us. It was fun, we could do it, and [we realized] that was what we should pursue.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

When we started it [Condor], I was in a little one-bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale. Max and Erich came over and said, “Yeah, we’ve got a couple computers, got a couple thousand dollars. Let’s make a company.” I said, “Okay. Sounds good. I don’t know if I have that much money, but I’ve got a computer, too.” We were on our way.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

Cages lined the brightly lit corridors of N. Human Labs. Animals screamed and thrashed in each cell. Scientists, tufts of white hair sticking up from either side of their bald pates like horns, paid them no mind. They marched up and down the corridors like soldiers on patrol, eyes peeled for the monkey that had escaped cage number 106. At the far end of the lab, Gordo, the monkey of the hour, observed his surroundings. He couldn’t remember how he’d come to the lab. What he did remember was that the scientists had fed him a special banana and that eating it had suddenly made picking the lock on his cage as simple as scratching his head.

Now he stood, red ball cap fit snugly over his head, trying to decide on the best way to reach his imprisoned friends. He could leap from filing cabinets, dash under operating tables, swing from the ceiling lights, and scale the pipes along the walls. Before Gordo could perform any fancy acrobatics, he needed to pull off an even trickier maneuver. He needed to take his first step.

We wanted to have a character that had a unique movement, something you didn’t see in most of the horizontal scrolling games. As a lifelong Spider-Man fanatic, the idea of Spider-Man swinging had an influence on the idea of playing [the game] as a swinging monkey, just going through that motion.

It was really in Dave’s, Max’s, and Erich’s hands to figure out how to make that happen.

-Ef Wyeth, co-founder, FM Waves

In another laboratory of sorts, David Brevik sat at his computer. Ef Wyeth and Mike Sigal, his bosses at FM Waves, and Max and Erich Schaefer, his teammates on Gordo 106, huddled around him, watching anxiously. Reaching forward, Dave tapped an arrow key.

Given that what we’d produced thus far was libraries of images with no coding involved, I remember going into the office where David was working and seeing the first sprites animated on the screen. That felt incredible.

I remember playing the game on the Lynx, and I sucked at it. But it was still just awesome to see the whole thing come to life.

-Mike Sigal, co-founder, FM Waves

I think Dave was born to make games and had been messing around with making games from the time he could manipulate a computer. He came in and certainly knew a lot more about the process and how to produce art. He was a terrible artist, but he at least knew, technically, how to do it.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

Ef and Mike knew they had lucked out in finding Dave Brevik. Dave had no formal experience writing games, but he had made plenty on his own time and knew how to import art into the game and make characters run and jump around the screen—vital skills that programmers unfamiliar with game development would have needed weeks to learn.

With Dave handling the code, Max and Erich were free to focus on creating artwork. Their initial trepidation at creating art assets for a video game had vanished after taking stock of their skills. Mustering his skill in environmental design, Max stitched together laboratory levels that teemed with life. Meters flashed and flickered, liquid gurgled through test tubes, and flames danced over Bunsen burners. Erich focused more on bringing characters to life. Depending on whether Gordo stood in place or swung into action, his tail would bunch up or flow behind him. Scientists marched with arms outstretched and hands curled into claws.

One by one, the Schaefers fed Dave the assets they created and watched as his code brought them to life. Seeing Gordo 106 evolve with each new line of code and colorful bunch of pixels filled the group with confidence.

I loved making the art, trying to get as much bang for the buck as I could out of 16 pixels and 8 colors, and I liked the puzzle aspect of reverse-engineering the way games were made.

Game development also appealed to me because it was a collaborative, creative effort that I recognized could be popular and lucrative without the immense scale of film making, my favorite major in college.

Of course, in those days, “lucrative” mostly meant beer money.

-Erich Schaefer

We started to put together this game, and it was obviously fun, and it was obviously competitive. You could look at what we were doing, and look at what other people were doing, and say, “Yeah, we can actually do this.”

-Max Schaefer

While Gordo 106 continued to come together, FM Waves hit patches of financial turbulence that threatened to break the team apart.

Our expenditures exceeded our revenues. Like most start-ups, we were funding as we went. There was money we were expecting to get from Atari, and we discovered later that that was not uncommon with Atari.

But we can’t blame it entirely on them. We were already on the brink. We couldn’t pay the bills.

-Efraim Wyeth

Dave, Max, and Erich observed the company’s troubles and entertained the idea of striking out on their own.

Back at FM Waves when Dave, Max, and I worked together for the first time, we would say, “Hey, we shouldn’t make games for these guys. We should go make games on our own.” We referred to it around the office as Project Condor.

-Erich Schaefer

Setting sail for entrepreneurial waters seemed feasible. One programmer and two artists could bang out a game fairly quickly—if they could find a publisher willing to foot development costs. Whispering conspiratorially in corners of the office was one thing, but actually taking the plunge was another. Dave, Max, and Erich felt no pressure to strike out on their own. Despite the occasional late paycheck, working at FM Waves was like hanging out with friends. Meeting deadlines often meant long stretches of twelve-hour days and the occasional all-nighter, but the guys filled the hours with talk of their favorite games and free food from the deli.

Besides, the paychecks always cleared—until the summer of 1991, when they didn’t.

The company wasn’t earning enough to provide salaries for everyone. Leaving was very difficult. To this day, whenever I leave a company, good or bad, it’s difficult because you wrap your identity around what you’re creating and the change you want to create in the world.

-Mike Sigal

Dave Brevik also made the difficult decision to leave. As much as he wanted to stay and finish Gordo 106, he had a wife to take care of and bills to pay.

I’d been working at FM Waves maybe five months or so when my paychecks started bouncing. Definitely didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad. It would have brought on the “I told you so” speech.

So I knew it wasn’t going to work out, and it was time to look for something else more secure, but I still wanted to do video games.

-David Brevik

Dave planted himself at the kitchen table and rifled through the classifieds. He hit on a lead right away. A new company, Iguana Entertainment, had been founded that same summer in Santa Clara, not even ten minutes from where he and his wife lived with her parents in San Jose. The job seemed ideal: shorter commute, making games, and a stable paycheck. His mind made up, Dave gave his notice to FM Waves and moved on.

***

Dave had come to terms with the fact that he’d never throw the game-winning pass of the Super Bowl in real life, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t become a superstar quarterback in a football video game.

I was employee number one at Iguana, I believe. My first project there was to convert an arcade machine called Super High Impact to the Sega Genesis for [publisher] Acclaim Entertainment. I did that in three months.

There was an artist doing the art, but I was the only coder. We finished it, and it was one of the first on-time, on-budget projects that Acclaim had had in years.

-David Brevik

Casting aside NFL rules and sportsmanship, Super High Impact was a rough-and-tumble game where players slammed into opponents hard enough to send helmets bouncing across the field. Pleased with Iguana’s efforts, Acclaim fed Iguana co-founder Jeff Spangenberg and his team more projects. The influx of cash allowed the company to squeeze out of their cramped office space and spread out in a complex large enough to house multiple teams and projects.

One of the opportunities Jeff received was adapting another coin-op game to the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. The game, a one-on-one fighter featuring digitized actors, had just hit arcades and was causing quite a stir.

We played the game, and I was like, “Oh my God, Jeff, this game kicks ass. This is going to be a huge monster hit. We’ve got to do this game.” He [Jeff] said, “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t really like it that much. It’s too weird. It’s just this cheap knockoff of another game.”

I said, “Okay, well, I really think it could be awesome.” That game was Mortal Kombat.

-David Brevik

After Iguana bowed out of the running to port Mortal Kombat to home consoles, Acclaim Entertainment stepped in. The publisher poured $10 million into a marketing campaign that proclaimed September 13, 1993, as “Mortal Monday,” the day the game arrived on various Nintendo and Sega systems. Acclaim sold more than 6.5 million cartridges over the game’s shelf life, securing a spot in the history books as the architect of one of the biggest video game launches of all time.

From that moment on, Dave Brevik had his boss’s ear when it came to deciding on future projects for Iguana.

By 1993, Dave was helping to lead Iguana as the company’s technical director. He wrote code for projects such as Sunsoft’s Aero the Acrobat, a platformer-style game where characters leap over pits and other obstacles. Around the same time, Midway came to Iguana with another arcade-to-console conversion proposal for NBA Jam, a two-on-two basketball game featuring gravity-defying dunks. This time, Jeff heeded Dave’s urgings and signed on to port the coin-op game to consoles.

Before Dave could sit down and start porting NBA Jam’s dizzyingly fast action to home systems, Iguana pulled up stakes.

Around the time Iguana started NBA Jam and before we got very far along, Jeff got married. His wife was from Texas, so he moved the company to Texas.

I didn’t want to go, so I called up Max and Erich and said, “So, uh, you guys doing anything? Want to start a company?”

-David Brevik

***

FM Waves bounced a check, and Dave was gone. That was the beginning of the end of FM Waves. They ran out of money.

We were slackers living in an apartment with friends and zero expenses, so we didn’t really care. We kept at it just to see where it would go.

-Max Schaefer

Despite commendable efforts by FM Waves—later rebranded Tenth Planet after Ef and Mike decided to drop clip art and focus on game development—Gordo 106 was doomed even before it released in 1992. The problem was the low market permeation of the Atari Lynx handheld, and to a greater degree, Atari itself.

One of the problems was they [Atari] discontinued the Lynx shortly before our game came out. We never really had a chance for Gordo to make money. There was a shortage of Lynx sets at Toys “R” Us and other stores. Atari kind of screwed the pooch there.

But then there were rumblings about a new Atari platform, the Jaguar. What they really wanted was for us to be developing stuff for the Jaguar. So we shifted some attention to that, and they kept promising us the specs. They wanted us to start developing a game before we had their specs.

We were stuck in this limbo for a while, and discovered after the fact that that was not uncommon in working with Atari.

-Ef Wyeth [SQ1]

Ef called the staff together and announced that Tenth Planet was closing its doors. Unable to foot the bill for the team’s last paychecks, Ef gave Max and Erich their pick of office equipment, including a brand new Macintosh IIfx with a staggering 32 megabytes of memory. Lugging their new-old hardware back to their apartment, Max and Erich weighed their options. They didn’t want to return to desktop publishing. The game development bug had bit them. Another plan took shape. What if they started their own game company? Reaching out to Joe Jared, the programmer FM Waves had hired after Dave split, the Schaefers formed a new start-up, Atomic Games.

Armed with a programmer, computers, and artists, all they needed was a project. The trio batted around ideas until they decided to try converting Gordo 106 to the Super Nintendo.

I met Max and Erich Schaefer in 1992 or so through my wife’s boss at Publish Magazine, who was a friend of theirs. They wanted to break into game development on their own after having worked for a small video game developer on the Atari Lynx. I remember meeting them for the first time at a Mexican restaurant on Haight Street near Stanyan.

Later, in 1993, as VP of Development at DTMC, a very small Nintendo publisher, I signed them—as Atomic Games—to work on a Super NES game they had pitched to me: Gordo 106: The Mutated Lab Monkey.

-Matt Householder, VP of development, DTMC [SQ2]

After receiving the rights to remake Gordo 106 from Ef Wyeth, Max and Erich invited Matt Householder and his wife over to their San Francisco bachelor pad. The group hit it off right away, bonding over comic books and an appreciation for underground pop culture. Committed to the idea and to the Schaefers, Householder drew up papers and signed Atomic Games to bring Gordo to the Super Nintendo. The contract paid just enough to keep the guys stocked on beer and snacks, but not enough to lease an office space for easy collaboration.

At first, the arrangement suited Max and Erich just fine. Important topics could be discussed over the phone. For more immediate concerns, they could meet up at a coffee shop. After a short time, the arrangement proved untenable. Like Joe Jared, the Schaefers were still relatively new to game development and needed an experienced programmer to bring their game to life. With all the Atomic Games developers still feeling their way through the development process, Gordo 106 moved forward at a limping crawl.

When their phone rang in the summer of 1993, Max and Erich assumed it was Joe calling to discuss yet another setback. The voice on the other end of the line surprised them. It was Dave Brevik. He explained his situation: Iguana’s CEO planned to get married and relocate the company to Austin. Brevik didn’t want to go; he wanted to talk to the Schaefers about Project Condor. Now was the perfect time to start their company, he explained. He’d amassed contacts at Acclaim and Sunsoft over his two years at Iguana and was positive he could land them some contract work to get started.

Max and Erich loved the idea, but they were contractually bound to trudge through Gordo 106’s flagging development. They proposed an alternative: what if Dave helped them finish the game? Dave passed on the idea. Working on Gordo again didn’t appeal to him. Resigned, he decided he would move to Texas with Iguana if it meant keeping a paying job. Before he hung up, Dave told Max and Erich to touch base with him if their situation changed.

A few weeks later, Householder called the Schaefers and informed them that DTMC was barely treading water. Regrettably, the company could not honor the terms of their contract.

We called up Brevik and asked, “What are you doing? Let’s get our own company going. Let’s make something happen.”

David was working at Iguana Entertainment at the time. I guess when I called him, he was sitting next to his boss, so he said, “No. I’m happy here. Everything’s going great. Not interested. Good luck, guys. Keep in touch.”

-Max Schaefer

Max and Erich peeled off a twenty from their nest egg, bought some booze, cranked the stereo, and kicked around ideas for what to do next. Something would come up. Something always did. Several hours and beer bottles later, the phone rang. Max picked it up and slurred a greeting. From the other end, Dave excitedly told them that he’d decided against moving to Texas. Project Condor was a go.

Chapter 4: Superman Can’t Kick

I sat in the front room and people would come in and drop off mail, thinking I was the receptionist. I was just at a card table with a light box and a little phone.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Condor

Our big intra-office social events often revolved around NHL ’94 for the Genesis, which Max was quite good at. We accidentally created a genuinely game-centric culture there, which was a natural outcome of the lack of money for much else.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Condor

Max and Erich had this old van, a beat-up old Vanagon. That was like our company car: white van, bumper missing, no hubcaps. But that was kind of like us. We were this rag-tag group.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Condor

In late August, Dave ushered Max and Erich into the living room of his cramped one-bedroom apartment. After some catching up, the three talked shop. Between them, they had a few computers, a few thousand dollars, and Dave’s contacts—just enough resources to operate a company from their living rooms, but not nearly enough to hire on more developers.

Iguana was moving to Texas. When they decided to move there, a lot of that was predicated on whether or not I was going to move there.

I told them yes, and at the last second, I told them no. So I felt like I couldn’t really poach anybody from that situation.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

Dave, Max, and Erich looked around at each other, resolved. They were young but determined to make their new company succeed. Plus, there were the Sunsoft and Acclaim contacts. Dave promised Max and Erich he’d get on the horn first thing in the morning and try to rustle up some business. Just then, the phone rang.

Shortly after creating Condor—in fact, at our very first meeting—we got a phone call from somebody who used to work with David on the Aero the Acrobat project. He called us up out of the blue at our first meeting and said, “Hey, we want you to make games for us.”

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

So in our first organizational meeting for the new company, which was Condor, we had an offer to pick from a list of games to make. It was really good synchronicity. During our initial discussion, the phone rings, and we’ve got work.

It was one in a series of really lucky things that happened to us along the way.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

The call was from David Siller, an executive from Sunsoft.

Dave approached me and said, “I’m not going to Austin.” He said that to me kind of off the record, so I told him, “Well, I certainly appreciate your efforts on these projects. Maybe we can talk turkey and see if we can do something together.”

-David Siller, publishing director, Sunsoft

Sunsoft had a few choices for us. We had Scooby-Doo, an Aerosmith game, or Justice League Task Force. They asked, “Which do you want to do?” I said, “Justice League.”

They said, “What? Aerosmith’s going to be much bigger.” I said, “But there’s no game there.” Of course, that was long before Rock Band.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

Modeled after developer Capcom’s Street Fighter II, Justice League Task Force would pit DC’s iconic superheroes like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman against each other in one-on-one brawls. Dave hung up the phone and talked excitedly with Max and Erich. Right there in Dave’s cramped living room, they had landed their first project minutes after deciding to start their own game company. Leaping such a tall hurdle constituted a solid day’s work, but they decided to square away a few more nagging issues. The first: a proper name for their company. They decided to go with Condor, Inc. None of them found “Condor” particularly attractive, but it would do.

Deciding on official titles was even less appealing. One of the three guys would have to shoulder a fancy title so the publishers knew who to pester about budgets and deadlines. To decide who would carry the burden, they used a technique not documented in best-selling management books. They drew straws.

The extent to which I was CEO was because we needed someone to be CEO, and I was probably the guy best equipped to fend off the publishers’ intrusions.

Even when we got bigger, Dave, Erich, and I ran the company as kind of a three-headed monster. We had titles just for the formality of having titles. Anything important that went on, the three of us would decide together.

-Max Schaefer

By September 10, 1993, Dave, Max, and Erich had squared away their paperwork and made Condor official. Next up on the agenda: leasing an office where they could spread out and start in on their superhero-studded fighting game. After touring office parks around the Bay Area, the guys decided on a small office park on Bair Island Road in Redwood City, roughly halfway between the Schaefers’ San Francisco apartment and Dave’s home in Santa Clara. From the outside, their new digs resembled a vista right out of a fairy tale. The little office building was bordered by earthy paths that meandered around the complex. When they needed a break from staring at screens, they could mosey down to the marina, sit along the shore, and watch boats bob against the docks.

Inside, their home away from home left much to be desired. The thin walls were scratched and stained, and tacky gold carpeting blanketed the floors. The office was made up of a large main room that branched off into three tiny offices. A damp, musty scent rose up from the carpeting. Dave, Max, and Erich wrinkled their noses. It wasn’t much, but it was home.

Dave laid claim to one of the offices and set up his programmer’s cave: no lights, closed blinds, walls covered in hockey posters, desk littered with action figures and coffee mugs. Max and Erich crammed desks and computers into the adjacent office so they could more easily collaborate on artwork, leaving one office and the main space open. The brothers’ goal seemed simple in theory: clone Street Fighter II, but draw superheroes instead of fireball-throwing karate masters. In practice, drawing the Greek God physiques of superheroes proved more difficult.

The first thing we realized when making this game was that we needed someone who could draw superheroes on a professional level, because certainly Erich and I couldn’t do it. We could do backgrounds and monsters and whatever, but drawing an iconic human figure, a superhero, is not something you can fake.

-Max Schaefer

Around the same time, Dave heard from a producer at Acclaim he’d met while working on Super High Impact. Acclaim was shopping around a contract to develop NFL Quarterback Club for Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld. The guys accepted the job without hesitation. More work meant more money. It also meant Dave, as Condor’s only programmer, needed someone to help carry the load.

Desperate for help on both the programming and art fronts, the founders drafted two want ads and sent them around to the local papers in March 1994. A few days later, the mail carrier dropped off a small box packed with photocopied sketches of fantasy creatures, armored knights, and superheroes so chiseled and detailed they could have stepped right out of professionally drawn comic book panels.

Max glanced at the name and phone number on the resume and snatched up the phone. Michio Okamura was their man.

***

I’ve been doing art since I was a little kid. I think my first professional gig was a small fantasy game called Arduin Grimoire… when I was 14 or 15. It was written by Dave Hargrave. I drew a lot of inspiration from that.

-Michio Okamura [SQ1]

To Michio’s delight, publisher Grimoire Games accepted several of his illustrations and even featured his art on the cover of Dark Dreams, the fifth volume of Arduin Grimoire adventures. A short time later, his work caught the eye of recruiters from Comico Comics. The headhunters were looking for a pool of talented freelance artists to put together a comic book based on Robotech, a popular science fiction animated series. Michio signed on enthusiastically and drew characters for Robotech: The New Generation #5 and Robotech Masters #9, which premiered in the 1980s, and Shuriken, a comic starring a bodyguard-assassin and drawn in Japan’s unique manga style.

For Michio, life had hit its peak. His freelance art didn’t bring in much cash, but it was enough for a single guy living on his own. Then, life penciled in a curveball.

I did independent comic books for a while, then I got married and had kids. I had to go get a respectable job, so I worked at a Japanese corporation for about five years. I was in imports and exports.

In five years I became the distribution manager for the west coast and they were talking about making me the VP of the West Coast, learning how to play golf, wearing suits, talking to clients. That’s about when I panicked. I was turning 30 and thought, I don’t want to do this all my life. I want to do something creative. I want to [create] art.

So this was my last chance. I was going to take a break, go do art for a while, get it out of my system, then go back to doing something respectable.

-Michio Okamura

Flipping through the classifieds in March 1994, Michio stumbled over the answer to his prayers. Video game artist wanted. No experience necessary. Michio immediately dug up a box of old sketches from his closet. He picked out the best ones, copied them at work, and mailed them off. A few days later, he got a call from Max Schaefer, co-founder of Condor, who asked him to come in for an interview.

Michio showed up dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt and tie. Three guys emerged from dark offices and introduced themselves as David Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer. They wore tattered shorts and rumpled t-shirts. Michio, used to knocking around with executives in full suits, wondered if Condor was a legitimate operation. Then the four guys kicked back at a table and talked kung fu, superhero comics, and fighting games.

When I was in high school, we had Asteroids. That wasn’t a graphic marvel. It wasn’t artistically interesting. Then, right before I turned 30, my brother went and got a Super Nintendo, and he got Street Fighter II Turbo. I started playing that, and I was amazed at the graphics.

-Michio Okamura

As the interview went on, Michio’s worries faded away. This felt nothing like interviewing for a job. It was more like hanging out with friends. Dave Brevik seemed particularly interested in Michio’s fantasy artwork. Michio got the impression that there were bigger ideas, darker ideas, bouncing around in his skull.

The conversation turned to the job. Dave and Max slid Michio a pad of paper and a pencil and asked him to take a pop drawing quiz. Michio set to work, sketching out a detailed, spandex-clad character striking a heroic pose. The guys took one look and asked when he could start.

The next day, Michio strode into Condor ready to work. His three bosses greeted him and set up a small card table by the door. The desk was sparse save for a phone and a light box, a backlit device that artists use to trace pictures onto paper. Michio grinned. He could already feel his artistic synapses crackling at the idea of drawing Superman executing rib-shattering punches and punting adversaries into the stratosphere.

There was just one problem.

I had no experience working on a computer except for doing import-export documentation for customs. Art is completely different from just running an application. I had never [drawn] anything on the computer.

So through the entire Justice League project, I didn’t do much on the computer. Almost everything I did was hand drawn.

-Michio Okamura

Improvising, Max and Erich put together an art pipeline that played to Michio’s strengths.

Michio could draw without source material and pretty much nail the look of the superheroes. He would do an outline form on paper, and we would scan it and resize it, and then fill in the dots by hand on Deluxe Paint.

-Max Schaefer

Michio divided his days between illustrating superheroes and playing fighting games to better understand what made them fun. As much as he loved the stylized visuals of Street Fighter II, he was more impressed by how the game let advanced players exploit its smooth animations. By executing an attack and then pulling off another move before the first animation finished playing out, he could chain together a flurry of punches, kicks, and special attacks like fireballs that left his opponent reeling. When they were not converting Michio’s illustrations to digital formats, Erich and Max heeded their new hire’s advice on how to design a layered fighting game.

Over in his programming cave, Dave ran into technical hurdles of his own. To build Justice League Task Force, Dave, Max, and Erich scraped together over a third of their budget to pay for a Sega Genesis development kit, a box that let developers test game code and roll in art and music assets. Learning to write code for the Sega Genesis had not been too difficult. Now, however, he needed to get Game Boy kits up and running so Condor could get started on the handheld NFL Quarterback Club game. That, he decided, seemed like the perfect starting job for their first employee—their other first employee.

***

My dad was a gamer, an old-school gamer. I remember I was five or six years old when he bought Pong. And I saw that on our crappy black-and-white TV in their master bedroom, and I was amazed. I just thought it was the coolest damn thing.

And ever since then, I wanted to do that, whatever that was. I was six or seven and just knew I wanted to play games. I wanted to do more of that.

-Richard “Rick” Seis, programmer, Condor

Like Dave Brevik, Rick had life all figured out from a young age: play video games, move to Silicon Valley, make video games, play more video games. He knew that the best way to achieve that goal was to become a programmer. Back in the days of Pong, programmers did it all: wrote code, drew characters and levels, and made the primitive beeps and screeches that passed as music and sound effects. As a programmer, he could land a job anywhere.

After finishing high school, Rick enrolled at Northern Illinois University as a double major: computer science and “video gamer.” Every spare minute he wasn’t writing code for assignments, he was building his own little games or mashing buttons with his buddies. As his senior year wound down, Rick applied to some game companies, but also sent out resumes and portfolio samples to more upstanding enterprises just in case a job in games didn’t materialize. When it didn’t, Rick headed for the west coast and a programming job with Delta Dental that paid just north of $30,000 per year, a respectable salary for a junior programmer.

For the next two years, Rick stayed put at Delta. His guidance counselors at Northern Illinois had left no room for debate on that point: once you got a job, you stayed there for at least two years so your resume didn’t make you look like a drifter. After a year of suits and cubicles, Rick snapped. He polished his resume, scoured the morning papers, and fired off applications to game programmer jobs that popped up. Six months passed without a reply. Then, one morning in March 1994, Rick opened the paper and read a bite-sized blurb. Game programmer needed. No experience necessary.

I was getting discouraged. I came across an ad for a company called Condor and I said, “Should I send my resume or not?” Because the ad is this two-liner. I said, “These guys have to be goofballs. They’re not even paying for anything more than a two-liner.”

My significant other at the time said, “Just do it. Who cares? What does it cost you? You’ve got a resume ready. Just throw it in the fax machine.” So I sent it out. And sure enough, they called.

I said, “Oh my God. I’ve got an interview for a game job. Fuck. Yeah.” I mean I’m on cloud nine at this point.

-Rick Seis

On the day of his interview, Rick dressed in a suit and stocked a leather attaché with copies of his resume and references. Around lunchtime, he collected his things and made the forty-five-minute drive to Redwood City. Inside, the office was dark and empty. Rick looked around and saw a TV in one corner. A Sega Genesis and controllers sat on top of it in a tangled heap. He smiled. This had to be the place.

A door across the small room opened and a man appeared. Rick immediately felt overdressed. The man wore a wrinkled tee, faded jeans, and socks. No shoes. Then the man stuck out his hand and introduced himself as Erich Schaefer, and he must be Rick, here for the interview. As if on cue, two other guys appeared. One was tall with a wide smile. The other had the bleary-eyed look that Rick recognized as a symptom of sleepless nights staring at code.

Erich introduced Rick to his brother Max and their partner, Dave, before ducking back into his office to finish up some artwork. Max took a few good-natured shots at Rick’s attire and looked over his resume while Dave lobbed programming questions at him. After several minutes, the conversation segued to video games. What they were looking for was someone who didn’t want to collect a paycheck and clock out at five. They wanted gamers, the type of gamers who loved playing games just as much as they loved making them. Rick identified himself as such. Dave and Max challenged him to prove it.

In college, I used to play NHL ’94 all the time on the Genesis with my buddy. I mean, my buddy and I were so good, we’d play it upside down. We’d get on these bean bags, flip over on our backs, and play it upside down because we were so good.

So we get on this conversation about games, and they go, “Oh, you love NHL ’94? We love it, too. We have a tournament here that we do during lunch just for fun.” The interview’s ending, and they go, “Want to play us in some NHL ’94?”

I don’t remember who I played first, probably Dave—and I just kicked the living daylights out of him. At the end, I sandbagged it because I’m thinking, I’m beating the hell out of the guy who interviewed me and I want this job!

-Rick Seis

After cutting and devouring his slice of humble pie, Rick shook hands and thanked them for the interview. Dave and Max responded in kind and said they’d be in touch. Stepping outside beneath a twilight sky, Rick eased his vehicle into rush-hour traffic. The bumper-to-bumper crawl back home took over two hours, but Rick didn’t care. He pulled off one exit early and swung through a Burger King drive-thru. A junior engineer barely made enough to stay afloat in the Bay Area, but he deserved a reward. Maybe he’d get the job, maybe not, but finally landing an interview after six months of casting lines without a single bite seemed an accomplishment worth clogging an artery for.

Juggling food, keys, and attaché case outside his door, Rick heard the phone ring inside.

I open the door, I drop the bag right inside, I pick up the phone, and it’s them, and they offer me a job. I was like, “Holy fuck!” I mean I am out of control at this point. I’m ecstatic, I’m absolutely ecstatic.

Literally that’s how the day went: I get the interview. It goes well. They love NHL ’94, my favorite game. I go get Burger King. I walk in the door. I have a fucking job. I mean, it’s less pay, but I don’t care. I was just on cloud nine.

It was an amazing day. I’ll never forget it. It really was an awesome day.

-Rick Seis

Dave, Max, and Erich invited Rick to wake up the next morning and come make video games at Condor. Rick accepted even knowing that Condor’s lean budget meant a sizeable pay cut from his position at Delta; they were starting him at $23,000. That was fine by Rick. He had finally landed his dream job and would get a chance to start on the ground floor at Condor as the company’s other first employee.

They offered me the job that day, so technically, I could start work the next day. But I gave a two-week notice to my company, because again, that’s the proper thing to do.

-Rick Seis, employee number one, Condor

Rick got hired first, but I started working first.

-Michio Okamura, employee number one, Condor

Rick squeezed into Dave’s office and jumped between writing code for games and learning the ins and outs of programming games. Even though more sophisticated programming languages had come along, console and handheld games were written in assembly, a cryptic but powerful language that allowed savvy programmers to squeeze every last drop of performance from hardware.

That’s another great thing about that era: you were right in there. You’re hemmed in by that crappy processor and paltry amount of memory, so you’ve got to figure out creative ways to make the football arc without doing too many mathematical operations. And that mattered. That mattered back then.

-Rick Seis

Like a well-oiled tag team, Dave and Rick switched off between projects. After writing the basic layers of the Game Boy development kit and getting football players to run around in NFL Quarterback Club, Rick handed the project off to Dave so the more experienced coder could finish the engine, the core of a game that displays graphics and processes commands. Rick stayed busy on Justice League and building a dev kit for Sega’s Game Gear handheld, which would host a version of NFL Quarterback Club, thanks to another of Dave’s contacts.

While programming on Justice League went smoothly, the art team hit a super snag.

There are always advantages and disadvantages to working with someone else’s intellectual property. The advantage is you’ve got characters that generate instant consumer recognition and a built-in audience. But oftentimes, these IPs aren’t made for video games.

When DC’s writing comics about Superman, they’re not considering, “How’s he balanced [in terms of fighting abilities] versus Batman?” They don’t think about these things. As game makers, we have to think about these things. And so oftentimes, there are things that are built into an IP that can affect gameplay and affect the quality of the game in favor of the property.

One example of this was the infamous “Superman can’t kick” story.

-David Brevik

Condor’s crew knew that characters in a fighting game needed special moves that utilized each character’s specific abilities, such as throwing batarangs as Batman and streaking across the screen as the Flash. But every character also needed to perform basic punches and kicks when the fighting got up-close and personal. DC disagreed. The Man of Steel could leap tall buildings in a single bound, outrace locomotives, and had even risen from the dead. But according to DC, the Man of Steel did not kick in the comics, so they could not permit him to kick in a video game.

The constraint frustrated Condor. They picked up the phone and argued to Sunsoft, their liaison to DC, that cutting kicks reduced Superman’s arsenal by a third. DC wouldn’t budge. Afraid of losing the Justice League contract if they raised too big of a stink, Condor devised a solution. Rather than outfit Superman with kicks, they just gave him more punches.

The interaction with DC was weird. They couldn’t even be bothered to play the game, so we had to make video tapes of gameplay to send out. They’d look at the tapes and then come back with feedback.

One time they said, “Why is Batman’s belt green?” It was because video tapes bleed. His belt was yellow in the game.

-Max Schaefer

DC also imposed restrictions on how characters could appear in-game based on current story arcs in the comic books.

At the time DC was doing Superman with his long hair. In my mind, Superman is a clean-cut, short-haired guy, but I had to make his hair long. My version looked like David Hasselhoff.

-Michio Okamura [SQ2]

Juggling a tight budget and a growing workload, Dave and the Schaefers scraped together money to hire more programmers and artists. In mid-1994, the guys brought on Tom Byrne and Kelly Johnson, a friend of a friend. Kelly lacked formal experience but impressed Max by sketching a professional-quality Superman on a cocktail napkin. Kelly and Tom set to work on animating Michio’s hand-drawn illustrations. The next logical step was finding another programmer to help Dave and Rick crunch code.

Matt Uelmen’s persistence was legendary. He’d call all the time and say, “Give me a job!” I still have his original mix tape that he gave me. He would call over and over again for weeks.

Finally I gave in and said, “Fine.” I mean, at the same time, he was obviously talented, so I liked him.

-David Brevik

In those days, having your own musician on staff was unheard of. Either you outsourced your music or just did whatever, but you didn’t have an actual freaking music guy. It was too expensive, relatively speaking, to what your team needed.

-Rick Seis

Growing up in the small town of Lomita, California, Matt Uelmen’s interest in video games blossomed alongside his talent as a musician. He started gaming and playing music at a young age, switching off between piano lessons and devouring stacks of Atari cartridges. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1993, he set his sights on making music for games.

Sitting in my office one day at [Nintendo publisher] DTMC, I answered the phone to a cold-call from Matt Uelmen, who was looking for a job in games. He told me that he’d called Nintendo of America and they’d given him DTMC’s phone number. He explained that he had no experience and wanted to compose game music.

I had no idea what he could do in electronic music and sound effects, but I talked with him for some time—probably more than once—and found him to be obviously smart and quite entertaining.

So I gave him Max’s info and encouraged Matt to contact Condor for work, although I didn’t think he had much of a chance with no experience in games or electronic music production.

-Matt Householder, vice president of development, DTMC

Uelmen showed up for his interview to find Condor’s three bosses tearing a console football game to shreds, mocking the gameplay, the graphics, the sound, the controls. He immediately felt at home. At Condor, there were no programmers penned up in cubicles, nor, judging by the way the guys bantered with their three bosses, was there any discernible hierarchy. At Condor, there were only gamers.

Unable to keep up with his new friends’ skills in games like NHL ’94, Uelmen built up a unique reputation around the office.

In our very, very early office, the game monitor was literally an arena of death. Well, not literally. No one died there. But we had a great culture of smack-talking and [playing] games that were currently available.

-Matt Uelmen

Uelmen would play, and he would just do things to infuriate you. Smack talk and all that. I would get so mad; I just wanted to run the score up on him every time.

He was just such a little bastard about it—but that was his shtick: ridiculously smart, but purposely infuriating at times.

-Rick Seis

Dave, Max, and Erich did their best to keep the office stocked with games to play. Once a week, they made a trip to the local Electronics Boutique and dipped into their dusty coffers for a single copy of select new releases. One afternoon, they came back with a copy of Doom, id Software’s watershed first-person shooter that saw players blast and chainsaw their way through hordes of demons.

One by one, the small Condor crew installed the game and passed the disks around. Then they drew the blinds, cut the lights, plugged in headphones, and stepped into virtual hell. The office, quiet, save for the clicks of keys and mouse buttons, periodically exploded in terrified screams when monsters sprang out of hiding and erupted in a shower of bloody chunks courtesy of shotgun shells and rocket blasts.

Doom was famous for its groundbreaking multiplayer modes that let gamers play with or against each other over modems or a local network. Dave, Max, and Erich lacked the funds for an office network. Once again, the team improvised.

Condor had just one big room, and we’d all be playing. We would just tell each other what we were doing: “Oh, I’m here, now!” We were playing the same game—not together, but we were sharing the same experience.

Matter of fact, I used to sit across from Rick, and we’d always be Doom-ing together in the same level. And he’d say, “Oh, dude, you’re just kicking ass. You’re way ahead of me!”

-Kelly Johnson

After another fun session reducing demons to meat and bones, Kelly turned off the game and switched on Deluxe Paint to keep coloring in superheroes. Hours later, he glanced up to see Dave Brevik entering the room with a stack of papers.

We were working on Justice League Task Force, and one day, Dave came around and just dropped a document on our desks. He said, “This is the game we’re going to make someday.”

-Kelly Johnson

Curious, Kelly picked up his copy. The title page showed tormented souls shrieking in agony and raising their hands to the heavens. Below the picture was a single word. Diablo.

Act II: Synapses and Snowstorms

Chapter 5: The Business Plan Du Jour

My attitude was—and this is how I talked Mike and Frank into it—we’re young, we don’t have mortgages or families. All we really have to lose is time. We could try it for a year. If [it] takes off, great. If it doesn’t, chalk it up to experience. I still believe to this day that attitude is everything.

-Allen Adham, co-founder, Silicon & Synapse

We had lots of ideas for games. The Lost Vikings was the first original idea we developed. It was a really cool puzzle game, but it ended up being too complicated, so it was never going to be successful with mainstream gamers. We learned a lesson based on the sales of Vikings: make games that appeal to a broad audience.

-Patrick “Pat” Wyatt, programmer, Silicon & Synapse

Allen Adham slipped into the line of students headed for the cafeteria and ducked out a side entrance. He hustled the few blocks to the video arcade, fished out a pair of quarters, and checked his watch as he roamed aisles lined with flashing screens. Less than thirty minutes until the next bell—just enough time for a couple rounds of Space Invaders.

Twenty-five minutes and a new high score later, he raced back to school and wished, not for the first time, that he had some way to play video games at home. He already spent every spare minute at the arcade. His parents would never invest in a game machine.

My brother and I talked my dad into buying us [a computer] so we could use it for school. We used it to play games. I liked playing the games so much that I started writing them.

-Allen Adham

When his eyes grew blurry from marathon programming sessions, Allen plugged in the Apple II modem and dialed up his favorite bulletin board systems to talk games and programming with other budding developers. He soon discovered that not all board operators lived across the country, or even across the state. Some of them were in his area code.

On the programming side, I knew most of the people from my community. I got to know much of the local programming talent at events, and it was through [friends] that I met Allen Adham.

-Brian Fargo, founder, Interplay Productions

Like Allen, Brian Fargo had discovered video games in arcades before switching over to the Apple II and catching the programming bug. Several adventure games and a start-up company later, Brian founded Interplay Productions. In search of talent, he combed bulletin board systems for programmers and discovered Allen Adham. Brian was impressed by Allen’s talent and offered him a gig writing games for Interplay.

Almost overnight, Allen was living his dream.

Early on, it was easy. It was a summer job. I knew a half-dozen people in the business that I could call and ask for work. I could make $12,000 a summer, and that was good money for high school. I would work my own hours, so I had a social life and could go to the beach with my friends.

-Allen Adham

Out of high school, Allen enlisted in the military. When he returned to California, he picked up where he left off and signed up at University of California, Los Angeles, as a computer science major. He divided his time between writing games for Interplay and a few other studios such as Datasoft over the summers, and bunkering down in UCLA’s computer lab. During one lab session, Allen set the password on his workstation and left the room. The student sitting beside him saw the perfect opportunity for a prank.

We were sitting side by side at UCLA in one of the computer labs, and I had gotten up to go get a coffee, go to the bathroom, and I had locked my computer system. And when I came back, I sat down, I typed in my password, the system unlocked and I kept working.

And this guy sitting next to me, who I didn’t know was Mike, turned to me and said, “Hey, how did you do that? […] While you were gone, your system unlocked itself, and I relocked it using my password.”

-Allen Adham

“‘OK, so what was your password?’ I ask him, and of course Allen said, ‘I’m not telling you!’ But then, starting to realize what must have happened, I say, ‘It was JOE, wasn’t it?’

Allen looked completely amazed. He said, ‘Yeah, how did you know that?’”

-Michael “Mike” Morhaime, co-founder, Silicon & Synapse

Mike and Allen discovered they shared more in common than just passwords. Whether partnering up to tackle schoolwork or hanging out with Mike’s pals from Triangle, an engineering fraternity, the new friends talked about computers, programming, and what they planned to do after college. Mike was interested in computer hardware and figured he’d apply to tech companies around Silicon Valley. Allen’s plans were unwavering. He wanted to make video games.

Allen hoped to combine the wisdom his professors imparted with the hands-on experience he had gained writing games over summer breaks. He quickly realized that most of his professors had little to teach him. Even advanced topics like artificial intelligence covered material he had already taught himself. So he ditched, sneaking off to the Ackerman Union student hangout to play arcade games. Eventually, he noticed another escapee from his AI class gaming alongside him.

When I was growing up, I always felt that I wanted to make video games, but I really had no idea how to go about doing it. Allen also knew that he wanted to make video games, but he knew exactly how he wanted to go about doing it.

-Frank Pearce, programmer, Silicon & Synapse

In the spring of 1990, Mike Morhaime and Frank Pearce, complete strangers unknowingly linked by a mutual acquaintance, graduated from UCLA and sought gainful employment. Mike joined hard disk manufacturer Western Digital while Frank took a position at Rockwell International, a manufacturing company in Southern California. Six months later, Allen collected his diploma and dialed up Mike to pitch the opportunity of a lifetime: leave his stable job at Western Digital and join Allen in a scrimp-and-save game start-up.

Mike, as anticipated, didn’t exactly jump at the offer. Allen persisted. It was better to try their luck at a start-up now before mortgages and families tied them down, he reasoned. The more Mike thought about it, the more he found himself caught up in Allen’s infectious enthusiasm.

I borrowed $15,000 from my grandmother. Ten thousand went into the company and $5,000 went into my bank account, and that’s pretty much what I lived off of for the next two years.

-Mike Morhaime

Allen and Mike christened their game company Silicon & Synapse—silicon for the material used to make computer circuitry and synapse for the gatekeeper in the nervous system that allowed nerve cells to pass electrical and chemical messages back and forth. Excited to get started, Allen assessed his small team’s skill set. Years of playing and making games had given him a strong designer’s sense, and both he and Mike had experience in programming. But they were only two guys.

When Allen graduated in December of 1990, he contacted both Mike and myself and invited us to come with him to make computer games. […] There were people in the department I was working at inside Rockwell [who] had been there for 15 years … doing the same thing I was doing, and I had just shown up.

I just felt like if I was going to take a chance at the age of 22, it seemed like a good time, so I accepted Allen’s invitation to go work with him.

-Frank Pearce

In February 1991, Mike and Frank met one another for the first time at the Silicon & Synapse office site, a 600-square-foot property in Costa Mesa, California. The property was devoid of furniture, so Allen, Mike, and Frank spent their first day assembling desks. Allen’s plans for the company and the pounding of hammers on cheap wood rang throughout the small space. When they finished, the three guys looked around at their bare walls. They didn’t amount to much. But one day, those walls would become famous for sheltering the team that built the greatest video games ever made.

You should have heard Allen talk back then. Allen talked very big. If you listened to him, you would think we were on our way to owning the world.

-Mike Morhaime

Allen picked up the phone and hit up his Interplay buddy, Brian Fargo, for work. Brian handed him a stack of contracts for port jobs. Their first project was porting Battle Chess, a chess game where animated game pieces drew weapons and battled over squares, to Microsoft Windows. Other projects on their plate included J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Vol. I for the Amiga computer and Macintosh versions of Lexi-Cross, a game where players competed in futuristic TV game shows, and Dvorak on Typing, a tutoring program designed to increase the user’s typing speed.

To keep up with the slew of projects, Allen, Mike, and Frank divvied up responsibilities. Frank concentrated on programming games while Allen and Mike jumped between writing code, securing contracts for more work, and looking for freelance programmers and artists to handle the load. Pat Wyatt, one of Mike Morhaime’s fraternity buddies, became the company’s second employee and one of a select few to earn a full-time position.

For the sum of $5,000—which seemed like a lot at the time—I converted DOS Battle Chess into a Windows game, which was really above my skill level at the time, but I learned a lot and managed to pull it off.

Because of the number of hours I worked, I only got paid something close to minimum wage, but it [the work] was so much fun and so cool—even though it was frustrating because of the complexity of the project—that after it was over, Allen and Mike offered me a job.

I learned later that they didn’t have any expectation that I’d take the job. They thought I’d go out and get a job that paid more. But I took a pay cut from my university job to go and work at Silicon & Synapse because I thought it’d be fun.

-Pat Wyatt

Allen knew developers who converted another company’s games didn’t receive credit for the conversions. But he would get paid, and he could use that money to hire more developers. More developers meant more work, which meant more cash—and, he hoped, the chance to make his own games.

There was this attitude that it didn’t matter what our project was. We were going to learn how to do it and we could learn anything that we put our minds to.

-Mike Morhaime

We called it the business plan du jour. Every day, there’d be some new company that had something they wanted done, and we would evaluate whether we should take on their project and whether we could juggle to fit it into our existing schedule.

At the same time, we tried to find funding for the projects that we wanted to do.

-Pat Wyatt

Most of the guys filtered in around ten or eleven in the morning and worked late into the night. With so few developers and so much to do, no one confined himself to one project. Pat spent several hours writing code for Battle Chess before switching over to a different game on a different platform. Artists shepherded pixels into characters and levels.

Long hours lit short fuses. When the guys needed a break, they entered virtual worlds, grabbed big weapons, and hacked each other to bits.

One of the great things that Allen and Mike did was encourage us to play games on company time, which was just a brilliant idea. We all played games anyway, but they encouraged us to play games, figure out the mechanics, and understand how everything worked with everything else. This meant you weren’t working in a vacuum.

-Paul Barton, artist, Silicon & Synapse

We had a Neo-Geo in the little, tiny game room. You could literally get one or two people in the room and a couple standing in the doorway.

Every day, we’d play, and the rules were you could only win twice before you had to get up from your seat and let the next guy come in.

-Stuart “Stu” Rose, artist, Silicon & Synapse [SQ1]

When the guys needed a break in the middle of fourteen-hour workdays, they shoved their sparse furniture against the walls, spread out on the floor, and broke out Magic: The Gathering, a trading-card game where players summoned monsters and cast spells described on cards. Competition was cutthroat. Before a match began, each participant shuffled their decks and set the top card aside for the winner to claim.

When we were a much younger and smaller company, the bonds that developed between everyone were very strong. It was easy to know everyone well because going out for a beer only meant taking two or three cars to bring the entire company.

[…] Unique relationships are built when people share a common goal and spend blood, sweat, tears, and late nights working to achieve that goal. That’s one of the things I like most about making games—working with a group of talented people that share and realize a vision.

-Frank Pearce

Every time the team hit a deadline, Allen collected a paycheck. Despite money trickling in from port jobs, neither he nor Mike added a dime to their personal bank accounts for nearly three years. Every check went toward building up the team to handle a heavier workload.

Their future seemed precarious and money was one of those issues. I must have worked on half a dozen projects within a very compressed time period, an insane amount of hours and lots of pixel pushing. It was always about, “Okay, we’ve got to get paid for this one. Then we’ve got to finish up and get paid for the next one.”

But I always knew that the dream was to make enough capital to fund the video game titles they wanted to make.

-Paul Barton

Just four months after Allen and Mike had opened Silicon & Synapse’s doors, Brian Fargo offered to help them take a huge step toward making their own games.

I needed to do some console games, and I thought if I could get something done quickly, that would give me a little success to get my foot in the door. That’s exactly what RPM Racing was.

I bet the whole company on it. I even borrowed money from my father-in-law to buy enough cartridges to make that work. It was a huge bet.

-Brian Fargo

Calling on a contact at publisher Electronic Arts, Brian secured a license to remake Racing Destruction Set, a racing game for the Commodore 64 computer that let players swap out tires, engines, and weapons like land mines, as well as build their own race tracks. The remake, entitled RPM Racing—short for Radical Psycho Machine—would release on the upcoming Super Nintendo console, set to debut in the U.S. late that summer. After several months of nose-to-the-grindstone work, Silicon & Synapse shipped RPM Racing in November 1991, becoming the first American-made game to land on Nintendo’s hot new console. [SQ2]

Copies of RPM Racing didn’t fly off shelves that holiday season, but Brian Fargo was still impressed. He’d given Allen and his team a tight development window of just a few months, and they had delivered a fun and clean product. As far as he was concerned, Allen had paid his dues. If the Silicon & Synapse leader pitched him an original idea, Brian would publish it.

Fired up, Allen called his team together and announced a game day. He instructed everyone to pair up and spend a full day brainstorming. At the end of the day, everyone would gather in the main room and share their ideas. The winning idea would become their next project.

I think Allen had a much better perception of the gaming market than the rest of us. He knew that we should be making games with broad appeal. Mike Morhaime and I were into more esoteric games.

Mike and I worked together to develop our first game proposals and our two games were a sailing simulator and a comedic beat-em-up. Designing a sailing game was obviously pure naiveté. We were designing games that would be fun for us to play instead of games that would appeal to others.

-Pat Wyatt

The winning submission was a puzzle game called The Lost Vikings proposed by Ron Millar, a jack-of-many-trades who had started out making art for Silicon & Synapse before taking up game design. In The Lost Vikings, the player solved levels by switching between three Vikings and harnessing skills unique to each character, such as bashing through walls, using a shield as a parachute, and shooting arrows at far-off buttons to lower bridges. The catch was that the player could only control one Viking at a time; the remaining two stood idly by, vulnerable to enemies prowling around.

Vikings started out as a puzzle game that involved a lot of Viking characters on-screen simultaneously. As we got further along in development, we learned that it just wasn’t possible to create that many characters with sprites on the Super Nintendo, so we decided to cut the number of Vikings down to five - each with their own unique abilities.

After a bit more design work, we [pared] it down to the three Vikings that we have since come to know and love.

-Mike Morhaime [SQ3]

Brian Fargo approved Lost Vikings over lunch and a handshake from what I understand. The approval document for doing Lost Vikings was two legal sheets with little Vikings drawn on them.

I got the impression that that’s the way most things happened in the early days. I think that’s probably a problem with the games industry today: they want to over-plan things. They’re so risk-adverse that great things sometimes [get passed over].

-Stu Rose

Alongside The Lost Vikings, Brian gave Allen the go-ahead to develop Rock ’n Roll Racing, a spiritual successor to RPM Racing that supported up to four players and featured new tracks; power-ups; cash rewards for aggressive behavior, such as blowing up other cars; and instrumental versions of popular rock-and-roll songs that matched the game’s pedal-to-the-metal action. [SQ4]

I remember our contract with Interplay for Rock ’n Roll Racing. That was when I thought we hit the big time. Interplay offered us an eight-month contract for $40,000. Before that, our contracts were for three months and $10,000.

I was so excited, on the way back I couldn’t stop screaming. By the time I got back to show Mike the contract, I was so hoarse I couldn’t talk. Back then, to recoup $40,000 you had to sell 60,000 units.

-Allen Adham

Rock ’n Roll Racing garnered a smidgeon more recognition than The Lost Vikings and earned a nod as Best Driving Game of 1993 in Electronic Gaming Monthly. The honor boosted morale, but Allen and his team still felt frustrated.

Rock n Roll was mainstream. Vikings was a pretty cool game, but not broadly appealing. But they were both fun games to play, which I believe is why we were named [Best Software Developer by Videogames Magazine] in 1993.

The problem was both of those titles sold really poorly, much below our hopes and expectations, so there was no royalty stream to gain from those; it was basically work for hire.

-Pat Wyatt

Producers over at Interplay also felt frustrated with low sales numbers. One reason, they conjectured, was the growing rumble of newer, more powerful game consoles coming from Sega and Nintendo. Poor marketing decisions, like packaging Rock ’n Roll Racing in a pink box, created another stumbling block.

I’ve worked with great people, but early on, a lot of those people were not very good. They came from other industries, and many of them didn’t even really want to talk to us. They just wanted to do their job and get out the door. It wasn’t about, “How do we push this? How do we get more people?”

Marketing people would come in and say, “Well, a pink box pops off the shelf.” And you’re like, “Uh… so?” That doesn’t make any sense. They wanted to make a pink box for a product that guys would buy. Guys don’t buy pink things.

-Feargus Urquhart, producer, Interplay Productions [SQ5]

The biggest hurdle for Silicon & Synapse was the publisher-developer arrangement they had signed with Interplay. As per standard publisher-developer terms, the developer made the game while the publisher carried financial burdens such as marketing, distribution, packaging, buying game cartridges, and paying an advance that helped the developer pay for equipment and salaries. Since Interplay had footed most of the cost for The Lost Vikings and other games, Interplay collected the majority of the profits.

Silicon & Synapse plugged into a small stream of royalties, but only after reimbursing Interplay for the advance. Since their console games brought in below-average sales, the team saw below-average profits.

Nobody likes that, but it’s the reality of the situation: not every game will be a hit. You’ve got to work that into the overall structure. But as developers grow more powerful, they get to make arguments about the value of their name and why they’re not going to pay for other people’s losses.

-Brian Fargo

What Allen wanted was to create his own game, from scratch, and keep every aspect of production—especially marketing—under his company’s control. He found his chance buried beneath the sweeping desert vistas of Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, a strategy game released for the PC by Westwood Studios in 1992.

Based on the universe created by science fiction author Frank Herbert, Dune II had players choose one of three factions and assume the role of commander. Players funded their war effort by harvesting spice, a resource they converted into credits. Credits paid for buildings where players produced combat units. The goal was to raise an army of units and eliminate opponents. Unlike most strategy games, Dune II did not unfold over a back-and-forth series of turns like a game of chess. Instead, all actions happened concurrently, all in real-time. The game’s unrelenting pace and on-your-feet thinking made every moment a sweaty-palmed affair.

Westwood called Dune II a real-time strategy game, or RTS. Allen and the rest of the guys at Silicon & Synapse called it nearly perfect. Skilled players could dig deep and utilize all sorts of advanced strategies, while using the mouse to perform commands kept it accessible to new players. The three factions had access to a few similar buildings and units, but also offered unique structures, units, and technologies that encouraged players to switch up tactics depending on the faction they chose. [SQ6]

Dune II lacked only one crucial feature: multiplayer. During break periods, the guys exchanged boasts about their superior skill like blasts fired from Dune II’s needleguns. The trouble was, they had no way to prove their claims. Dune II only allowed players to wage war against computer-controlled opponents, and the game’s limited artificial intelligence failed to keep up against more nuanced tricks and strategies. If Dune II had allowed two humans to meet on the battlefield, they would have crowned it the perfect game.

Silicon & Synapse’s developers combed store shelves and gaming magazines for other RTS games to play. They found none. Allen came to a decision. Since he and his friends couldn’t find any other RTS games, they would just have to make one. He called up Brian Fargo and explained that he wanted to make a real-time strategy game for the PC, one set in a fantasy world to distinguish it from Dune II’s science fiction setting. Brian was open to the idea.

I started off as a developer, and I moved my up the food chain and became an affiliate publisher. That basically means you’re financing games yourself, you’re handling the marketing yourself, but you’re letting the publisher do the distribution.

I said, “That’s what you should do through us. That way you guys get the bulk of the money, and if you make a hit, you’ll get a lot more.” Allen liked that idea, so they started working on a PC strategy game.

That’s all I knew. PC strategy games didn’t light the world on fire, but I said, “Hey, you don’t have to pitch to me. It’s whatever you want to do. That’s the best part, here.”

-Brian Fargo

Before hanging up, Allen squared away one last detail: the game box would bear the Silicon & Synapse name, branded in bold letters.

Everything that we had done up until that point, we had done for someone else. But WarCraft was our title. We were the developer, and we were the publisher, so we didn’t have to answer to anyone.

-Frank Pearce

Chapter 6: The World of WarCraft

The feeling of sitting alone in front of a computer, looking at your screen and realizing that off in cyberspace somewhere there is another sentient being building, exploring, and plotting your destruction was exhilarating.

-Allen Adham, co-founder, Silicon & Synapse

I would love to straighten this out. In 2011, Blizzard had their 20th anniversary, and they did a video where the Davidsons gave their spin of history. It was completely wrong.

-Brian Fargo, founder, Interplay Productions

Allen went to the dictionary and picked out “Blizzard.” And we all universally went, “What?” He said, “It’s a cool name! Get it?”

-Stu Rose, artist, Silicon & Synapse

In September 1993, a storm raged through Silicon & Synapse. Programmers pounded away at code, artists colored in pixels, and co-founders Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime discreetly plugged up holes in their sinking ship with funds from bank accounts bordering on empty. Pat Wyatt sat in the center of the tempest. Silicon & Synapse still needed contract jobs to keep the bills paid, but they also needed to make headway on WarCraft, the company’s fantasy-themed, real-time strategy game and the first in what Allen envisioned as a long line of games. [SQ1] Until Allen could free up more programmers, Pat would work on the RTS alone.

Pat cleared his plate and started work on the under-the-hood tech that would breathe life into WarCraft. Battles would unfold across maps too large to load into memory as one gigantic spread, so he wrote routines that clicked the maps together tile by tile, like puzzle pieces. To view the entire map, he added the ability to scroll around by moving the mouse to any edge of the screen. Next, he wrote procedures to process commands received from the mouse and keyboard.

With the game’s backbone mostly in place, Pat stared at his screen, wondering what to do next. On every other project he’d worked on, he had been a junior engineer, a grunt who got paid to follow someone else’s design. Realization dawned, making him giddy. He was the only programmer on WarCraft. He had carte blanche. There was no design plan other than to clone Dune II’s formula—gather resources, build an army, destroy opponents—and then add multiplayer. WarCraft was his to define.

Keyed up, Pat thought about pulling an artist to draw a few soldier units he could experiment with, but they were buried under other projects. He cracked into Dune II and exported troops into WarCraft to use as stand-ins. Now, he needed a way to select units in bunches using the mouse.

Dune II only allowed you to select one unit at a time. That felt like a crippling limitation when you were trying to manage tactical combat for a bunch of units. Maneuvering them one at a time was a real drag.

Also, there was no formation logic where you could say, “Okay, all you guys go here,” and the units would move together as a group. They would all do their own thing instead of doing what you wanted.

-Pat Wyatt, programmer, Silicon & Synapse

Before joining Silicon & Synapse, Pat had used drafting programs to design cellars for his dad’s wine cellar business. Those programs let users click and drag the mouse to catch multiple screen elements in a rectangular box. The intuitive click-and-drag method seemed a natural fit for rounding up troops in WarCraft.

With all the necessary code in place, Pat ran the embryonic game and pressed a few keys. Units appeared like raindrops on a windshield.

After I got the pathfinding working, I probably spent two whole days selecting units and saying, “Go there!” It actually proved useful because I was able to debug pathing problems and understand how units moved together.

But it was so much fun moving all those units. They looked like little pebbles rolling along in a river. It was this fascinating confusion of motion, and it was all something I had created.

-Pat Wyatt

The sight of his massive attack force charging around at his command inspired Pat to add deeper tactical options.

In Dune II, you would say, “Move over there,” but while the unit moved, it would get attacked on the way; it wouldn’t fight back, and it would show up to the destination nearly dead.

If you do a “move” command for a unit in WarCraft or StarCraft, the unit will move to the destination to the exclusion of anything else going on around it. But if you click “attack” and then click on the ground, the unit will move to its destination, but if it discovers other units it can attack along the way, it will attack them.

-Pat Wyatt

Fueled by Pat’s enthusiasm, WarCraft evolved at a steady pace. He added new elements, such as gold and lumber, finite resources players had to harvest to build buildings and produce troops. [SQ2] Beyond the borders of WarCraft’s burgeoning fantasy world, Allen and Mike’s real-life resources had just about dried up.

The company sort of grew beyond the point where our Discover cards [could] handle it […] so we each went to our parents and we got them to each put $20,000 into a bank account, so $40,000.

And at the time that we sold the company to Davidson and Associates, we completely maxed out the $40,000 credit line and so it was pretty tight for the first few years.

-Mike Morhaime, co-founder, Silicon & Synapse

Allen and Mike did their best to keep money flowing. When David Siller, Sunsoft’s publishing director, approached them in summer 1993 with a contract to adapt DC’s The Death of Superman comic book story into a beat-em-up for the Super Nintendo and Genesis, they snatched it up. [SQ3] Pleased with the company’s progress on the Superman game, Siller offered them a contract for a fighting game called Justice League Task Force for the Super Nintendo. [SQ4] Only days before, Siller had signed Condor to develop the Sega Genesis version.

Always on the lookout for more projects, Allen signed up to develop a collection of word games like crosswords and jumbles called Games People Play for the PC. He got the job from Bob and Jan Davidson, founders of the Davidson & Associates educational software company. Impressed with their portfolio, Bob made an offer to buy Silicon & Synapse, which Allen and Mike had rebranded as Chaos Studios in December 1993.

One night Bob just said to Allen, he goes: “How much do you want?” And Allen gave him an astronomical amount thinking that Bob would go “No way, that’s way too much,” and Bob said yes.

-Joeyray Hall, artist, Chaos Studios

Bob explained his situation to a stunned Allen. Davidson & Associates had skyrocketed after Jan had developed Math Blaster, a game where players solved arithmetic problems by blasting characters out of cannons aimed at the answer. With the “edutainment” market cornered, Bob and Jan wanted a piece of mainstream gaming, but they recognized that entertainment-focused games like The Lost Vikings and Rock ’n Roll Racing were not their forte. That was where Chaos Studios fit in. If Allen was interested, Chaos Studios would function as the entertainment division of the growing Davidson software empire.

Allen told Bob that he and Mike would have to talk about it. He dropped the bomb on Mike, who was just as shell shocked. Selling to a major corporation was like Excedrin for financial headaches, but there was one other partner they needed to talk to before they could consider turning over ownership.

In the beginning, I said I’d like 20 percent ownership because of all we were doing and paying for. Then later on, Allen said, “Eh, let’s make it 10 percent.”

So I said fine. I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it. So I did, in fact, own 10 percent of the company.

-Brian Fargo, founder Interplay Productions

We were a public company at the time, I believe, and so we had the wherewithal to [offer to buy them], but we didn’t know if they had an interest in selling, but I guess Interplay made them an offer or approached them about acquiring more of them.

We always thought that, well, Interplay had a bit of an advantage because they were culturally aligned with the folks at [Chaos Studios]. On the other hand, we were adults, and one of the things they were looking for was adults to do the business side of the business.

-Bob Davidson, chairman/CEO, Davidson & Associates [SQ5]

Allen and Mike expressed one concern to the Davidsons. They had spent years slaving away on port jobs with no control over their projects. Bob and Jan understood and sweetened the offer: if they sold Chaos Studios to the Davidsons, they could have free reign over their games.

It gave us the illusion that even though we sold the company, we still owned it—still had control to make the games that we wanted to play.

-Mike Morhaime

In February 1994, the co-founders signed on the dotted line and got the payday they needed: $6.75 million. The acquisition went down as a stock swap, a corporate arrangement where the seller gave up stock in their own company for more lucrative stock in the buyer’s company. Brian Fargo received shares worth his 10 percent ownership as well as rights to distribute WarCraft in Europe, where Interplay’s reputation in games loomed large.

Just as valuable as stocks was access to Davidson & Associates’ business muscle. To maintain control over the promotion and distribution of their products, the Davidsons employed experts in marketing, technical support, printing, and distribution. Chaos Studios would gain access to those divisions, ensuring that their games would be heavily marketed and distributed to retail stores all across the country, thanks to their parent company’s experience and reputation among vendors.

After squaring away final details, Allen and Mike announced the sale to the team.

The grand story is that a week before [Chaos Studios] was sold to Davidson & Associates, Mike paid the salaries on his credit card. And we didn’t know. We found out after they signed and made the announcement.

They went, “You guys don’t know how close things were. This is great.” And we said, “Really?!” I’m really glad they didn’t share. Too much information can be bad.

-Stu Rose

With their financial issues conquered, the team was free to focus on bigger concerns—like the company’s name.

When we incorporated, [Allen] incorporated us under the name Silicon & Synapse. That wasn’t really a good name, because no one knew how to spell it.

-Frank Pearce

What we actually got over the phone was, “Silicone? Isn’t that what you put in women’s breast implants? And what the hell is a synapse?”

-Allen Adham

We briefly changed the studio name to Chaos Studios, but it turned out there were other studios with the same or similar names. We considered changing the name to Ogre Studios, but Bob and Jan Davidson convinced Allen that Ogre would be a bad name.

-Pat Wyatt

Running out of ideas, Allen picked up a dictionary, leafed through it, and landed on “blizzard.” The name, like Chaos Studios, aptly described the work environment—a veritable storm of projects, a passion for creating fun games, and developers pulling hair out over tight deadlines. In May 1994, Chaos Studios became Blizzard, albeit with a slight modification.

We specifically selected to append Entertainment […] because we always felt like we wanted to have the option to do more than games.

I mean games are our foundation, but we always felt like, you know, if we were creating our own franchises, we would want to someday [see] them on the big screen or see them in novelizations or comic books, or whatever.

-Frank Pearce [SQ6]

With the company name settled, Allen reassessed his priorities. Blizzard Entertainment had grown from three guys building desks to fifteen developers. The time had come to drop dead-weight projects and focus on the ones that mattered. No game mattered more than WarCraft. Bob Fitch, who had started work on Games People Play around the same time Pat started in on WarCraft, dumped the word-game collection without a moment’s hesitation and joined Pat on the RTS game.

Pat, newly appointed producer on WarCraft in recognition of his long service to the game, assigned his team of programmers to different areas of the game. While he and Bob worked out artificial intelligence for the units players could control, Mike Morhaime and new hire Jesse McReynolds wrote routines that enabled WarCraft to host multiplayer sessions over phone lines and local networks.

Stu Rose had been the first artist on the project, starting almost neck-and-neck with Pat Wyatt. His first task was to write up a design document, a guidebook that established the game’s vision and gave the team a point of reference as they created levels, gameplay mechanics, story elements, and the technology that powered the game. With many gameplay elements already in place, Stu concentrated on conjuring up a few locations in the barebones world where WarCraft took place.

I took some initial ideas that Allen had, and ideas Ron Millar had about scenario designs, and pretty much fleshed out a lot of the names. I was pulling names out of my… uh, out of different orifices. “I think I’ll call this Stormwind Keep!” I drew up the original map for [the Human kingdom of] Lordaeron.

-Stu Rose

Artists gradually finished up the contract work that paid the bills and threw their weight behind WarCraft. Samwise Didier, who had cut his teeth creating artwork for The Lost Vikings and Rock ’n Roll Racing, had a penchant for doodling fantasy characters that were heroic in proportion and cartoonish in design during company meetings. Allen pegged Sam’s unique style as the artistic vision for WarCraft’s two factions: the Humans—a mix of Archers, Knights, and Conjurers; and the Orcs—clans of Warlocks and beasts such as the Grunt, a foot soldier with tusks as sharp as his axe. [SQ7]

We started out trying to make things more realistic. But in the game, the realistic stuff was thin and tall and just didn’t look powerful. So we started squashing the characters so they looked better from the camera angle, and it just turned out that they looked cool and mighty.

So we just stuck with that look on all of our games.

-Samwise “Sammy” Didier, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Players produced combat and worker units at buildings. Like in Dune II, players produced basic units at first, then worked their way up to more powerful units by constructing prerequisite buildings according to a hierarchical chart. Armies could consist of any combination of units, but most of the differences between Orcs and Humans were superficial. [SQ8]

Balance was pretty much one for one. That’s one thing Allen did input. We didn’t have enough time or effort to have an asymmetrically balanced game, and it would be a lot easier to have things one for one.

I was a proponent of having asymmetrical balance in the races, but we were a small team. We did not have the ability to balance that situation out.

-Stu Rose [SQ9]

Allen monitored WarCraft’s development closely. He took part in spur-of-the-moment design meetings that sprang up around desks and in the break room, jotting down comments in a yellow legal pad. If he believed in an idea, he backed it. If he disagreed, he threw his weight against it. One debate sprang up around Pat’s take on unit selection. Players could select as many units as they could see on their screen and send them crashing against enemies like an avalanche. Allen pointed out that there was nothing tactical about directing an avalanche; it was a mad rush of bodies that players didn’t have to exert precise control over.

After weeks of arguing, Pat saw the logic in Allen’s argument and conceded.

There was no argument that was ever finished until the game shipped. You’d go in, argue about something, talk to some other people, round up allies, come back and have the same argument again.

Some arguments would run for months with no resolution, or there’d come a resolution that no one cared for, so the arguing would continue.

-Pat Wyatt [SQ10]

Although Allen was a Blizzard co-founder and the guiding force behind design, his word was not law. When talk turned to how players should produce units, the team deliberated between two options. The first followed Dune II’s methodology: select the appropriate building and click the unit to produce. Allen and Ron Millar favored option two: rather than let players have control over unit production, various units would randomly pop out of buildings.

A company-wide battle over unit production broke out.

When Allen and Ron went away to CES, Stu [came into my office and said, “Pat, we’ve got to talk. This is what we need to do.” He laid out a plan for how unit creation should work.

I worked over the weekend to finish it before Allen and Ron returned. Come to think of it, I worked every weekend.

-Pat Wyatt

I was really big about making sure the pace of the game was set to the point where the player always had something to do. I didn’t want players to feel out of control of the situation. They had to have a vested interest in their build choices: “This is my choice to build something, so I want to build a Peon.”

Being at the whims of fate can be really frustrating, and that’s something I didn’t want anywhere near WarCraft.

-Stu Rose

When Ron and Allen returned, they played the game, discovered Stu’s bold change, and agreed that control over unit production made the game more fun. At Blizzard Entertainment, fun trumped all other considerations.

Blizzard’s developers also targeted the game’s single-player campaign as a point of interest. In Dune II, players chose one of the three factions and battled against the remaining two. The plot took twists and turns, but each level boiled down to the same routine: harvest spice, build an army, and wipe out the opposition. Blizzard kept WarCraft players on their toes by constructing missions where no base-building and resource-gathering took place at all; instead, players guided a small group of units around the level, fighting enemies and rounding up allies as they went.

Blizzard’s developers also wanted to spin a more engaging yarn in WarCraft, but no one had given much thought to penning a grand epic. Orcs and Humans fighting for dominance—that was as much of the story as anyone knew, and needed to know At the same time, they needed someone to do graphic design for WarCraft’s instruction booklet, a task all the coders and artists were too busy to take on. Stu knew just the guy for the job.

I got Bill Roper into the company. Bill was working at Kinko’s at the time. He was a friend of mine, and I was pressuring Mike to no end, saying, “You’ve got to hire this guy.” And Mike said, “I don’t know if we have enough work to keep him busy. I don’t know.”

The first week Bill was in there, his head almost exploded. He came into my office saying, “I’ve got enough work here for three people! What was Mike talking about?”

-Stu Rose

Bill soon caught the game development bug and looked for more ways to contribute. He ended up throwing together the game’s story on the fly during recording sessions.

The development team was looking for someone to do the voice-over for the demo. I volunteered for the job. I showed up expecting to be given a script, but instead they pulled up a screen of a castle and said, “OK, here’s the castle, and there’s this big war between Orcs and Humans.”

-Bill Roper, producer, Blizzard Entertainment [SQ11]

I think one of the most novel things about WarCraft was the [audio]. Very quickly, people picked up on the fact that you could click on units to make them say funny stuff.

Bill absolutely nailed the character voices. He gave them so much personality. He could have created uber-serious voices, but games are supposed to be fun and not take themselves too seriously.

The combination of the cartoony graphics and cartoony voices really appealed to people.

-Pat Wyatt

***

Before Allen and Mike were able to invest in faster computers and an office network that made file sharing quick and easy, Blizzard’s developers tightened their shoelaces and transferred data over the sneaker network. One afternoon, Pat slipped a floppy disk into a fellow programmer’s computer and copied the IPX packet driver, the traffic cop that directed information back and forth between computers engaged in a game, onto the disk. Then he walked over to his computer, dumped the data, mashed it all together into a complete version of WarCraft, and handed a copy of the prototype game code over to Bob Fitch.

Bob compiled the code. WarCraft roared to life on his screen. On the main menu, the multiplayer option lit up. Pat raced back to his desk, fired up his game, and connected to Bob’s computer. The screen went dark, then a preliminary base appeared—a town hall and a few Peons, worker units that the player used to harvest resources and construct buildings.

WarCraft was online.

Grabbing his mouse, Pat ordered one Peon to build a farm and sent the other three into the mine to harvest gold. In the background, drums thundered ominously. Pat felt his pulse quicken as he dragged the mouse cursor around the screen. He didn’t know what Bob was up to, and Bob had no idea what Pat was building in his little corner of the map. That’s what made the match such a rush.

We played for probably 20 minutes or so, building barracks and attacking each other. Then the game crashed. I ran into Bob’s office and said, “That was freaking awesome!” And Bob said, “Yeah, that was epic! And I was kicking your ass!” And I said, “No way, I was kicking your ass!”

We had a great game experience, but it was also enormously stressful because neither one of us wanted to be the one to lose the first game of WarCraft. Playing against a human was way, way more stressful than playing against the computer.

It was just this magic moment because it was so invigorating to play against a human and know that it wasn’t some stupid AI. It was a player who was smart and doing his absolute best to crush you. I knew we were making a game that would be fun, but at that moment I knew the game would absolutely kick ass.

-Pat Wyatt [SQ12]

Pat’s and Bob’s excitement faded when they realized why each believed he had stomped the other. When WarCraft connected two players, both computers had to pass data back and forth across the network in perfect synchronization so each computer could keep track of what the other was doing. Somewhere along the way, Pat’s and Bob’s computers had fallen out of sync, displaying different versions of events instead of one true account of what was unfolding on-screen.

Pat soon discovered the problem. Anticipating that the modems of the time would be too slow to process the entire state of the game every time a player took action—mouse clicks, keyboard presses, moving a unit, earning or spending gold, clearing away trees for lumber, and hundreds of other decisions—Pat had written the code to only send player commands back and forth during multiplayer games. Unfortunately, various logic errors had resulted in each computer processing the same command a different way. Over time, the disparities stacked up, rendering each computer unable to reconcile one shared account of events.

I wrote the original multiplayer code, so it was my bug. It was very, very difficult to find. WarCraft was my first RTS, and it was my first original title as a developer, so I made mistakes. There was a lot I had to learn along the way.

When we first discovered the multiplayer bugs, there weren’t any terms for them, so I invented the term “sync bug” to describe that there was a synchronization problem between the two computers playing the game.

-Pat Wyatt

The sync bug did not stop the rest of the Blizzard team from gorging on WarCraft’s early code. WarCraft was already fun without multiplayer. With it, the game became a drug. On every screen around the office, workers hacked down trees, barracks spit out combat units, blacksmith forges and castles crumbled under assault from Catapults, Peasants under escort from Knights and Footmen trekked across the map to build a new base near unmolested forests and gold mines, and Orc Daemons slugged it out with Water Elementals conjured by Human Wizards.

After matches drew to a close, the guys clustered around desks and raved about wins and losses, strategies successful and thwarted. Even more exciting was what their game held in store for other players. One day, armchair generals all around the world would march their troops across phone lines and wage war against friends down the street or complete strangers hundreds or thousands of miles away.

***

Pat Wyatt’s pivotal role in WarCraft almost ended shortly after it began. Over the first six months of the project, he had been given the relative luxury of devoting his entire schedule to WarCraft. The trouble was, he wasn’t bringing home enough money to justify long nights and weekends porting games and bringing WarCraft to fruition as the game’s sole coder. He approached Allen and broached the subject of a pay raise.

I went in to talk to Allen, and he said, “Well, tell you what. Why don’t you convert Blackthorne from Super Nintendo to PC? We already converted Lost Vikings, so you can re-use a lot of the source code. And we’ll write up a contract for you to get paid as a contractor.”

The way he presented it was, “You’re an awesome programmer so you should be able to do this really fast, so you don’t need to get paid much money for this.”

So I ended up working my full-time job, then going home during the evenings and hacking on this other project to bring in additional cash.

-Pat Wyatt

Pat grumbled, but didn’t really mind taking on the extra assignment. Allen and Mike were not just his bosses. They were his friends, and they looked out for their team. Then, in early 1994, Allen and Mike sold the company and became millionaires.

Back when I joined Blizzard, there was this idea of, “We’re all in this together. We’re all going to take on the gaming world, and we’ll all get rich doing this.” There was no, “You make this much, and I make this much.”

There was just a whole lot of vision and not a whole lot of particulars. All of us trusted that Mike and Allen would take care of us, and today, I would say that was a very naïve way of thinking.

-Pat Wyatt

As part of the terms of the stock swap between Davidson & Associates and Blizzard, Allen and Mike received stocks and stock options. They distributed the options among the employees who had been with them the longest, including Frank and Pat. New to the corporate world, Pat lost himself in speculation over his options. His calculations didn’t look promising. The amount he stood to gain once his options matured didn’t seem equal to the amount of blood, sweat, and tears he’d given Allen and Mike over the past three years. And there was always the chance that Blizzard Entertainment or Davidson & Associates might bottom out, rendering the options as valuable as mere sheets of paper.

In short, Pat felt like his friends had ripped him off.

He [Pat] almost left once during the early part of the Blizzard days. We all went over to his house and talked him out of it. I was pretty naïve. I just viewed it as, “One of the family wants to go. Let’s go console him because we’re all great.”

-Stu Rose

Stu and some of the other guys were not the only ones who chased after Pat. Allen and Mike recognized the sacrifices he had made to help pave Blizzard’s path to becoming the best game company in the world. If he came back, they would make that recognition official: a jump several rungs up the pay ladder and the position of vice president of research and development, a third captain at the wheel of Blizzard Entertainment’s ship. Pat agreed and returned to work on WarCraft that summer.

***

With Pat’s issues resolved, Allen set his sights on a looming deadline: the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, an annual event where game and tech companies demoed upcoming products. That year, Blizzard would show off Justice League Task Force and The Death and Return of Superman. Allen also planned to bring WarCraft along, but he wouldn’t show off the game to just anyone. That privilege would be reserved for individuals who saw the PC as the next great gaming frontier.

Act III: Descent into Hell

Chapter 7: The Game We’ll Make Someday

In early 1994 or so, while I was still at DTMC, Max pitched me a game called Diablo. I confided to Max that the game sounded excellent, but that DTMC was going out of business soon, so Condor should look for a home for Diablo somewhere else.

-Matt Householder, vice president of development, DTMC

Everyone wants to hit a zombie with a club, but not everyone wants to read badly written fantasy text.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

I kept on bugging Dave: “Call them up! Get a build of WarCraft for us!” Eventually he finally gave in. And that call, as I understand it, is the call that basically started the process of them buying us. The rest is history.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

When they weren’t busy making games, the Condor crew stayed busy playing them. Blasting through Doom and conspiring to overcome Matt Uelmen’s cheesy tactics in NHL ’94 remained the most popular ways to relax while their workstations rendered graphics and compiled code. Then, in early 1994, a PC game called X-COM: UFO Defense abducted the team’s attention span.

Developed by Mythos Games, X-COM was a slower, more tactical experience than Doom. In X-COM, players chose a location for their base, researched new technology, manufactured supplies for their scientists and soldiers, and remained in the good graces of nations supplying funds for their extraterrestrial hunt by protecting them from alien infiltration.

At the start of X-COM, players navigated menus where they could order supplies, train troops, send aircraft out on patrol, and look over funding reports. Inevitably, players made contact with extraterrestrials. Setting paper-pushing aside, the game switched to an isometric view, a literal twist on the top-down perspective used in games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on Super Nintendo. In top-down games, players watched the action from high above, looking down on their avatar’s head and boots. X-COM’s isometric view slanted the camera, still showing the action from above but allowing players to see the fronts, sides, and backs of their squad and the alien invaders.

Over a series of turns, players deployed soldiers through yards, city streets, and even inside suburban homes to surround and eliminate alien threats. The turn-based gameplay encouraged players to consider troop formation, emphasizing planning over itchy trigger fingers. Once defeated, aliens could be dissected, revealing weaknesses that players could exploit. [SQ1]

X-COM offered Erich Schaefer a dissection table’s worth of tools and strategic possibilities, making the game a blast to play.

There were many things I loved about X-COM. The game revealed itself in an interesting way. There were multiple levels of gameplay: combat, designing and laying out your base, and a long-term story that tied into your research. You would study devices and aliens that you had captured, and that would unlock story elements.

But the main thing was the random battlefield and the destructiveness of the areas. I just loved that you were in these lands, fields, and cities, and those environments were never the same. That was the random element we loved; it comes from X-COM and the roguelike games.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

For Dave, Max, and Erich, computer games were more than diversions. They were inspiration. They didn’t want to slave away on console projects that offered them little creative control and even less pay. They wanted to make their own games, and they wanted to make them for game platforms that weren’t already shuffling toward retirement.

The industry was at a time where the Super Nintendo and Genesis were coming to the end of their life spans, and it was definitely not clear what consoles were coming out afterwards. We had to make a call, and as a little company, your eggs are all in one basket. You’re only doing one project, so if we picked the wrong machine, we’re screwed.

The PC was always there. The PC is always going to be there as a gaming platform. So it seemed like, from a business perspective, that [the PC] was a better platform for us. You weren’t constrained by the very limited hardware that the consoles had.

-Max Schaefer

Condor’s founders wrote design documents for three game ideas. One was Tyran Conquest, a futuristic action game that flipped between missions like raiding installations to steal alien technologies and spaceship shootouts set against the starry depths of space. The second concept was The Crystals of Quexlcoatl, an Aztec-themed shooter where players explored randomly generated temples in search of six magical crystals.

Eager to develop for new hardware, the founders aimed Tyran Conquest and The Crystals of Quexlcoatl at Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, and 3DO Company’s Interactive Multiplayer, known as the 3DO for short—fresh consoles boasting 3D graphics and speedy processors that left the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis eating dust.

The third document described Diablo, Dave’s dream game intended for the PC platform.

Dave said, “You know, there’s these great dungeon-crawl games that we used to play, like Angband and Moria, that are crying out for an update.” The structure of the games was really addictive. You could play them for hours and hours.

-Max Schaefer

In laying out Diablo, the founders stuck close to the roguelike formula. A lone hero would descend through dungeons crawling with demons, going deeper and deeper until they eventually breached Hell. There, they would face Diablo, the devil incarnate. On the surface was a town where players could buy and sell equipment for their fighter, thief, or magician avatars. Each class had special abilities, such as stealthy movement for thieves and spells for magicians.

Like X-COM, Diablo would play out over turns: first the player moves, then the monsters, and so on. Players would have to exercise forethought and creep forward to survive mobs of monsters like sword-wielding skeletons and archers. Defeating monsters made heroes stronger and awarded them with random treasures like gold, spells, and armor. The game would also randomly assemble each level of the dungeon, providing a different experience each time players sat down to the game.

Unlike the roguelikes of days gone by, Diablo would feature full-color graphics. Spending countless hours playing X-COM convinced the guys that an isometric perspective was the perfect angle to follow Diablo’s action.

One of the whole points of making a roguelike with modern, 3D rendered graphics was that you could make things look really cool. But [characters] just don’t look that great walking around from a top-down perspective. You see the guy’s head and his shoulders, and that just wasn’t right to get the full grandeur of [the art we were making].

We did a lot of experimentation with angles and decided on the isometric perspective. That was something we just played with until it felt right. It was a perfect compromise between navigation, knowing where you are, and seeing the cool stuff the artists were making—really seeing the characters, monsters, and environments.

-Max Schaefer

Dave, Max, and Erich went into vague detail on Condor’s plans to support Diablo after release. For a nominal fee, players could purchase expansion disks that contained new items, monsters, and dungeons. They closed the document by outlining a schedule that estimated one year to complete development, then passed the design around the office. The team responded with enthusiasm.

I noticed David Brevik’s Angband obsession pretty early in the job, like summer ’94, and caught the bug shortly thereafter. When it was announced that we were going to try to do a version of Angband with graphics and sound, I was very happy about that.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Condor

Internal interest in making a roguelike update was high. Now they needed to find a publisher. They hoped to meet just such an individual in a few weeks when they attended the annual summer CES show to demo Justice League Task Force on Sega Genesis. The moment their plane touched down in Chicago, Dave, Max, and Erich hurried to the convention center. They weren’t scheduled to demo Justice League right away, so they hit the pavement in search of a publisher to bankroll Diablo. They received a cold reception.

At CES shows, we would go around and pitch these games, pitch Diablo, to everybody that would listen. And every single person that we talked to, their feedback was always the same: “RPGs [role-playing games] are dead.”

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

Dave, Max, and Erich couldn’t argue against the grim state of computer role-playing games. CRPGs had derived from Dungeons & Dragons and remained graphical interpretations of that decades-old formula: players drew maps on graph paper as they explored dungeons since most games did not generate maps automatically, virtual dice rolls determined whether players hit or missed when they attacked and how much damage they dealt in combat, and most games unfolded over turns. Many CRPGs also recycled graphics from older games, making newer titles look dated.

In contrast, other game genres took advantage of cutting-edge hardware such as video cards and CD-ROM. In 1993, developer Cyan released Myst, a graphical tour de force where players explored photorealistic worlds. Far more popular were the hordes of first-person shooters influenced by Doom. Casual gamers took one look at the archaic graphics of RPGs and passed them over in favor of games that satisfied their bloodlust and justified their investments in top-of-the-line computer hardware.

As developers of RPGs struggled to keep up with technology and gamer tastes, their games plummeted in quality.

In 1993, [Strategic Simulations, Inc.] published Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, a top-down [computer RPG] based on [publisher] TSR’s post-apocalyptic Dark Sun campaign. Despite an intuitive interface and intriguing setting, the game’s mediocre graphics, jerky animation, typos, and buggy code kept it out of the limelight.

-Matt Barton, Gamasutra.com

SSI eventually developed more than 30 [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons] games. […] Many were excellent, including Curse of the Azure Bonds and Eye of the Beholder.

But by the mid-’90s, SSI had begun to squander its license, producing title after title of buggy, forgettable games. […] The early ’90s were a creative drought for RPGs, and store shelves teemed with tedious, derivative titles.

-Lara Crigger, 1up.com

Dave, Max, and Erich could barely say “RPG” before publishers shooed them away as if they were contagious.

All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. Instead of taking these cool, quick, addictive game designs and making them have flashy, impressive graphics, they were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super small niche of super RPG geeks—which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.

So when Brevik mentioned these roguelike games, it was kind of a natural, “Yeah, let’s take that cool, addictive structure and modernize it. Let’s strip away the stuff that’s turning off a lot of game fans from RPGs.”

-Max Schaefer

With each rejection, Dave’s temper flared. These publishers weren’t gamers. They were suits. They didn’t get the appeal of battling hordes of demons, the thrill of incinerating undead with magic, and the excitement of seeing a mysterious new item, its magic properties unknown, clatter to the ground after hard-fought victories. Suits only saw numbers—production costs, development schedules, fiscal projections.

After hitting up almost every publisher, Dave, Max, and Erich made their way back to Sunsoft’s booth. What they found at the booth left them stunned.

We showed up at the Sunsoft booth very excited because our game was going to be shown off. So we went to the booth, and there was a Super Nintendo version of the game that we were making for the Sega Genesis.

And we were all dumbfounded. We’d never even talked to the guys; we never knew another version of it was being made. We were like, “What? There’s another developer making the same game on another platform?”

-David Brevik

Dave, Max, and Erich eyed Allen Adham and his team’s take on Justice League Task Force with interest.

I think there was a competitive vibe from the very first time we met the guys from Blizzard, when we were doing the Justice League Task Force projects. They were doing the Super Nintendo version, we were doing the Sega Genesis version, and it’s just natural to want to check out the other version and see how you’re doing and how they’re doing.

It was a good, vigorous competitiveness.

-Max Schaefer

Despite the hundreds of miles separating their studios and the disparate hardware of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, Condor’s and Blizzard’s interpretations of a fighting game stocked with superheroes looked and played remarkably similarly to one another. Dave and Allen clicked right away. The two lifelong gamers engaged in a dialogue about the state of games, their favorite titles, and their companies.

We got to chatting, and they said, “Yeah, we’re working on a PC game.” And I said, “Oh! A PC game? I love PC games! I don’t want to do console games. I want to do PC games.”

They said, “We’ve got a little booth. It’s this itty-bitty meeting room. You want to come take a look at the game?” The game that we saw was WarCraft.

-David Brevik

The Condor founders squeezed into a cramped suite with rickety walls and gathered around a computer. Allen fired up WarCraft. As he built up his settlement and directed his units in skirmishes, he listed off the game’s most prominent features—multiplayer modes, real-time gameplay, and story campaigns that let players learn more about the Humans and the Orc Horde.

I had no idea at that point that WarCraft would become a historically important game. It just looked cool. And they were really nothing at that point, either. They were just a bunch of guys who did the same thing we did, but they started earlier because they had a couple other titles under the belt by that point.

-Max Schaefer

Dave watched in awe. WarCraft was impressive enough, but it was Allen Adham’s passion for games that bowled him over. Allen wasn’t rattling off sales projections. He’d given WarCraft the green light because it was a game he and his friends at Blizzard Entertainment wanted to play. Those guys weren’t suits. They were their own audience. They were gamers.

***

Dave, Max, and Erich spent the return trip to the Bay Area talking about the convention. Justice League probably would not sell well since it would debut on aging hardware, and dozens of publishers had shot down their pitch for Diablo. On the bright side, they had made contact with Allen Adham, a developer whose passion for making games mirrored their own. That one connection made the trip a success.

Reality trampled their high spirits as soon as they set foot in the office. Crumpling under the weight of development costs and unsure of what the next generation of console hardware had in store, Sunsoft shuttered its U.S. and European studios and put the kibosh on several works in progress—including the Super Nintendo and Genesis versions of Justice League Task Force.

No one from Sunsoft had bothered to inform Condor or Blizzard about the publisher’s financial troubles. Suspicion mounted when Sunsoft began delaying payments to both developers. Just when it seemed like the fighting game might get buried with its publisher, Acclaim Entertainment swooped in and acquired the rights to publish Justice League and other Sunsoft games.

The transfer came with a few bumps, chiefly a missed milestone payment that slipped through the cracks while Sunsoft and Acclaim sorted out legal issues. Quietly, Dave, Max, and Erich slipped away to hit up friends and family for loans. Over time, Condor’s cash problems grew too large for personal loans to cover.

We were definitely running low on cash, and we didn’t know a whole lot about running businesses. We thought, Hey, it’d be okay if we didn’t send in our payroll taxes in some quarter. Because we’d plan to borrow it, get it from friends or something.

We didn’t get into serious trouble, but the taxman did start knocking on the door to say, “Hey, where the heck’s the money?” We had to scramble.

-Erich Schaefer

New games provided the perfect distraction from Condor’s mounting financial troubles. The team pestered Dave to get a copy of the WarCraft game the founders had seen at CES. They were also curious about Blizzard Entertainment. Who were these mysterious developers 400-some miles away, building an eerily similar version of the game they were creating?

The desire to play WarCraft bubbled over. Dave phoned Allen as he had numerous times since meeting him back in June and asked if Allen happened to have any spare copies of WarCraft lying around. Several copies of the game arrived a few days later and cut through the team’s work ethic as cleanly as an Orc Grunt’s axe cut through trees. Like the Blizzard guys down south, Condor’s crew enjoyed talking trash and swapping strategies just as much as building up a large force and rolling across the map to confront opposing factions.

After binging on WarCraft, Dave called Allen again to thank him for the game—and to run a question by him. Back at CES, Dave had mentioned to Allen that he and the Schaefers had put together a pitch for a computer RPG, a resurrection of the roguelike genre that had been popular on college campuses during the 1980s. Maybe, when Allen had time, he could hear Condor’s pitch for the game.

Allen confided that Blizzard needed to keep their heads down to finish WarCraft, which Davidson & Associates wanted on store shelves by Christmas. Once the game launched, he would love to hear more about Diablo.

***

In January 1995, Allen Adham and Pat Wyatt flew up to Redwood City to visit Condor.

Davidson definitely wanted us to work on more projects. One of my jobs after WarCraft [was finished] was to find more titles, so I went out and talked to lots and lots of developers.

I reached out to the developers of Pax Imperia, and we worked with them on Pax Imperia II, which ultimately we sold to another publisher because it wasn’t going to be a high-quality title.

-Pat Wyatt, vice president of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

Dave, Max, and Erich gave their guests a quick tour of the office and guided them down the hall to a small conference room they shared with other companies renting space in the office. They passed out Diablo’s design document to Allen and Pat, then gave a presentation from note cards that hit the game’s highlights: a turn-based dungeon crawler in a gothic setting featuring randomized dungeons, monsters, and items, with tentative plans to include multiplayer compatibility for two players.

The presentation didn’t even last an hour.

I’d say within the first hour of our presentation, I knew they were really in love with this idea because we were pitching the game to gamers, not executives. So many people who published games at that time were businessmen. That’s still true today. But the Blizzard guys were gamers first, businessmen second.

We were gamers running a business—first and foremost, that’s what we were. So talking the same language, loving the same kinds of games—that really got them frothing at the mouth. They were like, “Oh, these guys get it! Our companies mesh really well together. This is a great idea.” And we were like, “Yes! Finally, somebody understands what we’re trying to do!”

It was an instant mesh between the companies. Our philosophies seemed to be perfectly aligned. They got where we were going and what we were doing, and we were happy we had business. We were going to make an original PC game.

-David Brevik

Impressed, Allen and Pat promised to get the ball rolling on a publishing contract with Condor. As their plane took off, they talked over what Condor had shown them. They had only two concerns.

Allen and I went to Redwood City to check out the design presentation for Diablo. We thought it was a great idea, but the two things it needed to have were multiplayer and real-time gameplay.

There was just no question in our minds as we flew back from that trip that those were the things that had to be changed about the game to make it cool.

-Pat Wyatt [SQ2]

Chapter 8: The Velvet Hammer

It was our theory early on that you’ve got to get the best out of the people you hire, and making games is really, really rigorous and demanding. It’s mentally and physically demanding to make a competitive, innovative, good game. You have to [create] an atmosphere where that can happen.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

So the guy interviewing me, he’s got his feet up on the table, no shoes on, and I’m thinking, Yeah, this is what I want to do. I don’t want to work somewhere where I’ve got to wear a suit and a tie. I want to be lounging around with my shoes off playing video games.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Condor

We all pile into the kitchen because it’s the biggest space we have. People are sitting on the tables. Now we’re going to make the decision on whether Diablo is turn-based or real-time. I would say probably 90 percent of the team wants it real-time. Dave doesn’t. I don’t. But pretty much everybody else wanted it real-time.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

By the end of February 1995, Dave Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer had hammered out the final draft of their publishing contract with Blizzard Entertainment. Functioning as publisher, Blizzard would dole out $300,000 to fund Condor’s descent into Hell. Signing on the dotted line hit Dave like an adrenaline shot. Diablo, the game he’d dreamed of making since high school, was poised to rise from the depths of his imagination and become virtual reality. The boost faded as he and his partners assessed their situation.

Blizzard’s six-figure sum wouldn’t flood Condor’s bank account all at once. As per the standard agreement between publishers and developers, paychecks would trickle in as Condor met milestones over the one-year development they projected for their game. To meet those markers, they needed to hire more programmers and artists. To do that, they needed at least one additional project to fill the void left by Justice League Task Force, which the team had just wrapped up. As luck would have it, the guys knew just who to call for work.

Max and Erich had worked on a Super Nintendo version of Gordo 106 for [Nintendo publisher] DTMC. Matt Householder was their producer there, so when he was at 3DO, we were able to get some work from him to do a football game for the M2, the second generation 3DO machine.

We started working on that in the very early stages of the M2’s development, and the system was super advanced for its time. The graphics were unbelievable. At that time, they were way beyond anything else.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor [SQ1]

As a producer at The 3DO Company, Matt Householder’s job was to woo quality game developers by offering them lucrative development contracts in exchange for creating cutting-edge games for 3DO’s consoles. Dave, Max, and Erich set up a meeting with Householder to pitch just such a game—a 3D football title for the M2 featuring four-on-four contests set in fully rendered stadiums and a camera that zoomed along behind players to follow every teeth-rattling tackle and mad dash to the end zone. [SQ2]

Householder instantly saw the appeal. The advanced game would sack the droves of cartoony 2D football titles available on Nintendo and Sega systems. Plus, he knew the Condor team had the experience to pull it off. Dave Brevik had written Super High Impact for home consoles in just shy of three months while at Iguana Entertainment, and Condor had released a version of NFL Quarterback Club on the Game Boy and Game Gear handhelds earlier that year. Satisfied, he gave Condor the green light and offered a contract for $500,000 spread over several months of milestones.

Throwing the M2 project into the mix gave Condor three balls to juggle—the M2 football game tentatively titled NFLPA Superstars, a second edition of NFL Quarterback Club for the Game Boy and Game Gear portable systems, and Diablo. More projects meant more money, but they also meant more bookkeeping, a chore neither Dave, Max, nor Erich cared to undertake. They knew just the guy for the job.

In 1994, I had been advising Max and Erich and invested some money in Condor. In February 1995, I passed the California Bar, and I was trying to figure out how not to go work for a law firm. Condor needed someone to help come in and run the business side of things. I was a natural fit, so a couple of months later, I came in to run the business so they could focus on the games.

Condor being a small company, I had a great opportunity to get involved with game production as well. Everybody chipped in to do what was necessary to get the game done.

-Ken “Kenny” Williams, business director, Condor

Ken was a friend of Max’s and Erich’s. He came in as an investor in the company and helped us. We didn’t have anybody really working on our books. We didn’t even really keep books other than, “Wow, what’s our checking account look like?” and “Maybe we should write some of this down.”

It didn’t make much sense for us to become experts in business. It still doesn’t make sense. There are lots of people that can help out in doing those kinds of things, and it’s just best for us to get rid of all distractions so we can focus on creating a great product.

-David Brevik

After more consideration, the guys decided against spreading the workload across the whole team. To make significant progress on each game, they would need to divide their forces.

Diablo was very much up Dave Brevik’s alley, and Erich was always more of an RPG guy than I was. We played a lot of sports growing up, and I loved the idea of making a football game, so I definitely jumped at the chance to spearhead the M2 football game and make that happen.

At the same time, I knew that by doing that, we were helping to make Diablo happen. Diablo, for all of us, was the project we had the most emotional attachment to, just because it was our project and it was something new, something exciting; whereas with making a football game, you’re making a football game. There’s only so much you can do with it.

-Max Schaefer

In need of an artist, Max drafted Kelly Johnson, who had been working on Diablo characters alongside Michio Okamura and Tom Byrne, to animate football players for NFLPA Superstars. Dave and Rick Seis were busy writing ones and zeroes for all of the other projects, so Kelly vetted a friend of a friend, Brian Piltin, who had the programming chops to write the football game. While Brian and Kelly wrote code and animated athletes, Max architected stadiums and fielded calls from 3DO.

Dave added to Condor’s programming ranks when he reached out to Robin van der Wel, a buddy he’d known since high school. Robin had studied electrical engineering, but he’d taken enough programming courses in college to dive right into NFL Quarterback Club.

Brian, Robin, and Kenny got their feet in Condor’s door through a combination of savvy and personal contacts, but every other candidate needed more than a solid skill set to land a job at the growing company.

Certainly you needed to be able to execute the job. But early on, everybody had to approve you before you could get hired. We wanted a love of gaming, and therefore, a love of the job. Persistence typically goes along with that. We wanted people who wanted to work in games, and ideally, would stay through the good and bad times at the company.

Nothing bonds like a shared experience like that, like going through battle. That’s my metaphor for it: battle. There are some rough times, and there are some really, really amazing times.

-Rick Seis

Back in those days we didn’t have big contracts to make games, so we said, “Okay, who do we really need? We need a programmer; we need one more artist.” We didn’t even think about hiring designers. There were just programmers and artists.

Even bringing in a sound guy made us say, “Oh my God, that breaks the budget,” just to bring in a guy who wasn’t a programmer or an artist.

They were tough calls, and we didn’t always have the money. But the guys who kept expressing interest—Matt Uelmen and Eric Sexton are great examples—made us think, Yeah, these guys are going to be good because they’re just really interested. They seemed to really want to do it.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

Eric Sexton might well have bumped into Dave Brevik two years prior when, in 1993, he chanced upon the opportunity of a lifetime: an internship at Iguana Entertainment.

I went in for three days to do this animation test for them. At the end, they decided that my skills weren’t good enough to hire me, which was devastating because I really, really wanted to work there. I thought that’d be the best thing ever. It forced me to buckle down and turned me toward doing more computer-based art.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Condor

Sexton bounced back when a buddy hooked him up with a pirated version of 3D Studio, a program that artists used to render models and animations. Because the software was hacked, it came with no instructions. Determined to bring his skills up to snuff, he felt his way along and taught himself various commands and tools. When he needed a break from 3D Studio, he switched over to old standbys, Deluxe Paint and DAnimate, to fashion grisly animation reels. One of his favorite creations depicted a robot stomping after a fleeing human and blowing him into bloody bits. Before the scene fades out, torrents of rain wash the spreading puddle of blood down a nearby gutter.

In 1994, the same friend told Sexton about a job ad for a game artist at a start-up in Redwood City. Sexton thought about mailing off a few sketches, but dismissed the idea. Flexing his newly minted skills, he fired up DAnimate and rendered a 3D spaceship corridor bathed in neon blue light. Hours later, he saved the scene to a floppy disk, printed off his resume, and drove to the address listed in the newspaper ad.

I was just there to basically say, “Here’s my resume. You guys were close by, so I figured I’d hand deliver it.” They gave me an interview right there on the spot, saying, “Oh, hey, why don’t you just come on in?” They were all hanging out. A couple of guys were playing NHL ’94 on the Sega Genesis.

I went into one of the rooms, and it was hard to keep track of who was who because there were so many people coming in saying, “Nice to meet you.” They’re sitting there looking at my art and critiquing my art, and I was so nervous, but everyone was so nice.

-Eric Sexton

Sexton left the interview feeling upbeat. For a week, he stayed close to the phone, expecting a call. None came.

They didn’t hire me for another year. I think I called them up once a week, saying, “Hey, how’s it going? I’m still here!” At one point they said, “We really want to hire you, we just can’t right now. Get back in touch with us every so often, and we’ll let you know what’s up.”

I took that as a cue to call them every single week, and at some point they told me, “Hey, why don’t you check in, like, once a month?” I might’ve slowed calling to every other week.

-Eric Sexton

One year later in 1995, Condor had drummed up the resources to bring on Sexton as an artist. He showed up for his first day of work excited to dive in, but found a blank space in the main room where a desk should have sat. Rick Seis and the rest of the gang explained to Sexton what was required of him on his first day.

You would take the VW van that Max owned, and you’d go to Desk Depot, and it was just old desks. You would pick your own desk, haul it up with everybody’s help, and you’d just drop your desk down, and that’s where you worked.

No cube farms or any of that crap, so communication was awesome. You just looked over at someone and said, “Hey.”

-Rick Seis

Trundling to and from the furniture store, Sexton dropped his desk in an open space in Condor’s main room and joined the party. He started on the Game Boy version of NFL Quarterback Club as a pixel pusher, herding pixels together to create graphics. Like the rest of the guys, Sexton loved the open atmosphere at Condor. When he got stuck, he could spin around in his chair and ask for help. If he needed a break, he got up and moseyed around to see how his friends were getting along. He wasn’t the only drifter. Matt Uelmen was more likely to be found milling around the main room than closed up in his closet-sized music studio writing tunes.

I’ve always been one of the worst roamers. Generally, even when I’m at my most productive, it usually happens in one intense three-hour chunk. For the rest of the day, I’ll kick around ideas or work on smaller-scale things, but I’m able to be a major distraction for everyone else.

This is partially why Runic Games doesn’t mind having me a thousand miles away from the studio in my current job.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Condor

Condor’s ability to bring on extra bodies afforded Dave the opportunity to work with his younger brother, Pete—if Pete could prove himself first. After graduating from Chico State with a business degree, Pete moved in with Dave and his wife, Wendy, until he could find a job. Dave’s stories about the life and times of a game developer inspired Pete to approach Dave and ask if there might be a spot for him at Condor. To test Pete’s resolve, Dave enrolled his little brother in programming boot camp.

Dave would challenge me: “Here, write this.” I would come up with algorithms and functions to figure out how to get things to work. My first goal was to make a game like Centipede. After I programmed that, I made a Pac-Man game.

-Peter Brevik, programmer, Condor

True to his word, Dave offered his brother a temp position. Pete became a regular around the office, hanging out with the guys and sharpening his programming skills while the others banged out milestone goals.

I looked forward to it every day. We would carpool together, and we would go to hockey games at night together, and work together. It was a great time.

-Peter Brevik [SQ3]

The team stabilized gradually and fell into a routine that oscillated between hard work and hard play. Several times a day, Robin van der Wel and Dave donned their chef hats to bake EPROMs, erasable microchips that developers used to test-drive their Game Boy projects.

The microchip had a little window on the top. If you shot it with ultraviolet light, the light would remove all the data. So we put the microchips on this little platform, we’d stick it on this ultraviolet sheet, set the timer for around 30 minutes, and sit there.

It was like making toast or something. Tick, tick, tick—ding!

-David Brevik

You couldn’t just test out a little bit of code and run the program and see what happened. You really had to think about as many tasks as possible ahead of time. In that way, you had to be a little more organized. You couldn’t just change a line of code and re-run it.

-Robin van der Wel, programmer, Condor

Nearby, Max and Kelly crafted intricately detailed football players and mammoth stadiums while Brian Piltin fought tooth and nail against the M2’s nebulous system architecture.

For me, working on the M2 game was tough. I had to get out my college physics book to work on that game. I remember the PlayStation coming out. Sony had invested a lot of money into writing libraries to make the programming easier, but with the M2, there wasn’t much in the way of supporting code for that system.

It’s funny because I think the whole course of 3DO’s legacy would have changed had they just come out with good libraries at the same time they came out with the hardware.

-Brian Piltin, programmer, Condor

Anyone tired of banging their head against a problem had plenty of ways to let off steam. Some of the guys drifted between desks to shoot the breeze or ask for advice. Others blasted demons in Doom, picked off aliens in X-COM, or crowded around the Sega Genesis to play or cheer on hotly contested bouts of NHL ’94.

All day, we would sit around and play NHL ’94, pretending like we were working. We had a schedule up on the wall. Different people played on different days. We tried to spread it out, make the tournaments last a little while.

There were specific moves we developed that would score most of the time. Almost all of the time. We had nicknames for every single one of the moves: “Oh, you straight-lined me!”

-David Brevik

Max, toward the end, actually started to beat me. He’s the only one that could beat me. I dominated for the most part. Dave would never come close, but Dave could always beat Max. Always. Whatever that was, whatever their styles were, Dave could always beat Max, but my style was always counter to Dave’s style. Always.

Erich and Max continued to move up, and yet Max would still get beat by Dave. So when tournaments would come, I’d sit there chanting, “Please, Dave, beat Max! Please, Dave, beat Max!”

-Rick Seis

The team’s antics spilled outside the office. Around lunchtime, the hungry gamers piled into Max’s beat-up Vanagon and headed to establishments of questionable, but affordable, quality. Burger King was a cheap but serviceable favorite. Other haunts included The Pelican, dubbed “The Smell-ican” for its iffy service and dicey food, and Amelia’s, known around the office as the “house of mediocrity.”

We did everything together while at work. We’d go to lunch, and it wasn’t like, “Ugh, we’ve got to go to a company lunch.” Everybody wanted to do that. So we’d all go to lunch and inevitably the Schaefers would bring their newspaper, and everybody would pick a section and just eat lunch while reading the paper, with your buddies around you, and not much conversation would happen.

I’d say, “What sections are left?” Everybody wanted Sports or Business, and I’d end up getting Living or something.

-Rick Seis

When the clock chimed five, few people called it a day—sometimes because their tasks demanded that they stay, but usually because they didn’t see any reason to leave.

We liked coming to work because it didn’t feel like work. It felt like a club where you went to hang out with your friends.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Condor

We hired people one by one as we found good people. We wanted to keep the group together, and I think having a steady group of people that worked together for a long time was something we valued pretty early on.

-Max Schaefer

***

While the team plugged away on the projects that kept the bills paid, Dave and Erich spent hours each day in Dave’s office hashing out Diablo’s design. Their first order of business was to retire the game’s design document to a desk drawer. They had written the document to attract a publisher with deep pockets. It had served its purpose.

I would say our style was iterative. A lot of developers say that, but I don’t think they mean it to the same degree that we did, which was: get something on-screen and work on that until it’s fun, decide why it’s fun, and do more of it, or decide why it’s not fun and do less.

It was really about starting with small moments, honing those small moments, and then building a game from that. That style meant we could change things very fast.

-Erich Schaefer

Whipping up a whole dungeon crawling with monsters and treasures seemed a lofty starting point, so they picked out the elements that made up the game’s backbone and built it up from there.

The very first thing we did was, Erich made one rough room out of tiles. We had a crude tiling system and sprite cutting tools in place, then our very first animations followed.

Those were the very first objectives: getting something on-screen and then playing with the sizes and perspectives to get the action to look right, as well as making sure the squared tile area was based largely on X-COM as far as the way that game did its tiles.

-David Brevik

Dave reverse-engineered X-COM to gain a better understanding of how it ticked. Gameplay took place over a grid of tiles, and each character and object occupied a single tile. Dave also studied X-COM’s selection box, a tool players used to move troops around using the mouse. He decided that Diablo would utilize the tile-based grid as well as mouse-driven commands, which made the game easy to grasp. With a single mouse click, players could traverse the dungeon tile by tile, pick up items, open menus, and whack monsters.

Also like X-COM, actions, such as movement and combat, would unfold over turns, much like a game of chess.

We fiddled with all sorts of things, but basically it was, “my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn.” We were going to have items that boosted speed, and then we said, “Well, if we’re going to boost speed, we should probably break this down into points.” So we said, “Okay, if moving from here to here costs 10 points, then moving diagonally should cost 14.”

We ended up doing this whole point system to try and get you to move, and it started to get pretty complicated.

-David Brevik

A distinctive personality emerged as the game matured. During its early stages, Diablo had no multiplayer components that provided safety in numbers. Players entered the dungeon alone, armed with their wits, a handful of gold coins, and any magical items they found along their journey. Caution, planning, and an eye for tactics were the keys to survival. Players were safe as long as they stood still, giving them plenty of time to sort through their inventories and plan their next move. Invariably, though, they would have to take a step, and the monsters—dusty skeletons, bipedal goat men, and demons bent and clawed and ravenous for flesh—emerged to greet them. Heroes who charged in quickly found themselves boxed in. Since each tile held only a single character, surrounded heroes couldn’t slip away. They carved a path to freedom or died trying.

Diablo’s single room slowly spread outward, growing into small dungeons where nightmares walked and treasures sat twinkling. The team’s excitement grew as pieces such as the first player character fell into place.

While I was working on NFL Quarterback Club, the other artists were just getting started doing some preliminary models and getting characters made. They had the first Warrior player character, and he looked like a big guy in a tin can suit: all chrome, super shiny armor.

At the time, it looked amazing, but in hindsight, I think the more Mad Max, one-shoulder-pad, down-to-earth look ended up being a much better direction to go with him.

-Eric Sexton

Trips to the kitchen to fill up on caffeine and munchies became powwows to discuss progress and new ideas. Karin Colenzo, a friend of Dave’s from college who came aboard as an office manager to supplement her paycheck as a counselor, started out collecting resumes from applicants and filing miscellaneous paperwork. She quickly learned that anyone and everyone at Condor was invited to submit ideas.

Everybody did have a say, and everybody wanted everybody’s perspective, even mine. They’d say, “Okay, you’re not the hardcore gamer who programs or who does art for us, so you have a casual perspective. What do you think of this?” and “What do you think would make the game fun?” They actually wanted my opinion, and that was kind of neat.

We wanted to make a really great game; we wanted it to succeed. Everybody had that common goal, and everybody had the same passion for what was going on. There would be days where we’d meet in the kitchen early in the morning, and someone would bring in doughnuts. We’d eat donuts and talk about the game, or ideas, where the game could go.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Condor [SQ4]

Even in its embryonic stage, Diablo was fun and rewarding. Limping through a dungeon with a single hit point remaining only to stumble across a pack of monsters, formulate a plan that accounted for every eventuality, and emerge alive and in possession of a shiny new weapon or ornament brought a rush of satisfaction.

Doubly satisfying was the reality that the other games paid the bills, but Diablo was all theirs. There were wrinkles in the turn-based system that needed ironing, but once they smoothed out the mechanics, Diablo would make for an eerie, deeply strategic, and damn fun experience.

After playing an early build, Blizzard Entertainment didn’t see things quite the same way.

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.”

-Duane Stinnett, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

When Allen Adham had approached Condor with an offer to publish Diablo, he had been adamant that the game proceed in real-time, not a slower turn-based system where players could take as long as they pleased to think their way out of predicaments. Every step forward in Diablo, every moment spared to paw through backpacks or scout ahead, should carry a do-or-die feel.

Dave, Max, and Erich nodded along to Allen’s arguments but refused to budge.

I think we had some initial reaction that we didn’t want to be told what to do. That was a characteristic of our company: we were fiercely independent. We wanted to sink or swim on our own merits, and we definitely didn’t want to like someone else’s idea.

-Max Schaefer

Allen and his team argued that real-time experiences were more intense and memorable, pointing to their WarCraft strategy game as an example. The best WarCraft players survived and thrived because they made calculated decisions under intense pressure when enemy forces stormed their base from all sides. Dave, Max, and Erich volleyed back by reminding their publisher that Diablo was intended as a rebirth of the dungeon hacks Dave had become addicted to during college. Rogue, Moria, and other dungeon hacks flowed according to turns, so Diablo would as well.

By the late spring of 1995, neither Condor nor Blizzard had given an inch. Allen decided to unsheathe his most potent negotiating weapon.

There was this thing Allen did: instead of forcefully trying to make his points, Allen would bring out the velvet hammer, and with a slow tap, tap, tap, he would negotiate all the changes that needed to happen to Diablo.

You can’t just boss people around and say, “Hey, you’re making a game, but we want you to make lots of changes to it,” because game developers by and large don’t listen to stuff like that. They want to do their own ideas.

-Pat Wyatt, vice president of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

Allen tap-tap-tapped his way to a compromise: why not ask the Condor team what they wanted for Diablo? Dave and the Schaefers agreed and called a company meeting that same day, a Friday. The team filed into the kitchen, taking up chairs and perching on top of tables and counters. A spirited debate ensued.

I remember the bosses having a meeting and saying, “What does everyone think about making this real-time?” At the time, turn-based was still really popular. It was a viable way to go. There’s something to be said about being able to sit back, eat a sandwich, and click through the game as you want.

-Eric Sexton

Our open minds were our greatest advantage at that very early phase. The thing to remember is that real-time wasn’t even in the picture for the computer RPGs we grew up on, like the roguelikes. So even though we could all recognize real-time as an inevitability, to be told “the future is here” was still a little shocking.

-Matt Uelmen

It was like, “Hold on. We’ve got to consider what real-time means.” It means you’re not going to be able to sit there messing with your inventory when you’re in the middle of fighting monsters, so we had to think about how it would really impact the game design, what we’re trying to do, and what the play experience would be like.

But for every objection that we would come up with, there was a pretty good counter.

-Max Schaefer

There were enough people that were passionate about going real-time because they thought—and rightfully so—that turn-based was old. You could make arguments that there were still turn-based games out there, but in general, it felt old.

So enough people felt strongly enough about going real-time, and so did Blizzard South, which added considerable heft to the decision.

-Rick Seis

When talk died down, the guys called for a vote. An overwhelming majority spoke up in favor of real-time. The bosses adjourned the meeting and conferred in Dave’s office. Democracy was all well and good, but there were technical restrictions to consider. They called up Bill Roper, their producer down at Blizzard, to discuss the situation.

Blizzard South suggested we make it real-time after we sent them the first build that was this turn-based version. We argued, “No, we’re making this game.” But they finally wore us down—it probably only took an hour or so over the phone—to the point where we said, “Okay, we’ll give it a try, but it’s going to be really hard work to do. It’s going to take a lot of time, and we’re going to need some more money for the project.”

-Erich Schaefer

After everyone left for the weekend, Dave sat down at his computer and pulled up Diablo’s code. He scanned through and hit on something. The game was written so every action—moving, fighting, quaffing a healing potion—took up a certain amount of time. Monsters moved immediately after the player initiated a command. Once the time to perform an action expired, the game turned back the clock and the player-monster turn cycle began anew. All he needed to do was whittle the time between actions down to nothing.

Dave began to type. The sunlight filtering in through his window grew faint, then faded to night, leaving him suffused in the glow of his monitor. Occasionally, a breeze sighed through the window, rustling the blinds and fluttering the hockey posters hanging over his two desks. He never once looked up.

A few hours later, he built a new version of the game, took up his mouse, and played.

I can remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was sitting and I was coding the game, and I had a Warrior with a sword, and there was a skeleton on the other side of the screen. I’d been working on all this code to make characters move smoothly, doing a whole bunch of testing, and we’d talked about how the controls would work.

We wanted it to be visceral. Click and swing, click and swing. We wanted it to automatically happen: if you clicked on the monster, your character would go over there and swing.

I remember very vividly: I clicked on the monster, the guy walked over, and he smashed this skeleton, and it fell apart onto the ground.

The light from heaven shone through the office down onto the keyboard. I said, “Oh my God, this is so amazing!” I knew it was not only the right decision, but that Diablo was just going to be massive. It was really the most defining moment of my career, as well as for that genre of gaming.

A new genre was born in that moment, and it was really quite incredible to be the person coding it and creating it. I was just there by myself coding it up. It was pretty incredible.

-David Brevik

Chapter 9: The Condor Test

When we were making the game, we said, “Whatever we make, from the smallest potion to monsters and environments, we want to achieve gothic horror.” We didn’t see a lot of that in the gaming world at the time. We didn’t want to do anything that was known.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Condor

There was always a kind of “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do” guidance from Dave, Max, and Erich, but everybody could contribute their ideas.

-Kenny Williams, business director, Condor

I loved X-COM’s random elements. I wasn’t relying on some designer to make a fun level. It was my own level. It became mine instead of somebody else’s plan for me.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

Dave’s overnight conversion to real-time did not put the issue of Diablo’s play style to rest. On Monday morning, the team returned to work and put Dave’s experiment to the “Condor test.” On each monitor, a hero materialized in a cathedral room made of blue-gray stone. One by one, the gamers clicked the floor some distance ahead, and their heroes set off right away, shields raised and swords hefted, ready to cleave through bone.

It was the fast reaction of the mouse click. There was no pause before your guy started to shamble over there. We iterated on that over and over and really just nailed a feel that wasn’t in most games at the time.

We aimed to feel crisp, and your character would do exactly what you wanted when you clicked.

-Erich Schaefer

Skeletons ambled into view from the edge of each screen, swarming the adventurers and swinging cold steel. Hunched over their monitors, the guys clicked frantically, shattering the brittle undead. When the battle ended, the gamers broke into grins.

In turn-based games, you weren’t concerned with how fast you had to move to get from point A to point B, or navigating under duress as I call it. That’s not necessary in a turn-based game; you can take your time.

In a turn-based game, when you win, you say, “Cool, my plan worked. I took time, I deliberated, I made a plan, and it worked out.” But in a real-time, it’s, “Wow! I won!” It’s visceral. You’re in the moment.

-Kelly Johnson

Over a weekend, Dave Brevik sat down and got the game converted. The game was running in real-time basically over a weekend, and it was just amazing. I remember saying, “I can’t believe we thought we were going to keep this turn-based.”

-Eric Sexton, artist, Condor [SQ1]

For Condor’s gamers, the rush of adrenaline from smashing skeletons to bits closed the book on the real-time-versus-turn-based debate. Both versions of the game had started the same way and been put to the same test: a hero, a room, and a monster. Diablo played over turns was more thoughtful, but Diablo in real-time was faster and more visceral. It was more fun.

Alternating between playing and discussing the game for the rest of the day, the guys came to the same realization that had hit Dave the night he coded the conversion: the simple act of clicking the mouse, and the ability to see and feel the snappy feedback as heroes set off to carry out commands, was a huge part of what made the real-time prototype so appealing. As development continued, clicking became the nucleus of the Diablo experience.

We were always going for a tactile feel, a crunchy feel we called it. I think it was also helped by the skeleton, which was probably our first monster.

The feeling when you hit him and he shattered, which was a sound effect Uelmen made just by dropping pencils—the whole [sequence] was so satisfying and set the bar for the rest of the monsters and combat.

-Erich Schaefer

If [we couldn’t have gotten] the “click to move and fight” mechanic to feel fun and satisfying, we would not have been able to get the non-hardcore players to play long enough to get them hooked on the leveling up and item collection [parts of the] game.

It’s what made Diablo so accessible to a larger audience, including people who normally didn’t play RPGs or PC games in general.

-Michio Okamura [SQ2]

***

Condor began the process of establishing Diablo’s artistic vision in early 1995. While Dave wrote code and Max managed NFLPA Superstars, Erich guided the artists in the creation of monsters to haunt Diablo’s halls. Rather than steer his guys in a particular direction, Erich encouraged them to take the ball and run with it. No artist ran harder than Michio.

Usually, I would sit down with a whole lot of paper and do a bunch of sketches. I’d generate maybe 20 pages or so, and we’d sit down as a team and pick out the ones we liked, and I’d further define them.

Sometimes Erich would have an idea, like, “I want a fat demon.” I’d sit down and create my design of what I thought a fat demon would be. Then he’d say, “We need a flying bat demon.” I’d go create one.

-Michio Okamura

Michio would come up with reams and reams of drawings, so it was fun to get a bunch of drawings and just say, “Okay, this looks really cool, but this guy has a cooler sword, so let’s combine those drawings.”

I think that was some of the most fun collaborative art stuff we did at the time.

-Erich Schaefer

Straying from their design document, the three bosses decided that Diablo would offer a single hero character instead of three. Armed with a pen and sketchbook, Michio mocked up his idea for the hero—a knight wrapped in steel mail. Early on, Michio and the other artists realized that building characters on the computer would not come as easily. Diablo would display graphics in 2D by first paring down three-dimensional models. Condor’s artists could render out 2D art in games, but building 3D models was beyond their skill set.

To help Condor get a pipeline for 3D art production up and running, Allen Adham sent two of his artists, Duane Stinnett and Justin Thavirat, to Redwood City.

They had roughs of their character drawings, and we kind of went through and built the art, swapped components, just tutored them on how to get their pipeline going and make the games work. We showed them some of the things that we had learned by being self-taught and from going through WarCraft and WarCraft II.

-Duane Stinnett, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Over a single month, Duane and Justin took Michio and the other Condor artists on a whirlwind tour through modeling and animating 3D characters. Michio threw himself into the lessons.

I loved being at work. I spent most of my time working. I played some games while we were doing Justice League. By the time we got to Diablo, it was all work.

I remember being pissed off at times because I’d be sitting there working while everyone was playing Quake together in the office, thinking, If I don’t get my models done and ready to start animating, there’d be people sitting around unable to do work. So I always felt like I had to be ahead of everybody else.

-Michio Okamura

Coming in on weekends and staying on weeknights long after most of the guys had gone home, Michio slowly pieced together models of his characters. His first creation was the clunky, bulky knight. He considered it. Dave, Max, and Erich would probably give it a thumbs-up. Invariably, though, they would ask him, “What do you think of it?”

Michio scrapped the model and started from scratch. Days later, a tall man with long, dark hair and tattered clothing emerged. With the model complete, Michio handed it off to the other artists to animate.

We had this armored guy we got from Blizzard, one of the WarCraft models. Tom [Byrne] went on vacation for a week, and we hadn’t made much progress on the [hero’s] walk cycle. So I said, “Let me take a crack at it.”

And in one day, I made him walk. After that, I got put on animation. That’s how I became an animator.

-Kelly Johnson

Diablo’s hero was a blank slate. Rather than select a fighter, thief, or magician, players defined their hero by defeating enemies and earning points to spread across attributes, such as strength, magic, and dexterity. Dropping points into strength let players wear heavier armor and wield bigger weapons such as great axes and two-handed swords. Favoring dexterity increased their accuracy in combat and archery, while boosting the magic stat enabled them to learn advanced spells. Or, if players wanted, they could scatter their points across all attributes to create well-rounded heroes.

No matter the direction players chose for their hero, they all began their journey on the outskirts of the troubled town of Tristram.

We had this idea of this medieval town, and we wanted it to be a darker, more gothic, grim kind of place.

-Erich Schaefer [SQ3]

As the town’s architect, Erich set out to create a town perpetually cloaked in twilight. Dirt paths meandered between skeletal trees and farmhouses. All but a few homes sat empty; their inhabitants had either fled or been snatched from their beds by demons. Those who remained huddled in doorways; lanterns inside their shops and homes framed them in warm light that pushed the night away.

The cathedral looming over Tristram from the north was the source of the town’s fear. Red light poured out from windows and the open doorway, running over the ground like spilled blood.

I had been to Europe and really liked the small, medieval churches out there. When we started to make Diablo, the first thing I made was the church. I made it based on a book that had some Spanish churches in it. The terrain around it in the book was kind of similar to Tristram’s: grass, kind of rolling but kind of broken up. I think that set the tone.

I remember shrinking the church down a couple times because when we first put it in the game, the walls were just too high, and you couldn’t see the ruined roof or the red light coming out.

-Erich Schaefer

With his main themes established, Erich asked his artists to create townsfolk to see to the player’s every need. Griswold the blacksmith bought, sold, and repaired armor and weapons, while Pepin the healer patched up wounds and sold healing potions. Players who followed a forked brook that ran northeast came upon a rickety old shack that belonged to Adria, a witch ostracized by the community due to her stock of magical scrolls, books, potions, and staves.

One thing that brought Tristram together for me was the witch’s shack. That looked cool with the light spilling out through all the walls. I kind of tweaked the dusky nighttime setting of the scene to make that stand out.

-Erich Schaefer

Near the end of Diablo’s development, Erich realized the town was missing a storyteller who could pass along the game’s lore.

We were offering two fans the opportunity to get their names into the game. The names that won were “Deckard Cain” and something “Messerschmidt”.

At first we laughed at such a crazy name: Deckard Cain. We weren’t sure if it was made up or not. In any case, the name grew on us, and by happenstance, came at a great time, right after we identified the need for a narrator-type [character] to drive the story along.

-Erich Schaefer

With the storyteller’s name set in stone, all that was missing was the storyteller himself. Kelly Johnson, by that time finished with his work on NFLPA Superstars, eagerly volunteered.

Erich Schaefer said, “We need a guy in town who’s going to be a storyteller.” The only thing I was told was, “He’s a storyteller.” A lot of times we just went off a word. We’d get a word or two that described what Dave, Max, and Erich wanted, and they trusted us to come up with something. And we did.

I made Deckard Cain, from thin air. Erich assigned me to make Deckard Cain and all I was given as a description was that he was going to be the storyteller for the game. I was given no physical description to work on, so I made him black.

Back in the mid-90s, there were almost no black characters in games, so when given the opportunity to make a character, I made him black. For the time, it was considered very radical.

-Kelly Johnson [SQ4]

The sagely storyteller always greeted players warmly, inviting them to “stay awhile and listen.” Soaking up Cain’s myths and legends in the heart of Tristram’s perpetual twilight went a long way toward setting the proper mood, but it was the soundtrack Matt Uelmen composed for the town that clinched it.

I told Ken Williams I needed actual musical gear. It [composing Diablo’s soundtrack] was really a process of grinding until things stuck. The first couple of months of attempts were pretty bad, though I think I knew I wanted to have acoustic guitar as a centerpiece for any kind of town setting.

The main piece of gear was an Ensoniq ASR-10 [keyboard sampler]. That was the core tool for the making of that soundtrack, and we actually got a good discount on it, because Ensoniq was trying to market sound cards in that era, and so developers could buy their musical gear near wholesale prices.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Condor

Using the sampler, Uelmen could record himself playing different instruments, then rearrange the recordings into custom tracks. To get an idea for the mood he needed to set, Uelmen studied the atmospheric disparity between dungeons and towns. Down in the dark, danger reared its head at a moment’s notice. Up in town, players let down their guard and moseyed around.

Daily, Uelmen walked the shore along the marina. Stretching out with his twelve-string, he watched boats bob along the water and strummed, playing with different sounds and moods.

I think the sound of the 12-string dictated a good deal of the approach Tristram’s tune ended up having. The style of it was really more created by what it couldn’t be: it couldn’t be too overtly country or bluegrass, it couldn’t be too obviously Latin, and I didn’t want something that was too faux-medieval, so it ended up somewhere in between all of those things.

-Matt Uelmen

This sounds dorky, but music is almost spiritual, a soulful movement that resonates with all of us. Having music that sets a mood will ensure pushing an experience over the top. It can either make or break something.

If you were to go into Tristram and hear happy-go-lucky music, it just wouldn’t work. It’s like a horror movie: it’s all about the atmosphere, the music, the sound, and how that creates feeling.

I thought Matt did a perfect job of balancing dark, eerie, moody, and a little bit of light because of the string guitar. It’s got kind of that feeling of lightness to the tone, but it’s also kind of sad and disturbing, kind of haunting.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor [SQ5]

Uelmen’s final product washed over players each time they set foot in Tristram to repair armor, hawk goods they didn’t need, browse new wares, and let Pepin heal their hurts. Inevitably, they would have to leave Tristram’s fading daylight and descend into the dungeons beneath the church.

***

Like a magician observing peers, Dave Brevik had played enough roguelikes to understand how they pulled off their best trick. Roguelikes didn’t actually generate different dungeons. They generated one dungeon over and over using a random configuration of rooms and corridors, like using the same LEGO blocks to construct buildings of varying shapes and sizes. Players couldn’t tell the difference. Classic roguelikes made dungeons out of strings of text characters; it was up to the player’s imagination to decide if she was plundering a crypt, a cave, or a vast wilderness. Instead of recycling text-based graphics, Diablo would make dungeons by clicking together colored tiles.

To prevent players from growing bored of seeing the same tiles over and over, Dave, Max, and Erich decided on sixteen levels evenly divided over four environments: the cathedral, the catacombs beneath, a series of caverns, and an outpost of Hell.

Designing Diablo’s dungeons stemmed from my early D&D stuff. I liked to create maps. I had in my head a good sense of how a dungeon should flow. Then I’d think, “How do I create a randomly generated one?”

Each level had its own algorithm, its own way of forming together. I was working with Rick Seis on that at the time.

-Erich Schaefer

For the interior of the church, Erich fashioned high arched walls lined with grating, pillars that stretched up to shadows, storerooms holding bookshelves and shrines, and long corridors that connected cavernous chambers—all built from individual tiles like squares on graph paper. As they assembled the levels, Erich and Rick hit on certain pieces that should not be allowed to link together.

For our types of dungeons, as long as there’s an entrance to any room you make, you can get out. That’s all that matters. But that’s the tricky part: you could wall yourself in; you could make weird turns that didn’t make sense.

The algorithm had to be refined as we went along. To me, that’s what art means as far as programming goes: trying to figure out an algorithm that makes a dungeon look great.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

To establish construction rules, Rick wrote a program to test DRLG, short for dynamic random level generation. The program crunched Rick’s algorithms and printed out maps composed of symbols that stood for walls, doors, and stairs, resembling levels from the roguelikes that had influenced Diablo. [SQ6] Together, Rick and Erich weeded out algorithms that generated anomalies, such as inaccessible rooms.

For the cathedral tier of dungeons, we’d place two or three giant chambers, connect them with hallways, then have little offshoots out of the other sides of the chambers. We’d iterate on that and work together until it came out to something fun.

-Erich Schaefer [SQ7]

As Erich and Rick became more experienced, Erich painted tiles depicting wall tapestries and other ornate designs that Rick worked into the algorithms. He first verified that an area could receive a decoration—say, a bare patch of wall tiles that didn’t collide with grating or a door—and then planted it. Over time, the dungeons evolved from bare, sterile rooms to themed areas that felt ripe with history.

In between building dungeons, Erich and Condor’s growing team of artists defined the monsters that might or might not appear on each floor of the dungeon. The entire process was democratic and collaborative. Any artist, even new recruits like Ben Haas and Patrick “Patty” Tougas, could pitch ideas, build models and animations, and propose attacks based on a monster’s look. Skeletons and zombies shuffled around the cathedral and crawled out of coffins. Winged fiends, Michio’s flying bat demon, darted in to take quick bites of hero flesh. Skittish goblins called Fallen talked big but scattered when nearby allies fell. Known around the Condor office as “the sneaky demon,” the Hidden was a hunched, hairless enemy that materialized out of thin air in front of players. [SQ8]

When they hired individuals, they hired them for their creativity and what they could do, and they let them do that. We would say, “It would be cool if the creature could do this.”

Then we’d go to Erich with all these concepts, and he’d say, “Oh, that’s cool. And that’s cool, too. Okay, explain to me why it’s like this?” We’d explain it, and he’d say, “Okay, let’s do it,” and off we went.

-Patrick Tougas, artist, Condor [SQ9]

One of the things Erich was really good at was getting people to open up, talk about their ideas, and share them.

He did things in a very natural grassroots way where you could talk to him one-on-one, and he’d come back and tell you, after he’d thought about it, why it would work or wouldn’t work, and why we should give it a try when we weren’t sure.

-Michio Okamura

Populating each floor with random assortments of enemies added a deep level of tactical gameplay to Diablo. Players had to take advantage of their surroundings, such as firing arrows and spells through grated walls, filtering hordes of monsters through doorways, or rushing out of a room and slamming the door behind them when they got overwhelmed—as long as the doorway wasn’t clogged with bodies. The hero’s slow, plodding walk also affected gameplay.

Diablo had more tactical gameplay because many of the monsters would move at pretty much the same speed as the player. You could wake up one or two monsters, and that’s as much as you wanted to do.

You didn’t want to wake up a whole level of guys. You’d almost instantly die if you did. I don’t think it was as mass market a style of play as what we did with Diablo II.

-Erich Schaefer

To appeal to gamers from all backgrounds, Diablo stripped away RPG tropes unrelated to killing monsters and finding cool treasures. At the start of most computer RPGs, players often spent hours choosing a class, a race, and tweaking starting values. For Diablo, Condor didn’t want players getting bogged down in agonizing over stats and settings. New players typed in a name for their hero, pressed enter, and appeared in Tristram moments later.

Interaction with game elements was just as simple. Every critical action in the game was performed by clicking the mouse: click to attack, click to move, click to pick up items, click to talk to vendors in town.

Every once in a while, Dave would shut his door and evaluate the game, and one of the ways he’d do that is play the game one-handed. And we’d make changes based on that.

That was part of our goal: to make things so easy your mom could play it.

-Rick Seis

Our goal was to make a role-playing game that didn’t require a whole lot of thought, that was just entertaining and fun to play. I think most other RPGs, even if we liked them, were pretty in-depth and geeky: a lot of decision trees and dialogue and stuff that we wanted to skip.

I think our stab at action-RPG was just the right thing to do.

-Erich Schaefer

Players could kick their feet up and click their way through Hell with a single hand, but one surprise encounter early on was engineered to demonstrate that Diablo was easy to pick up but difficult to master. Every now and then, the game randomly planted a square room somewhere on the second level of the dungeon, always out in the middle of a larger chamber. [SQ10] The isometric camera perspective gave players a full view of rotted corpses hanging from hooks adorning the edifice’s walls, and a floor carpeted in blood and gristle. As soon as curious players threw open the small room’s door, a giant named the Butcher charged out swinging a cleaver and shouting, “Ah, fresh meat!” [SQ11]

Some games tried to follow that kind of path: introducing something early on in a game that’s accessible, and yeah, you can open that door, but maybe you shouldn’t just yet. It’d be one thing if we’d forced you to face the Butcher, but the game doesn’t force you to face him.

-Kelly Johnson [SQ12]

That was the whole beauty of Diablo. You could say, “Well, I can’t beat this guy, so I’m going to go quest for a while, then come back.”

-Patrick Tougas [SQ13]

Players quickly discovered that fighting monsters was like pulling the lever on a virtual slot machine. Upon defeat, some monsters simply slumped to the ground. On other occasions, players hit the jackpot: gold, weapons, armor, or some other trinket popped out of a monster’s corpse and clattered to the ground. It was the odds of hitting the jackpot, the possibility of finding a new blade or a ring that boosted strength by twenty points, that transformed PC gamers into Diablo junkies.

I think a loot system starts with a brainstorm of, “What would be cool to find?” The first thing we came up with was, you get a sword, and then we add +1 damage modifier [that the game randomly attaches to swords]. Then we can create a +2 damage [modifier].

We just kind of extrapolated from that, saying, “What else can we add to weapons or armor that just makes sense? There are a million combinations.

-Erich Schaefer

Randomly generated items read UNIDENTIFIED when players snatched them up. The colored word, printed in capital letters, got hearts racing. What were the item’s properties, the modifiers that altered its damage-dealing potential? Players had to use identification scrolls or pay Deckard Cain to find out.

One important thing—and I think we were unique in this regard for Diablo I and II—was the naming system. Calling it a Fiery Sword would add +2 fire damage, so all “Fiery” things would kind of be the same.

And then of course—which got kind of ridiculous—the suffixes. We might generate a Fiery Sword of Pain, which people parody all the time nowadays. We had some pretty goofy names.

-Erich Schaefer [SQ14]

To come up with hundreds of modifiers, Dave and Erich needed a program that cataloged a database of affixes and randomly applied them to items. Rick took up the task. Eric Sexton volunteered to help. He loved making games and wanted to try his hand at aspects of development besides art. While Rick wrote code, Sexton stood over his shoulder and spat out descriptors as they came to mind.

In Diablo, what we had was a program, a little batch scripter that let me put in a bunch of words, and I could basically hit a button and it would take those words and jumble them together. We refined that for Diablo II, but in Diablo it was pretty rudimentary, a word salad tool: hit a button and generate a bunch of random words.

I think the biggest hurdle was the outcome of random words. Picking and choosing which words to use was challenging because sometimes you’d end up with things that were a little bit… not so politically correct. Like, “The Black Killer.” That might not go over so well.

-Eric Sexton

Diablo determined the quality of items based on factors such as how far players had descended into the dungeon, their hero’s experience level, and the toughness of the monsters that opposed them.

Early on, we decided we wanted an inventory system where you picked up items and had to play “inventory Tetris” [to arrange items like puzzle pieces]. That was based on our love of the game X-COM, where you used a very similar kind of inventory system.

The rest of the [rewards system] was all experimental. It just kind of developed on the fly. We ended up with really cool stuff like dropping rings, aided so much by the distinctive sound effect.

-Erich Schaefer

Condor also split special items into magical and unique categories. Magical items were distinguishable by blue text and had randomized properties. Unique items, inscribed in gold lettering, had set names and properties but could hold two to three times as many properties as magical items, making them especially sought after.

Over nearly two years of playing the game and tweaking calculations, Condor and Blizzard finagled Diablo’s slot-machine formula so players received shiny new treasures just often enough to keep them glued to their mice and keyboards for hours.

Positive intermittent reinforcement is one of the hardest types of conditioning to break, which is why pets beg at the table: rewards may not happen very often, but every once in a while you get a scrap, so they keep begging.

There are random numbers that are built into game reward schedules. There’s a frequency for different types of items—swords, shields, armor, rings—then there’s the value of the item: is it crusty, or is it awesome?

-Pat Wyatt, VP of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

Dispensing rewards entails a very, very difficult balance. It’s all about pacing, rewards, timing, things like that, because you can’t focus only on finding new items. There are layers to the game. Like, “Oh, I’ve found a new environment,” or “I’ve run into a new monster,” or “I’ve leveled up and earned stat points.”

All these kinds of things build upon each other. The layers of rewards coming in at different times and at a different pace and at different satisfaction levels all kind of create this magic formula.

-David Brevik

I think loot system considerations make the Diablo-style games really hard to develop, harder than people might think, for teams that are used to other styles of development where a lot of stuff is planned out beforehand.

We really couldn’t think of these things before we actually did them, and before a group of people actually played the game and we decided how it was going.

-Erich Schaefer

My claim to fame was that I was the first person to kill a monster and get a magic item, and then use it and have it actually have an effect on my character. I’m pretty sure it was a sword with +1 [to the character’s] strength.

I went down the hall and got David Brevik to show him, and he said, “Yeah, I just put that in like five minutes ago.” That was a moment when I knew we had something that we all wanted to play and thought a lot of other people would want to play, too.

-Kenny Williams

Chapter 10: Spit, Bubblegum, and Floppy Disks

Since we were right on the water at Bair Island, a lot of people, especially on sunny days, would go hang out on the docks. I’d walk to the far end of the docks and eat lunch out there, and occasionally, I’d find other employees hanging out, watching boats come in and out of the harbor. And the occasional boat fire.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Condor

We had no project management or methods or agile development—all this fancy pants shit they have now. Just guys on a shoestring budget and a prayer.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

We were all in it together back then, so it wasn’t like, “Rick, did you hear those three assholes bounced my check?” Nope. It was, “Let’s get it resolved, man, because here’s a problem for the team.” And it got resolved. We were all in it together.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

Dave tuned out the voices shouting back and forth across the offices lining the hall. The world around him fell away, the volume dropping to mute as he read through the code on his screen. A few more lines of code and he could throw the latest build of Diablo together and let the rest of the team put it through its paces. He scrolled down, moved his cursor into position, and raised his hands over the keyboard.

The telltale sounds of doom broke through the babble of voices. The gurgle of the coffee pot. The beep-beep of the microwave responding to button presses. A second later and the microwave would begin to hum. That’s when he would lose everything.

He lunged for the mouse, swung the cursor up to the save icon, lifted his finger to click—

There wasn’t enough power on the second floor to handle three computers and three monitors in every single station, and the power would go out, and you’d just hear the F-bombs flying.

Dave’s office was connected to the kitchen, so if you had the microwave going, with the coffee pot, and all of his stuff, it would blow a fuse almost every time.

-Karin Colenzo

Dave sighed. He supposed he was due for a break, anyway.

People had rollerblades and were playing hockey out in the parking lot. Then we became good enough to say, “Hey, let’s try playing in a league.” Boy did we get our asses kicked.

-David Brevik

We were California people, and computer geeks at that. But we started a beginner league for roller hockey and went out in the parking lot and skated around a whole bunch, and started a team.

As you can imagine, it was pretty ridiculous at the beginning. I think we were losing 22 to 1, scores like that.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condo

Dave, Max, and Rick, three of Condor’s most enthusiastic players, looked around at the other employees. Team spirit they had in droves. What they lacked were numbers. To compete in league play, they needed more players. Friends and family threw in. Mark Shimada, Dave’s brother-in-law, signed up with his wife, Charlotte. Ken Williams’ wife, Megan, laced her rollerblades beside him. Karin, Condor’s office manager, decided to give playing a shot.

Joining the hockey league also gave new recruits like Patrick Tougas an opportunity to bond with colleagues outside of work.

One of the first questions they asked me was, “You’re Canadian, right?” I said, “Yes.” They said, “Do you play hockey?” I said, “Of course I do.”

I was the league scoring champion, my friend. I was probably the only Canadian playing [for Condor]. It’s a distinct advantage, learning to play hockey when you’re three.

-Patrick Tougas, artist, Condor

Hockey generated a sense of pride around the office. We made special Condor jerseys, a teal jersey with the black-and-white Condor logo [and] our names. They were really neat. We would wear them around the office, which was cool the first couple of weeks.

Then they became kind of stinky, but that was okay. We blended in with the other programmers.

-David Brevik [SQ1]

Parking lot scrimmages and late-night games kept the Condor crew active and gave their eyes a rest from staring at code and half-completed character models. Other events beyond their control gave them an excuse to get up from their computers. One afternoon, Dave’s ears detected the ominous hiss of an eighteen-wheeler’s air brakes as it pulled onto highway 101 just outside the Bair Island office. All eighteen of the big rig’s tires rolled over the power lines that fed into the main power grid. Dave’s screen winked out and the office went dark.

Outside his doorway, programmers and artists spread decks of Magic: The Gathering cards out on the floor to wait out the utility. A few of the others filled their pockets with gold tokens Karin kept in a jar in the kitchen and piled into Max’s Vanagon for an afternoon of putt-putt, go-karts, and arcade games at Malibu Castle.

Fridays were a wash. From morning until lunchtime, the team plugged away at tasks until one of the guys shot to his feet and shouted, “Game time!” Doom and X-COM roared to life on computer screens while other developers clustered around the television to play NHL ’94. Matt Uelmen grinned as his friends fell victim to cheesy play after cheesy play. There was no place he would rather be on a Friday night, or any other night. Home was a dumpy apartment crawling with social security recipients. Home had no video games or friends. Condor had everything he wanted.

***

As development continued, Condor’s team grew more adept at improvising solutions that bypassed their modest coffers. Artists, for example, used 3D Studio to model characters, animate them, and then flatten those 3D models into 2D images. The next step was trickier: cutting up those images into sprites, cutouts that could be pasted onto a game scene and moved around, such as a character walking around a dungeon.

No commercial solution for that step existed. The video game industry was still a seedling waiting to ripen and lacked a robust toolbox of programs tailor-made for game developers. Even if such solutions existed, Condor couldn’t have afforded them. The programmers rolled up their sleeves and built their own.

We had to render all this art, run it through this program to come out with a sheet of images; then we had another program, a utility that loaded in that sheet of images, and then cut them up and made sprites out of them.

None of our tools were professionally made. They didn’t have fancy interfaces or anything like that. A lot of them were difficult to use, like, “the first pixel in the file must be the transparent color.” We had all sorts of weird unwritten rules for our tools, and we’d make a tool for anything.

-David Brevik

Condor’s computers were plenty fast enough for running games like Doom, but converting 3D models into flat images, a process called rendering, slowed computers to a crawl.

You’d have a set of animations, and you wouldn’t render them up at work, because if you did, you’d sit there all day waiting for them to be done. So what we’d do is, when we left to go home that night, we would set up a batch render using a tool that Rick made.

You’d set it up and then just go. It took five, six hours. When you came back the next day, you could check it and make sure everything looked cool. But sometimes you’d look at it and you’d go, “Oh, something messed up. I’ve got to re-render that.”

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Condor

Technical limitations never prevented good ideas from squeezing into the game. Where most games boasted enemy counts of seven or eight, Dave fooled Diablo into permitting dozens of demons into the cathedral’s haunted halls.

Because of memory restrictions and the detail we wanted on our enemies, we couldn’t make many monster graphics. We had only a limited amount of memory to work with, so we could only make, say, four different [enemy types] on a level.

So we asked, “How are we going to get more enemy variety? Well, let’s just color them differently and call them something different.”

-David Brevik

Breaking through memory limitations was as simple as giving monsters new paint jobs. The Fallen, brown by default, took dips in red, gold, and shades of blue. Different colors came to represent varied abilities. Orange Winged Fiends sprayed lightning instead of sinking their teeth into flesh. [SQ2]

As Dave cloned monster types, he hit on another idea: Unique Monsters, souped-up versions of regular foes that hit harder, boasted special properties like immunity to fire, and rolled with a posse.

For the sake of resources, if we’ve got to have Fallen on the level, then we’ve got to have a Unique Fallen boss monster on the level because we’ve got the graphics loaded. Having the random Unique Monsters was awesome.

A lot of the roguelike games I played had unique enemies, but they had set stats. We took it a little bit further and gave ours unique properties. You had to really pay attention to what you were doing, and there were tough fights that were really compelling, and the rewards were good.

Sometimes the combinations of unique properties were ridiculous. People tell stories to this day, like, “Oh God, I fought this one guy for three hours one night!”

-David Brevik

Emboldened by creative empowerment and growing familiarity with their software, the art team tore down boundaries. Ben Haas came up with the Elemental, a spell that took the form of a running man covered in flames that collided with monsters in a fiery explosion. Even better, he could run around corners, giving him a heat-seeking ability that players could use to explode enemies lying in ambush.

Tired of modeling monsters, Patrick Tougas decided to work on spell effects.

We wrote our own proprietary lightning system and fire system. We just wrote those ourselves because our software didn’t have any plug-ins that could do the things we wanted to do. We got very inventive with that stuff.

Firewall was definitely an epic spell. I’d never seen anything like that in a video game. The way it worked was, we created one square of flame that looked really good. We’d have the growth, the climax, and the fizzle.

It was just one square, but to see it and to go work with the programmers and say, “We need to make a wall out of this, but we don’t want [the flames] to look super repetitive”—it was the first time I’d been able to sit down with a programmer and work that out. It was really cool.

-Patrick Tougas

I think it was kind of good that we didn’t have standard practices. There was no way of thinking, How did someone else do it? We figured out how to do everything.

-Kelly Johnson

Erich passed on spell effects and monsters to Dave, who carved out spots for them in Diablo’s code.

Dave is a genius programmer. Back then he’d just sit down and crank stuff out. We had this in-office entertainment: instead of playing a video game, you’d get up and go into Dave Brevik’s office, and you’d sit there and watch him code.

You’d have three or four people bullshitting and watching Dave code, waiting for the moment when you’d get to see the next big thing in the game.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Condor

People would come in and hang out with me and talk with me, and oftentimes, I’d be in the middle of coding something. Back then, I’d be able to code something up, and we’d be able to talk about it and iterate it right there.

So people would come in, watch, and talk about it.

-David Brevik

News that Dave had finished patching in new features caused work to grind to a halt. Visceral real-time combat and the slightest possibility that the next monster they swatted down might split open and gush treasure compelled them to keep playing even after Dave, Max, and Erich closed up shop for the weekend. Late every Friday night, the developers backed their cars up to the office, buckled in their computers, and sped home for a weekend of monster hunting.

We didn’t have a network—no Internet, no way to transfer large files. When we were making Diablo, we didn’t even have backups. I started doing it myself. I backed up everything onto floppy disks.

-Kelly Johnson

One afternoon, Dave, Max, and Erich carried in boxes of freshly minted business cards. Rick admired his cards before stuffing a few in his wallet and forgetting about them. His title was to-the-point: Programmer, one hat out of dozens he wore. He snapped tiles together to form caverns and dungeons, compiled a database of adjectives that the game applied to weapons and armor and monsters, helped Dave assemble development kits to test console games, splashed lava around caverns to form bubbling lakes, pruned dungeon algorithms, and checked miscellaneous items off the crinkled to-do list on Dave’s desk.

Kelly scooped up his pile of cards and examined the topmost rectangle with pride, then slipped it in his wallet and went back to work.

When it came to business cards you could put any title you wanted. Employee #7—that was my tag.

-Kelly Johnson, employee #7

Kelly’s card bent and creased as he rode his bike and scooted his chair around Condor, but he didn’t mind. The card’s wear and tear and the title it proclaimed represented him perfectly.

Matt Uelmen draped himself in a more extravagant title, while other developers treated business cards more seriously.

I was an artist/animator. I was so serious about it. I should have had a fun title, but I felt I needed a serious title.

Matt Uelmen had a title… I can’t remember what it was. Grand Poobah of Sound or something.

-Eric Sexton

Matt Uelmen was… oh my God, he had this really long name. “Musician of Mystery” or something.

-Karin Colenzo

Commissioner of Funk.

-Matt Uelmen, Commissioner of Funk, Condor

Ultimately, labels on business cards did not matter.

We didn’t have any mentality of hierarchy. Dave, Max, and Erich never put themselves above anyone. We were all on the same level, doing the same kind of work toward the same goal, with the same passion.

It worked for us. That works for a small studio.

-Kelly Johnson

***

Brian Piltin glanced up from his screen for the first time in hours to see the sun tucking in for the day. Rubbing at bleary eyes, he saved his work, shut down the computer, and considered closing the physics and linear algebra textbook on his desk, then thought better of it. He’d need them again tomorrow, as he had today and weeks before. While the other coders raved about their progress on Diablo, Brian fought for every inch of progress on NFLPA Superstars.

Since it was my first game, I’ll be honest: I struggled with a lot of it. I was learning how to do matrix multiplications, the polygons for the characters. I had built up a set of library routines to do stuff as far as the rendering.

-Brian Piltin, programmer, Condor

I worked with Brian Piltin, who was a brilliant programmer. He’s the one who should get all the credit for [NFLPA Superstars]. I made the players and the animation, but Brian wrote the code for the game to perform in 3D, and at the time, no one had made a 3D football game.

Max built the stadium. You could play four-on-four; it was crude, but it was playable. You could hike the ball, you could drop back, pass, and a guy could jump up and catch [the ball]. That kind of thing hadn’t been seen before.

-Kelly Johnson

Brian caught up with Max and Erich outside and climbed into the passenger side of Erich’s beat-up Honda Civic. By the time they’d gotten halfway to San Francisco, Brian was feeling much, much better.

We would drive home from work together because we all lived in San Francisco. They would say things to me like, “When Diablo’s done, you’re going to be driving a Ferrari” or “We’re going to buy you a Porsche,” stuff like that. I’m not quoting them exactly; it was along those lines.

And I took it seriously. I was only 21 years old, so I was thinking, When this is done, I’m going to be driving a Porsche, yada, yada, yada. I didn’t think to get anything in writing. I was just a foolish kid.

-Brian Piltin

At the office, over lunch, and rolling around in Max’s Vanagon, the bosses and their crew daydreamed about the future.

“When we strike it big, you also strike it big.” That saying right there is almost a quote. I forget the exact wording, but it’s damn close.

For at least Michio and me, they said that early on. We hadn’t even written a line of Diablo [code] yet. It was still just a design document, and we had heard that from the beginning.

-Rick Seis

Most of the guys smiled, laughed, and promptly dismissed visions of Ferraris and twenty-bedroom mansions. Their dreams were just that—dreams, fun fantasies like buying the winning lotto ticket and sharing the wealth with your pals. Their reality suited them just fine. Every day, they got to go to a job where they hung out with friends and made fun games. Their bosses paid them to do that. The money could be better, but as long as their checks cleared and paid the bills, it was enough.

One payday, Michio hopped into his old ’78 Pontiac Sunbird and rumbled down to the bank to deposit his check.

We knew we were having financial difficulties at the company. I had a paycheck bounce, which was not fine because I wrote my check for my mortgage and that depended on my paycheck. I always hated that we had financial issues.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Condor

I think it’s a sobering experience when you realize that you’re responsible for the salaries of people who have wives, husbands, and kids. So we took it pretty seriously that we were going to make this company a good place to work and to make sure people got their paychecks and that it was a stable environment, economically.

That wasn’t always easy. We were scraping by a lot. We bounced paychecks.

-Max Schaefer

Michio’s bounced check marked a new team activity.

We definitely weren’t a big budget operation. At one point, there was an informal race to the bank because the last few checks to be cashed had a possibility of bouncing.

-Matt Uelmen

Dave, Max, and Erich juggled every number they could find. They emptied their personal accounts into the company coffers to cover Michio’s check. Every dime from the NFLPA Superstars contract went toward payroll and keeping the lights on. More than once, the bosses slipped out of work and raced the Vanagon around San Francisco to ask friends and family for more loans. Ken Williams, whose substantial investments had already earned him partial ownership in the company, floated them more cash when he could.

In December 1995, days before Condor shut down for the holidays, Dave, Max, and Erich weighed their options. They couldn’t keep hitting up Ken and their other friends for money. Matt Householder revised the NFLPA Superstars payment schedule when he could to send Condor milestone payments ahead of schedule, but the complexity of the game’s development even made Householder’s gracious accommodations hard to hit. All the rest of their milestone payments had run out. They’d finished Justice League in the spring and released it during the summer, and they had shipped four versions of Quarterback Club—two for Game Boy and two for Game Gear—earlier in the year.

Just before the holidays, Dave and Wendy left to spend Christmas with his parents. His mind kept drifting back to Condor’s predicament, and how it might affect the game he had wanted to make since high school. The phone rang, scattering his gloomy thoughts. It was Allen Adham, and like Dave’s own Santa Claus, he had called to deliver the gift Condor needed most.

***

In January 1996, the bosses passed through Condor’s common room, greeting their friends. Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime entered behind them. Chit-chat tapered off. The visitors from down south bid everyone hello before following Dave, Max, and Erich into Dave’s office. The door clicked shut behind them. Chatter broke out around the common room. What were the managers from Blizzard Entertainment doing at Condor?

Inside Dave’s office, Allen and Mike laid out the terms of the offer Allen had explained to Dave over Christmas. After releasing back-to-back success stories in WarCraft and WarCraft II, Allen and Mike had earned the utmost confidence from Bob and Jan Davidson. In turn, they praised Diablo’s progress to the Davidsons. Bob and Jan took them at their word. If Diablo was poised to become a breakout hit, they trusted Blizzard to bring Condor into the fold. As part of the Davidson & Associates family, Condor would never have to worry about money problems again. Even more attractive was the promise of continued independence. Like Bob and Jan had trusted Blizzard to make WarCraft how they saw fit, Condor would maintain creative control over Diablo and their other games.

A few weeks later, the guys flew down to Los Angeles and met up with Allen, who arranged a formal introduction between Condor’s founders and the Davidsons. Dave, Max, and Erich took an instant liking to Bob and Jan. Not only were they friendly and easy to talk to, but they promised to give the guys their space. Diablo’s dark atmosphere wasn’t to their liking, but they recognized its potential at market. [SQ3]

With their minds made up, the bosses gathered the staff in the kitchen and broke the news: they were in acquisition talks with Davidson & Associates.

I think everybody had questions, like, “We’re getting bought out; what does that mean for jobs and pay?” I remember Dave, Max, and Erich being reassuring, saying, “We’re staying the same. Nobody’s losing jobs or anything. Now we have some backing; we have some funds to make this game and do more with it.”

-Karin Colenzo

I remember we started hearing talk and rumors about the fact that, yeah, they’re going to be selling the company. At some point, I think Dave, Max, and Erich did come out and say, “Hey, the only way we can survive is if we sell the company.”

My take on it was, At least if we sell to Davidson, we’ll stabilize the company, and I won’t have to worry about leaving and finding a new job because I love working here with our team.

-Michio Okamura

The guys said, “Even if we do get bought out, we’ll keep things the way they are. We just won’t have to worry about money.” I mean, that was the ultimate sell, right? The one thing that didn’t make the job platinum-level was the money situation.

We were always trying to get money. Money [coming] in equals good. Didn’t matter what was going on otherwise.

-Rick Seis

Joining Davidson & Associates also gave Dave, Max, and Erich access to the software giant’s well-oiled internal marketing machine.

The boxes on the shelves don’t represent the best products; they represent whoever made a deal to get that space. Space went to the highest bidder. The bigger you were, the more games you could have on the shelf because you could basically buy more shelf space from retailers.

That’s why our deal with Davidson was important: they had deals with everybody, so we were guaranteed to get on the shelf. As an independent [developer], you didn’t have shelf space. You needed a publisher to get on that shelf.

-Kelly Johnson

The team absorbed the news with confidence. Dave, Max, and Erich had created this company and facilitated an atmosphere where anyone could chime in. They had exhausted their own bank accounts more than once to keep everyone employed. More importantly, the guys didn’t act like typical bosses. They weren’t armchair generals who gave orders and holed up in cozy offices while the rank and file did the heavy lifting. They got down in the trenches and cranked out code and artwork with the rest of the team. If the bosses thought selling to Davidson was the best move, the guys would follow.

In a meeting when rumors were circulating that we were getting offers, the guys did say if they sold we would all be taken care of. There was no more detail to it than that and nothing in writing. We didn’t ask for any further details. We all believed it, and nobody questioned it.

I believe now, as I did then, that the guys were 100 percent sincere when they said that. At the time, there were no offers on or off the table. Of course once the money came in, they were seeing things from a different perspective.

-Kelly Johnson

***

Kenny Williams, Dave, Max, and Erich surrounded Condor’s fax machine and waited. They stood around, tapping their feet on the floor. Abruptly the machine lit up. A paper inched from the loading dock down into the tray, accompanied by a fanfare of beeps and screeches. Heads swimming, they scanned the paper and looked around at each other in amazement. Less than one minute ago, they’d been nearly broke. Now, on paper, they were millionaires, and Condor was saved.

Dave, Max, and Erich gave their hammering hearts time to slow down and reconsidered the number. They did not care for business, but they did appreciate the fine art of negotiation.

We went back to Davidson and said, “We’d love to go with you guys, but we’re going to need a little more money.”

Now, here are three guys with barely a nickel to rub together, and here comes a guy with a whole plate of nickels that you’ll never run out of! And we said, “Oh, shiny! But we want some more.”

-David Brevik

I remember at one point, we wanted to ask for more on the deal. All of us were too scared to do it. I think we drew straws again to see who had to call up Davidson’s [Chief Financial Officer] Jack Allewaert and ask for more.

I remember calling him and saying, “Jack, here’s what we want.” And he just said, “Nope.” I took a long pause and said, “Oh. Okay. Thanks, Jack.”

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

Undeterred, the guys went back to the table. They took their highball proposal, pulled it back just slightly, and faxed a counteroffer that seemed fair.

When you send over a message saying, “That’s not quite going to do it; here’s what we want”—that’s terrifying. I remember going around my office kicking furniture and throwing things until the offer came back.

The fax came back and said, “Let’s just meet in the middle,” and we said, “Okay!” It was the longest 45 minutes of my life. My recollection of it is that all happened within an hour and a half, but it seemed like an eternity.

-Max Schaefer

When Condor’s founders and the Davidsons sealed the deal in early March 1996, the three founders sagged with relief. Ken Williams just smiled. He’d known the deal would go through, one way or the other. As Condor’s legal representation, he had worked closely with the Davidsons’ chief financial officer to hammer out the details: the three founders and Ken would turn over their stock in Condor and receive shares of stock, as well as stock options, in Davidson & Associates.

Dave, Max, and Erich spread most of the options among the staff, which helped soften one of the acquisition’s negative consequences. During their days as an independent studio, the founders had pledged royalties from sales to their early hires. The agreement held for games like Justice League that had already shipped, but the acquisition cancelled out the possibility of collecting hefty royalties on Diablo, should it prove a retail giant. Even so, the Condor crew had no reason to doubt that the options would fail them.

There are two reasons to give someone stock options. One is [they are] an incentive to stay because stock options vest over a certain period, so that gives you a reason to stay.

The other reason is, you are now a part of what influences the stock because you work there. You work hard and that number goes up, and you get a reward. We all get a reward. That’s the theory behind it.

In a good economy, it works well. But that good economy has to last for five years, three years, or whatever the hell your vesting period is. It’s usually three or five years.

For me at the time, I was too young. I was like, okay, cool. I knew I was going to stay until the end. I love it here. Why would I ever leave?

-Rick Seis [SQ4]

After sealing the deal with their new owners, the founders turned their attention to a long-standing dislike.

We always hated the name Condor. “Project Condor” was always just kind of joking, but when it came time to name the company, we couldn’t come up with anything that everyone liked, so we said, “Okay, for the time, we’ll be Condor.”

No one liked it, and we definitely wanted to change.

-Max Schaefer

Condor’s new colleagues down south suggested they share the Blizzard Entertainment name. The bosses recoiled.

They wanted us to be called Blizzard. I wanted us to be something separate, yet still the same. We still wanted our own identity.

That’s why being called Blizzard North made sense: we’re part of a whole, but still separate. We have our own identity, yet we’re still part of something bigger.

-David Brevik

Early that summer, the bosses rented out a picnic site at the Coyote Point Recreation Area in Burlingame. Ken and a few of the guys fired up the grill and flipped burgers while the other developers soaked up sun. Max pulled into a spot and popped his trunk, revealing a keg of beer that he invited neighboring picnickers to share. Later that afternoon, Dave, Max, and Erich kicked back with a drink in one hand and a burger in the other.

I gotta say my favorite time period was when Davidson bought our company. It changed our financial lives, but more than that, it’s really draining to stress over making payroll every two weeks. It’s real physical stress.

To have that relief and be able to think about and work on games was the best part of the acquisition, more than them buying us and making money. We could actually just make games and not worry so much.

-Max Schaefer

All the money—all the payrolls and everything—came through Davidson. They handled almost everything. They let us do our own bookkeeping for our own division, but there was never a worry again.

-Erich Schaefer

Chapter 11: Light and Dark

One of the reasons Diablo is a creepy game is you go into the dungeon, and the lighting gets dark, and you can only see a little bit around your character. Things come out of the darkness, and it’s a little scary.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

I was inspired because Michio made great models. The succubus is sexy, you know? So I wanted to make her walk very confident, not like a typical demon. And her death animation was very popular, very popular.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Blizzard North

Max used to talk about how much money we could get if the game was very successful. Note: If the game was successful. I never got the impression that Justice League was going to be that successful.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

Rick and Michio stepped into the office Brian Piltin shared with Doron Gartner, a new programmer and a friend of Brian’s from college, and looked around. Doron and Brian were there, of course. So were Kelly, Uelmen, Robin van der Wel, Sexton, and Ben “Hot Sauce” Haas, so named for his propensity to drown his food in spicy condiments. The guys leaned against walls or sat on desks. Some looked determined, even angry. Most of the guys looked curious.

Rick and Michio noticed three conspicuous absences.

It was an employee-only meeting, which to me was just… We do everything together. We don’t hide from the bosses. We all talk about stuff. So for me, it was absolutely against what Condor did.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

Different people had different issues. For some people it was the amount of pay they were getting, and some people were just curious. It wasn’t an outright rebellion. There were definitely people who had some money issues, but most people were just curious.

People wanted to see what the issues were. That’s how things happened back in those days. We had a small group of people, so things just happened quickly.

-Kelly Johnson

Once everyone took a place, Brian stepped forward and explained the purpose behind the gathering. The bosses had announced their intention to sell Condor to Davidson & Associates, and the wheels were already in motion. When the sale went through, Dave, Max, and Erich would make millions. Before the wheels finished turning, the employees needed to discuss what they felt they were owed for their contributions. They had all pulled late nights, especially when milestone deadlines loomed on the horizon, and had all stepped up with ideas that influenced their projects. Salary increases or some sort of bonus for the whole team seemed appropriate.

Brian also submitted that certain developers worked at a pay grade below the extra responsibility they shouldered.

I was committed because I really did like the three guys. They were really nice guys. Not only the fact that they’d promised me [wealth and sports cars], but they’d also given me this idea that the company depended on me making these milestones [on NFLPA Superstars].

I felt like I was really important to them, so I really tried hard to get the game to the point where 3DO was willing to pay us.

-Brian Piltin, programmer, Blizzard North

Talk turned to how the team should broach a subject of pay increases with the bosses. If the bosses could not or would not deliver on those reasonable expectations, the employees should walk out to demonstrate how important the issue was to them. The suggestion did not sit well with most of the staff.

That’s just the way I felt: “Listen, they haven’t screwed us yet. Why should we feel like they’re doing that now?”

It would have been one thing if someone would have brought in some data proving as such, but it was just people feeling what they felt, and to me, the bosses never did anything to screw us. So why should I think that they would do that now?

-Rick Seis

Rick and Michio had been at Condor for almost two years and had seen Dave, Max, and Erich stress and slave over making payroll. Condor was their company to sell. The bosses had alluded to bigger paydays when they released a financially successful product. The NFL Quarterback Club games for Game Boy and Game Gear were niche, and Justice League Task Force had certainly fallen far short of the “successful” marker.

Royalty checks are based on sales. My recollection is we three [the bosses] didn’t take any royalty checks for Justice League. We had to make up our development fees out of our royalty stream. Profits just barely exceeded that.

It was a Street Fighter clone at the end of the cycle of the Genesis and Super Nintendo, so we split up what earnings we had amongst the employees. There was a tiny pool of money, and we gave it to everyone. I’m not sure what else we could have done.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

Most of the guys had been happy with their modest cut of royalties from Justice League.

We got three cents a copy. That was a real royalty. My first check, and only check [for Justice League], was $231. That was the best $231 I got from that place because that one felt like we all shared it together. We all got our little bit from it.

-Rick Seis

With [Sunsoft] going out of business, we were lucky that the game even got picked up by another publisher to be released at all.

I certainly didn’t expect to get anything, and regardless of the amount, it was my first royalty check for my very first game, so I was very happy to receive it. I used it to take my family out to dinner.

-Michio Okamura

Not everyone was pleased. In front of the bosses, they smiled and accepted the checks. Out of earshot, they weighed the checks against the prophecies of huge royalties the bosses had foretold.

At lunchtime, when the guys weren’t around, we said, “This is bullshit. I don’t know if I should tear this up out of protest or what.” We cashed them, but we were disappointed.

We’d all been told we’d make thousands of extra dollars. We said, “If this is how the bonus situation works, we’re never going to make any money.”

-Anonymous, Blizzard North

Many of the employees had understood the need to temper their expectations.

I don’t think they actually associated numbers with those talks. They would say, “If we get a million sales, we’ll be doing great. If we get 10 million, oh man—everybody’s going to be doing even better.” They would phrase it like that.

-Peter Brevik, programmer, Blizzard North

We did say we’d try to get royalties happening, but we would never tell anyone that we could or that there was anything in place until there was, nor did we guarantee anyone anything.

But people read a lot into that. You can say, “If we get a good royalty program going, you could end up getting substantial bonuses.” People think they will get substantial bonuses.

It’s hard to actually generate royalties, especially once you’re owned by someone else. It’s out of your hands.

-Max Schaefer

***

The room had gone quiet after the suggestion of a walkout. None of the guys would mind tacking on extra zeroes to their salaries. The turbulent pay situation was the only knock against Condor. If gamers around the world enjoyed Diablo as much as they did, maybe, hopefully, the money would come.

For Michio and the bulk of the rest of the team, working on a project as exciting and personal as Diablo was more important than money.

I had my paycheck bounce while we were working on Justice League. But for me, if I could get a steady paycheck and keep on doing what I was doing, that was enough. That was better than anything I’d had in a long time.

But these guys were talking about walking out. They were talking about abandoning Diablo to go strike. I didn’t want to go on a strike. I loved working on this thing. They had to drag me away to go home, and they were talking about walking away from it.

My thought was, If you want to walk away, then obviously you’re not passionate about this project. That’s like a mom and dad walking away from their kids and saying, “I’m not getting paid enough.” Where was their passion for this project?

-Michio Okamura

I remember being upset, but I think I was more upset because everyone else was upset. My irritation or annoyance with what was going on was more about: My friends are upset, so I should be upset too.

But deep down, I wasn’t that upset. Honestly, I’d make games for free if I could afford to.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Blizzard North

I believed in the company. I enjoyed working there. I enjoyed the people I was working with. I wanted us to keep going and keep the momentum moving forward without finances being an issue.

-Robin van der Wel, programmer, Blizzard North

After the meeting fizzled out, a few of the employees banded together and approached Dave, Max, and Erich about receiving a raise once Condor’s sale went through.

I do recall some people who, especially once we were doing great, wanted to [discuss raises and bonuses]. Those people came to us representing the group. As I recall we did give out some raises, and they were deserved.

[At the same time, we felt like], “Yes, everything looks good, but honestly we have half a game written, here. How about we make some money before we ask for some money?”

-David Brevik

There was time between when we got bought out and when we could get salaries normalized. The whole process of giving a raise was different after we got bought out. All salary stuff was done with [Davidson & Associates].

It would have taken a while before everyone was making their appropriate amount, that’s for sure. We might have been able to get everyone a 10 percent raise right off the bat, but that didn’t adjust everyone accordingly.

-Max Schaefer

Life at Condor did not continue on as normal. It got better. In March 1996, Condor’s sale went through, and the company morphed into Blizzard North. Instead of archiving builds of Diablo on floppy disk, the bosses installed a speedy office network that allowed developers to back up their work to servers. Installing a network also meant the team could finally blast each other to bits in multiplayer games.

Rick would set up Quake on the internal server so everybody could have it on their computer. Some people would get pizza. We would stay until late on a Friday night playing Quake against each other.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Blizzard North

We used to have Quake tournaments. David and those guys would have to reprimand us.

-Brian Piltin

People are yelling out of their cubicles, “I just killed you!” and “I’m coming back for you!” It was real camaraderie. It was a great environment to work in.

-Peter Brevik

More developers joined the roster. Max and Erich brought on Chris Root, a childhood friend, as a technical artist responsible for touching up Diablo’s weapons and characters.

If you weren’t actually working on a game, you were playing some other game. I remember getting my ass kicked by Matt Uelmen playing hockey on Genesis.

It was kind of upsetting. He found some way to score a goal all the time. As soon as we would start to skate, he’d go toward your net and get a goal. It was [so cheap].

-Chris Root, artist, Blizzard North

The team found even more reasons to stay at work instead of going home.

We used to go to this pub on Fridays in Redwood City. Every single Friday, it would be me, Matt Uelmen, Kelly Johnson, and sometimes Michio. One time, Matt was telling us a story about when he got beer spilled on him by a waitress—and 30 seconds later our waitress came around with a whole tray of beer because on Fridays we’d have a pint before we headed back to work. And she dumped the whole tray of beer on me. The whole tray! Every single [pint] landed on me.

This is the best part. I go back to work, and I’m covered in beer. I walk by Max’s office and he leans out and goes, “Hey. Happy Friday. You stink like beer.” I told him the story and he goes, “Whatever. It’s Friday. We see a lot of creativity out of you guys on Friday afternoons because you go and have a couple beers.”

-Patrick Tougas, artist, Blizzard North

In the early spring, the sale of Condor leaked outside Blizzard North’s walls and into the parking lot. Dave gunned the V6 engine that powered his bright red Honda NSX and streaked into a parking space like a red bolt. He stuck his head into the office and waved the guys outside to show off his new ride. His developers crowded around, gave the expected oohs and aahs, and returned to their desks to keep working.

Some weeks later, Erich arrived in a new Porsche. The team showered the car with praise. Erich shrugged. He’d always liked cars but had never been able to afford anything flashier than his Honda Civic. Now, he could. He and Max had also pooled their funds and bought a house in San Francisco. They’d felt cramped in their rinky-dink apartment and had been waiting to move into a bigger place at the first opportunity. Now, they could.

Most of the guys had no need to feign excitement for their bosses. They were friends, and each was happy for the successes enjoyed by the other. To Brian Piltin, the sports cars in the parking lot were a slap in the face.

I think my salary was around $30,000 at the time, and I was really busting it to help them with [NFLPA Superstars]. I felt like we were all in it together and then felt slighted because, once we sold the company, I felt like they didn’t need me anymore. I felt like they didn’t care about all the people that helped them at the time. And that shouldn’t be a reflection on them in reality because I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff that was going on that I wasn’t aware of. That was just my perception of it when I was 22 years old. That was how I saw it.

-Brian Piltin

Brian called up the developers who had sympathized with him at the cabal earlier that year.

I wanted to start some kind of computer programmers’ union. I was going to call it CPU. On the day I was going to have some people walk out, it was just me and [Doron Gartner].

I got really upset. I said, “I’m going to quit. They’re not making good on their word. They told me I was going to be driving a Porsche.”

Maybe all the other guys were happy just being there. They felt like they were part of this big thing. I wasn’t a gamer, and to be honest, I didn’t care so much about the hype surrounding the game.

To me, it was a job, and I was probably more interested in the money than anything. I didn’t have the kind of spirit of, “We’re going to make this great game.” To me, it was a job as a programmer more than anything.

-Brian Piltin

Brian knew Doron’s support was more out of friendship than a desire to sit out work on Diablo. He didn’t want his friend to lose his job just because he had tried to make a stand with his friend. Still upset, Brian quit his job at Blizzard North. [SQ1]

With Brian gone, Dave, Max, and Erich needed a programmer to pick up development on NFLPA Superstars. Robin van der Wel was the best choice. He had programmed the NFL Quarterback club games; the logic behind writing routines that made players move and throw game-winning passes remained the same, even if the implementation varied.

Like Brian, Robin made halting progress on the M2 hardware. Excited chatter over Diablo’s progress turned to grumbles every time NFLPA hit a speed bump. The M2 contract had served its purpose: bankroll new hires for Diablo and keep Condor’s lights on. Now that they had the Davidsons, the bosses wished they could drop the 3D football game. Luckily, The 3DO Company felt the same way.

We were talking about, “How are we going to get out of having to do this thing?” And just as we were plotting how to get out of the football game, 3DO called and said, “We sold the technology. Is there any way we can get out of having to do the football game?”

It was perfect. In fact, while we were getting bought out, we were like, “Goddamn it, we have to finish this football game.”

-Max Schaefer

On several occasions at Max’s request, I rewrote the [M2 contract] schedule of milestone payments to get Condor through tight financial spots while Diablo development and Davidson/Blizzard negotiations continued. 3DO was always agreeable to my rewrites, since it hadn’t been living up to the letter of the agreement with untimely M2 hardware delivery and weak software support.

Ultimately, Condor produced an excellent demo in [NFLPA Superstars], which helped convince Matsushita to acquire the M2 technology from 3DO for $100 million. 3DO certainly got its money’s worth from their Condor deal.

-Matt Householder, producer, 3DO [SQ2]

With The 3DO Company behind them and the Justice League and NFL Quarterback Club games released, only Diablo remained on Blizzard North’s plate. At long last, they could devote all their resources toward their hack-and-slash adventure.

***

After navigating through four cathedral levels, players followed the next stairwell down and emerged in the catacombs—four levels of earthen walls, winding corridors, and huge chambers. [SQ3] Like the cathedral floors above, light flooded every inch of the catacombs. Five months into development, Dave and Erich hit on a way to darken Diablo’s mood.

The lighting in the game was done on a grid basis. As you moved between squares, the lighting changed. So you click one square over and the lighting wouldn’t change until you stepped into the next square.

That was the easiest way to write the code, but Doron wrote an algorithm so that the game changed the lighting when your character moved a couple of pixels instead of once per square. He found a faster way to calculate lighting so we could update it more regularly, and that made a huge improvement to the game’s atmosphere.

-David Brevik [SQ4]

No longer as bright as an office complex lit under the glow of fluorescent bulbs, Diablo’s dungeons grew darker and tighter. Rick and Erich designed corridors that were less orderly than the church floors above. Floor lamps, hanging torches, and burning crosses provided small pools of light. [SQ5] The bestiary expanded beyond the zombies and skeletons roaming the cathedral.

I like what we called the rhino demon [Horned Demon], the guy who just charged out of the blackness in the catacomb levels. I thought that changed up the gameplay a lot because you’d hear him and you had a chance to get out of the way.

I thought that was a great monster behavior we invented along the way.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

When their health ran low and the chaos of battle became too great to manage, players could take trips back up to Tristram to sell gear, buy health potions, and repair weapons dented from carving up monsters. Those sojourns offered only a temporary respite. Ultimately, there was nowhere to go but down.

I think we really did a great job of giving the player a feeling of dread and claustrophobia. In terms of where so many of our artists were at and where the computer game business was at, it was really perfect timing.

It was a great response to what was dominating the business at the time, in terms of fantasy RPGs that really hadn’t conceptually advanced too much beyond the early Ultima classics, and titles like Myst, and the then-popular FMV [full-motion video] games.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Blizzard North

In between wandering the office to chat about the game’s progress and playing every new build of Diablo, Matt Uelmen continued to coax the game’s score into existence. Intent on writing dungeon pieces, he attempted to create epic tracks befitting a fantasy adventure, but that didn’t feel right. Diablo wasn’t epic fantasy. It was gothic horror, a new type of game that demanded a new type of musical score.

Playing through each new build of the game and peering over artists’ shoulders as they worked gave Uelmen some direction. Holing up in his cramped noise room, he powered on his Ensoniq ARS-10 and mixed and matched samples until he hit on themes that worked. [SQ6]

I don’t think that the composition process was as linked to each particular background as one might imagine. What became the opening cathedral theme was actually intended to be something like a final boss fight theme.

The stylistic approach is pretty similar throughout the soundtrack. It generally consists of 70 to 110 second chunks that fade into each other, with more metered and focused material, like something with a strong beat or bass line, generally alternating with slightly more abstract “horror”-type material, like synthesizer cluster chords and distorted sound effects.

-Matt Uelmen [SQ7]

Players who survived four levels of winding mazes and increasingly dangerous encounters progressed to the caves, open space divided by wandering rivers of lava. Gone were the narrow corridors and doorways where players could bunker down and fight enemies one at a time. [SQ8] Four floors down, players emerged in the final set of dungeons and Erich’s ominous, atypical take on a Hell setting. Instead of clichéd lakes of fire, Erich fashioned walls made from bone, glowing veins of blood threaded through the walls, and skewered nude corpses on spikes. [SQ9]

Fittingly, the four levels of Hell that stood between players and their ultimate target harbored the game’s most dangerous monsters. Possessed knights roamed the halls. Vipers slithered around upright, brandishing swords. Evil magi cast fire and lightning. And succubuses swayed toward heroes too busy gawking at their bared breasts to notice the blasts of magic forming in their hands. In the background, the fruits of Uelmen’s labor complemented Erich’s hellish visuals: a low drone punctured the bubble of silence and rose in pitch while drums boomed and crashed. [SQ10]

When a creature died, it had to fit in a certain space. That’s why a lot of the death animations in Diablo involve disintegration: the body just disappears because after a while we couldn’t come up with different ways to do [death animations] in one spot. You had to collapse the bodies.

So the succubus’s death was done so that her body would fit in the tile. You know, the whole bending over, getting in that doggy style position. The animation was very suggestive, and I was like, “I kind of like that.”

With the way she was dressed as a seductress, it fit her character. And the guys liked it, so it stayed.

-Kelly Johnson [SQ11]

On level 15, players faced off against the Archbishop Lazarus, Diablo’s chief henchman, before stepping through a blood-red portal that warped them to the Lord of Terror’s lair. [SQ12] Unlike previous levels, the lair was pre-built and populated with a series of switches heroes had to throw in order to reveal the final boss.

I kind of knew what feelings I wanted to get from Diablo, but really it was Michio who pretty much nailed it right away. We knew we wanted a demon-like figure, and he nailed it pretty quickly. I thought his model and design were just excellent.

-David Brevik

I did an initial version of Diablo very early on when we were pitching the idea, so I had almost the entire project to figure out what I wanted to do with the last boss.

For Diablo, I did the concept art, the model, and the mapping. By then, we had Ben Haas and Pat Tougas, who took over animations when they came on board.

-Michio Okamura [SQ13]

The Lord of Terror made his presence known far before he came into view on the screen. Red flames erupted from the ground beneath players as they fought their way to his chamber. Once in range, Diablo was a towering monstrosity of red scales and curled spikes, by far the largest monster in the game. Up close, he put aside spell-casting to unleash devastating swipes and blows with his clawed hands.

When Diablo was finally put into the game, he was hard. They hadn’t fully balanced him yet, and he was hard. Holy crap. We were dying left and right, but it was fun trying, and seeing him on-screen: “This is him. This is Diablo.”

Every time somebody would get to Diablo, everybody would congregate and check him out and see how they were doing.

-Karin Colenzo

Cutting down Diablo was a Herculean effort that required powerful spells, thick armor, and a weapon as quick as it was damaging. At the killing blow, Diablo’s chest burst open, showering the hero with blood. After the credits rolled, players could chase down the Lord of Terror again to collect more and better loot. Thanks to one of Diablo’s most innovative game modes, they would not have to face the demon alone.

Chapter 12: Battles and Battle.net

The big discussion was, “Do we look at this as another revenue stream, or do we look at this as a way to differentiate our games and make them stand out in the marketplace because we offer this service for free?”

-Jeff Strain, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

Our relationship with Blizzard was contentious, but it wasn’t acrimonious. It didn’t feel like there was ever any ill will. We fought fairly often about a lot of different things, but those arguments always felt productive.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

That was not a decision where we said, “Let’s go argue this back and forth with Blizzard North, and maybe they’re right and [Diablo] will be single-player.” We were going to make it a multiplayer, real-time game, and they were going to do it whether they knew it or not. It was just a question of how to bring about that change.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

Functioning as publisher for Diablo forced Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime to tread new ground. Since conceptualizing WarCraft and polishing off the remainder of its contracts porting games for other developers, Blizzard Entertainment had been the creative force behind every game it touched. As far as Allen and Mike were concerned, they should play the same role on Diablo. Blizzard had courted Condor on behalf of Davidson & Associates. As such, they viewed themselves as the parent and Blizzard North as the child.

You had to have a person or team of people who were filtering all that stuff and turning it into useful action items that could be accomplished. So the goal of a strike team was to take people from every game development discipline to make decisions about the direction of Diablo.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

Allen built the strike team from developers at his company. He included himself, Mike O’Brien, Pat Wyatt, Ron Millar, Bill Roper, and James Phinney, a newer hire who had started out designing game manuals before working his way up to a designer position. After fielding a call from Jan Davidson, Allen assembled the strike team to talk to Dave Brevik and the Schaefers about graphic content in Diablo that Jan believed might have crossed a line.

We were owned by Bob and Jan Davidson at the time, and Bob and Jan are two of the sweetest people in the universe. Jan walks in, and the woman in charge of PR was playing the game. Jan walked up and said, “Oh, this is the Diablo game that they’re making at Blizzard North.”

And she sees the Butcher’s room, and that’s Jan’s first taste of Diablo: an extreme example of the game’s gore and nudity. And she said, “Oh, I don’t know about this.”

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

I made the dead bodies in the Butcher’s room, all the corpses on the spikes and hanging from the walls. A lot of that was just taking the Warrior model, taking off all his clothes, hanging him there like a mannequin, and then going in and hand-drawing all the blood and gore and stuff.

I like cussing, I like violence, I like blood, and I’m proud of it. I think somebody made some comment about how the bodies looked like mannequins, so I thought, All right, I’ll give you real. I went in and drew penises and female body parts, nipples and what not. And it all stayed in.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Blizzard North

Allen supported Blizzard North’s vision to create a game with a mature, gothic-horror vibe, but suggested that nude corpses planted on spikes and smeared across walls ripped the envelope more than pushed it. The North bosses disagreed.

We didn’t think our vision took things too far. I remember one issue Max had with somebody down at Blizzard South was when a guy asked, “Is this a game you would be proud to show your grandmother?” And Max’s answer was yes. But our answer was also that we weren’t making this for somebody’s grandma. We were making it for us.

The Butcher’s lair adds great atmosphere to the game early on and shows you what you’re up against in this game. We were happy with the way it looked and what it made you feel. There was never a time where we would say, “Hey, we want to be shocking” or “Make that more violent or racy.”

We never did that. It was always the artists’ visions and our vision coming together. We could have made the game significantly more shocking in so many ways.

-Erich Schaefer

Dave, Max, and Erich refused to budge on Diablo’s graphic content, but they were open to other ideas that affected the game’s design. They had, after all, agreed that Diablo was far more addictive as a real-time game. They were also amenable to outfitting their game with the free online gaming network that Mike O’Brien, a programmer down at Blizzard Entertainment, was building. O’Brien was inspired to build an online gaming service for Blizzard’s games after he tried Kali, a program that allowed gamers to play online with competitors all around the world.

O’Brien found Kali’s business model and ease of use as appealing as its catalog of supported games, which included Blizzard’s WarCraft II. [SQ1] At the bargain-bin price of twenty bucks, Kali shattered the barriers imposed by modems and local networks and let players anywhere in the world group together with just a few mouse clicks. O’Brien was not the only developer excited by Kali’s success. Other companies had announced plans to launch their own services that let players play games online for nominal fees.

Eager to plant Blizzard’s flag in the loamy soil of online gaming, O’Brien made a bold suggestion.

I was not there at the very beginning of the discussion, but at the time I joined, creating a multiplayer service was really becoming the hot topic at the company. Mike O’Brien was the one spearheading that, and certainly, he was the one insisting that it not be a paid service.

He was the internal champion in saying, “Look, even if we were able to offer it for a while and charge people for it, eventually someone’s going to make the idea cost-effective and not charge for it, and we’re all going to be left scrambling. Let’s be the guys who go out there and put the stake in the ground and say, ‘This is the service we’re going to offer our players to differentiate our games. Let’s be awesome.’”

-Jeff Strain

The idea of supporting a free multiplayer gaming service was a huge financial risk. Jay Cotton and Scott Coleman, the creators behind Kali, allowed gamers to sample Kali for a few hours at no charge. Once the timer expired, gamers could pay twenty bucks to use Kali as often as they liked. By charging a fee, Cotton and Coleman had created a steady revenue stream that they used to continue improving their program. Foregoing a fee meant Blizzard would have to depend on game sales to maintain development of its multiplayer service. Allen Adham saw the risk in creating and sustaining a free service, but he also saw the potential.

We didn’t really talk about the possibility of Battle.net failing, at least not in discussions that I was involved in. To my recollection, once we decided to do it and the company had committed to it, it was just like any other project: we were going to have our own peer-to-peer hosting service to allow players to play against each other over the Internet, and it just had to work.

-Jeff Strain

O’Brien envisioned the service, which he dubbed Battle.net, as a matchmaker. Battle.net would provide a virtual lobby where players could meet up, chat, and launch game sessions. Once players entered a game, Battle.net would bow out and let the peers, the players’ computers running the game, take the reins. O’Brien assessed the projects on Blizzard’s plate. The WarCraft II team was currently working on a new RTS game, StarCraft, which probably wouldn’t be ready until Christmas. Blizzard North’s Diablo looked to be ready by summer 1996, just a few months off, making it the perfect launch pad for Battle.net.

During one of their phone conferences, Allen asked Dave Brevik how multiplayer code for Diablo was coming along.

We had planned on making Diablo a peer-to-peer network multiplayer game… sort of. The fact is, none of us had any experience doing that, so we were just writing the game as a single-player game, going around with our fingers in our ears saying, “Sure! It’ll be multiplayer!”

The guys down south got a look at our code. They had done multiplayer modes for WarCraft, and they said, “Oh my God, what are you guys doing? This isn’t ready for multiplayer. Are you out of your minds?” So they came up and helped us convert it to multiplayer.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North [SQ2]

While O’Brien and new hire Jeff Strain stayed behind to write Battle.net, Pat Wyatt and fellow programmer Collin Murray flew up to Blizzard North in August to help Dave and the other North programmers carve out space for multiplayer in the game’s code. The first time Pat opened up Diablo’s code database, he almost suffered a coronary. Routines were broken up and scattered across code, making components used in specific operations, such as calculating damage, difficult to track down and debug. Gobs of assembly, the language used to write Nintendo and Sega games, bled into sections written in C, a more advanced language used to write most computer games.

I had done some C in college, but I also made that jump from assembly to C when I went over to the Diablo project. The thing we did when we had a hard time figuring out how to write something in C was we would quickly write it in assembly, since we knew it better.

We would use assembly at points where we couldn’t figure out how to make [C code] faster, but we knew assembly would be quick enough.

-Robin van der Wel, programmer, Blizzard North

In analyzing Diablo’s guts, Pat could see that the code was not poorly written. It just wasn’t written according to proper programming practices that resulted in long-lasting, reusable, easy-to-maintain code. When Dave Brevik and his programmers had encountered a problem writing console games, such as Justice League, they had hammered out the first solution that worked and moved on. Console developers did whatever was necessary to get their game running so they could make milestones, get paid, and push on toward the next set of milestones.

Bashing through technical hurdles with the closest blunt instrument worked for console games because one Sega Genesis was the same as any other. Developing computer games was different. Every computer contained a mix of different hardware; if one player in an online game experienced a game-crippling bug, other computers involved might go down as well. A PC game needed to be stable not just for one player, but for everyone.

Booking a hotel, Pat and Colin teamed up with Dave to weed out bugs and write tighter code in the C language. The work often kept them at the North office until close to dawn, but Pat was used to the grueling schedule.

Blizzard Entertainment was an amazingly tight-knit group. We all loved games. We all worked really hard. We hung out together. We worked so hard that there was this thing called the Blizzard Curse, which was: If you’re married, you’ll get divorced; if you have a girlfriend, she’ll break up with you.

But we always had this vision that even though we were this tiny little company, we were eventually going to just dominate the game industry. And that vision came true because of the incredible passion and devotion that everybody had.

-Pat Wyatt

Looking around, it seemed to Pat that not everyone else shared that passion. Most members of the North team showed up to work each morning around ten or eleven. They spent hours playing games and headed home around five or six. They got work done, but at a fraction of the pace set at his Blizzard. Dave Brevik was the only constant. The man was a machine, leaving and arriving before the sun had crawled out of bed.

Dave, Max, and Erich saw nothing wrong with their schedule. They didn’t run a sweatshop. They and their friends were creative people. Work should be a place that encouraged and nurtured that creativity.

Before Diablo and after we were done, we had a lot of fun around the office. Some days, nothing would really take place. We’d play a bunch of games.

We weren’t super workaholics. We put in long hours to get things done, but we didn’t feel like we couldn’t waste any days. It was pretty casual back then.

-Erich Schaefer

Playing games was fun, but it was also research. Devoting hours every week to playing X-COM, as well as catching on to the roguelikes Dave enjoyed, had inspired much of Diablo’s former turn-based design. That design had changed dramatically, but it had been the catalyst for sparking Blizzard’s interest in publishing Diablo. NHL ’94 was a benchmark for tight, responsive controls and fast, calculated action. In implementing Diablo’s controls and designing its characters, Blizzard North’s gamers demanded that their game feel as good and respond as sharply as their favorite games.

Playing games also kept the creative juices flowing over long weeks spent burning the candle at both ends.

During Justice League, we were on a milestone schedule. We crunched every month in order to meet milestones. We had about three weeks of crunching every month and one week of relaxing and a lot of game playing.

You’ve got to restore yourself. You can’t just crunch and get burned out.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Blizzard North

[Blizzard North] was a little bit like Animal House: there are loose rules, everybody tries to respect each other and work diligently, but have some fun, too. Don’t make this a hardcore, I’m-wearing-a-tie job. That’s exactly what we didn’t want.

Regardless of whether or not our extracurricular activities had an impact on development timelines and how much we worked, the end result kind of speaks for itself, right? Did we go about it [making games] in an unorthodox way? Yes. But we all had pretty good success there, and we all had some fun.

-David Brevik

Other elements of Diablo’s design and Blizzard North’s contrasting culture presented opportunities for the two Blizzards to lock horns. Perma-death, a holdover from the roguelikes Dave enjoyed so much, was another point of contention: when a character died in a roguelike, the game deleted the save file and forced players to start over at the beginning. No second chances, no exceptions.

Part of the way a turn-based game becomes compelling and exciting is when you’re down to your last few hit points, you’re up against a tough monster, you have a bunch of things you can do, and you’re sitting there thinking about it.

You think: Should I use this potion? Should I swing at this guy? What should I do here? If I make the wrong choice, my guy’s dead. I’ve spent 12 hours building this guy, I haven’t slept tonight, and I’m going to make a bad choice right now.

And you do. You die, and you cry all night, and then you come back and play again.

-David Brevik

Allen understood the appeal of perma-death. What better way to attach players to their characters than to treat death as real rather than a setback solved by pressing continue? But such a punishing mechanic had no place in a Blizzard game. Casual players would reject Diablo if it punished their mistakes by nuking their progress. Dave hemmed and hawed, but saw the logic behind Allen’s case. The WarCraft games had done well at market because they were accessible, and perma-death was anything but.

The North bosses respected the ability to push an argument backed by sound logic. That was how they preferred to captain their ship.

There was this bigger middle room where about five guys sat. We’d be talking about whatever or getting shit done. To the left was an office where Max and Erich sat, and those two would argue about stuff all the time. All. The. Time.

We would laugh and laugh about what they were talking about. It was probably politics most of the time, sometimes game design stuff. We’d always make fun of them, saying they were a married couple squawking like hens.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

We really did try to make Blizzard North an egalitarian place; there was no pulling rank on anyone. From the most recent hire up to the top, anyone could have a vicious argument at any time, about any topic.

My brother and I have those typical sibling differences where we know exactly how to push each other’s buttons. Sometimes, in retrospect, it was almost recreation to do so.

As far as serious differences, we would have them frequently, but we weren’t pointless arguers. It wasn’t just yelling back and forth. There was a sense in the office that you had to make your case. The person who made the best case, won.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

Sometimes after we talk to [author David Craddock], we argue about what actually happened.

-Erich Schaefer

Blizzard North’s bosses executed their meritocracy policy again when they butted heads with Allen and the strike team over spell-casting methods. Diablo players learned and upgraded spells by reading books dropped by monsters or found in libraries randomly wedged into a dungeon’s randomized architecture. Early on, Blizzard decreed that players should cast spells from a book-like interface: open the book, click the spell, and click the monster to cast.

Blizzard North wrinkled their noses at the implementation. Diablo was all about clicking, but clicking too often could slow down the game. They would keep the book interface, but they also implemented an alternative called the quick-spell system. Players could bring up a list of spells and bind up to four spells to four separate keys. Casting a bound spell was as simple as pressing the proper key and clicking the right mouse button to cast. Blizzard’s strike team reviewed the implementation and agreed that it was faster and more efficient.

As development wore on, the two Blizzards engaged in more passionate debates. Some arguments lasted for hours, others stretched on for weeks, and all left both sides grinding their teeth and pulling their hair. But those arguments also made Diablo even better.

We all had very high standards for what we were doing, and we were also competitive. I think brutal honesty was sort of our style anyway. It was certainly true of Allen Adham. He would never hesitate to give his actual opinion, even though he would do it fairly diplomatically.

And it was definitely true of David Brevik. He would say what was on his mind without any filters whatsoever.

I think we had a group that was pretty good at adapting to that, because it was definitely our style. We had brutally honest meetings quite a lot, and we actually grew to enjoy them because we’d always end up realizing that what we were working on became better after that conversation.

-Max Schaefer

You specifically want to go out and hire passionate, brilliant people, and passionate, brilliant people are opinionated. When you put four, five, or six people in the room together, all highly opinionated, it’s highly unlikely that, for any given subject, they’ll all have the same opinion.

So managing that process and navigating through it in a way that makes everybody feel like they’re being heard and that their input is being weighed and [that they] have a voice that is respected—that’s part of what the modern game producer has to do.

But in this particular case, I think that the cultural differences between the two companies made it even more difficult—the cultural division and lack of clarity over who, at the end of the day, made the call. In this particular case, the problem was—particularly before Davidson purchased what became Blizzard North—that chain of command was not clear. The person who was responsible for making the ultimate call was not very clearly specified, and that’s always a dangerous situation.

-Jeff Strain [SQ3]

Those guys were a little more experienced, in that they’d already released the first WarCraft PC game and had done a good dozen or so ports of different titles. It was a really good combination. I think both the original Diablo and Diablo II really were what they were because you had the kind of Blizzard [Entertainment] polish and work ethic, and technical capability and [quality assurance testing], combined with the Bay Area quirkiness and personality [of Blizzard North].

Those really were the two elements that put it together.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Blizzard North

Chapter 13: The Golden Times

For me, Diablo’s development was more about going through the whole process of developing a game from start to finish. It was the first game I got to see from that perspective. I mean, you’re caught up in this big whirlwind, and it’s so exciting. I learned everything. The only thing I didn’t learn how to do there was walk, talk, and read.

-Eric Sexton, artist/designer, Blizzard North

One thing I love about game development: it’s a collaborative effort. One of the biggest successes of Condor was our collaborative environment.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Condor

Diablo broke so many traditions for PC games at that time. It was for Windows 95, it was DirectX, it was multiplayer over the Internet with a free service, it was an action-RPG, it had state-of-the-art 256-color graphics, it ran quickly. It was way, way beyond other games. It broke ground as a genre. I mean, the first Diablo was, in a lot of ways, revolutionary. That definitely helped its success and helped Blizzard’s success overall.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

Like the diverse personalities that made up Blizzard North, Diablo was a puzzle whose pieces came in a variety of shapes and sizes. As summer wound down toward autumn, mutual collaboration between the two Blizzards revealed the final pieces that completed the Diablo experience.

Between us and Blizzard we said, “How can we make this game a little bit bigger, a little bit more fun?” We decided to go with three [playable] characters instead of the one.

The decision to go with multiple character classes was made pretty late in the game, maybe three to four months before release.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

The square-jawed hero, once a glob of clay that players could shape to their liking, was re-christened as the Warrior. Two new heroes joined him on Diablo’s character selection screen: the Rogue drew arrows from a bottomless quiver, and the Sorcerer, a dark-skinned, distinguished-looking gentleman with a snowy goatee, fired off spells as quickly as players clicked the mouse. By early fall, Blizzard North’s artists had their pipeline down pat. In a matter of weeks, Michio concepted the heroes, built the models, and passed them off to Eric Sexton, who gave them animations for walking, fighting, and dying.

Like Blizzard North’s “mom test,” offering fighter, archer, and sorcerer archetypes made Diablo more accessible.

To me, creating character art should facilitate gameplay. You can look at the Warrior’s silhouette and tell what he does. That makes it easier for players to figure out what classes can do.

Toward the end [of the game], the classes all become basically the same character. It’s not like they have vastly different stats. But starting off with a template allows the player to think, Okay, [as a Rogue] I’m going to focus on using my bow and arrows.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

In a lot of ways, using one amorphous class was much more of a true role-playing experience in that it was undefined who you were going to be. In reality, that doesn’t work very well for a mass audience.

-David Brevik

The character art clearly typified each class, but the game didn’t shoehorn players into stereotyped play styles.

One of the design philosophies we had when making the project was, we wanted every player to be able to do everything. There was no reason why, as a wizard, I couldn’t pick up a sword. I would just be bad at it: the combat animations would take longer, and my inherent stats made it so that I was discouraged from using melee weapons.

It was very different from other RPGs where, if you weren’t a Warrior, you couldn’t pick up a sword. That doesn’t make much sense; I can certainly hold a sword. I suck, but I can do it.

-David Brevik [SQ1]

Whether with sword, axe, bow, or walls of flame, the goal of the game was simple: descend through the dungeons and kill Diablo. Over time, sub-goals appeared in the game.

Quests just happened as we went along. The process went, “Here we are making the catacombs. They’re kind of boring without something to do. Let’s come up with some kind of boss or some quest.”

It was a super organic process. Nothing was mapped out ahead of time.

-Erich Schaefer

Quests, optional missions players could complete to earn extra treasures, existed in some of Dave’s favorite roguelikes, but only informally. In Angband, players might luck out and discover pre-defined crypts in various dungeon levels, like static islands slotted into the game’s randomly generated sea of dungeons. Entering a crypt presented a risk-reward scenario: the monsters within were some of the deadliest in the game, but the treasures they guarded were the cream of the crop.

Dave, Max, and Erich had listed quests as a feature in the original Diablo design document, but had been too busy to implement quests themselves. Max had been tied up building stadiums for NFLPA Superstars, Dave spent every waking moment writing code, and Erich was more interested in designing gameplay than writing story fluff.

Maybe five or six months toward the end, Erich Schaefer said, “Hey, we need quests. I’ll pay five dollars for every quest we put in the game.” I wrote about 30 quests, and I think we got 10 or 12 in.

Not very many people wrote quests. I ended up writing most of the ones that went in. Erich Schaefer wrote a couple; maybe one person did one or two others.

-Eric Sexton

Eric Sexton is like a design fire hose. He’d have design stuff coming out of him all the time. Through all the trials and tribulations of game development, he still has this great, passionate attitude about making games.

It’s very hard to jade that guy. People never gave that guy credit for what he could do, and the stuff he gave to us.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

Opening up a word processor, Sexton began pounding away at keys. His fingers barely kept pace with the ideas spilling out of his head: a demon who slaughtered townsfolk and strung up their corpses in his lair, a giant skeleton king who haunted his burial crypt, skeletons that guarded an ancient spell in a forgotten tomb, a magical chart that players could dig up and use to weaken Diablo in advance of the final battle, recovering the tavern owner’s signpost from the pack of Fallen who had absconded with it… [SQ2]

Gathered together, the quests read like pages ripped from different novels. What was the relationship between confronting an undead king and recovering a tavern’s signpost? Blizzard North’s team had no idea, and they didn’t care.

This was kind of a reaction to RPGs at the time, which had just buckets and buckets of story, story in your face, all day I dream about story, story, story.

That’s one of the brilliant things about Diablo: the name of the game gives you the goal. You don’t even really need to know anything other than to read the box.

-David Brevik [SQ3]

To weave the jumble of quests into a yarn that explained why Diablo tormented Tristram, Blizzard North turned to Chris Metzen, a creative writer at Blizzard Entertainment who had gotten his start animating characters on the Super Nintendo version of Justice League Task Force before taking initiative and plotting out characters and story for WarCraft II.

The whole idea of King Leoric and Prince Albrecht came about later when Chris Metzen came in and said, “We need to wrap a story around this.” So he took all of the quests that I wrote and kind of rejigged them.

He didn’t change the quests so much as he took all these unconnected story ideas and events and wrapped them up into one idea.

-Eric Sexton

Dave and Erich were all for telling a tale, but story should never take priority over mowing down monsters and raking up treasure. The game was designed so players didn’t need to know why an undead king was rattling around down in his burial crypt. They could talk to townsfolk for background information or just kill the king when they got around to it.

Diablo’s narrative received another boost from a motivated group of 3D artists down in Irvine.

Blizzard North just kind of had to listen to what we did as far as cinematics. They just basically rolled with what we gave them. They wanted to concentrate on making a game and not on cinematics.

-Duane Stinnett, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

A small but eager group of artists down south led by Duane Stinnett and Matt Samia had rendered cinematics for the WarCraft games in between completing other art tasks, such as modeling characters and building the maps where missions would take place. The videos were short but sweet interludes that broke up the action and advanced the story between missions.

Frothing to create short movies set in Diablo’s bleak world, Duane and Matt asked Allen Adham what the North guys had planned in the way of story. Allen just shrugged. Without any plot to work with, Duane and Matt rounded up a cadre of interested artists and mapped out a cinematic that established Diablo’s mood. They gathered some 3D models from Blizzard North and whipped up a video that played the first time players started Diablo. The video took them on a crawl through a desolate town and delved into dark dungeons, conveying a taste of the adventure to come.

Next, Matt and Duane conspired to craft a suitably grim epilogue. Players would inevitably slay Diablo, but Matt and Duane didn’t see how the game could end on a happy note. Diablo was gritty, grimy, and gothic. Exploring what victory might mean in such a grim world, they hit on a suitably shocking ending.

A few weeks later, a disc containing the epilogue arrived on Blizzard North’s doorstep. The team popped in the disc and watched, stunned, as the hero knelt beside Diablo’s corpse, carved out the crystal that contained the essence of the Lord of Terror from the demon’s forehead, held it up, hesitated…

I remember we got the cinematic delivered to us, and we all watched as our hero jammed the gem into his own head. We were pretty much mouth-agape for a couple minutes as we digested what we had just seen.

-Erich Schaefer

That was Matt and me being very dark and fucked up, our way of thinking. I can’t remember if Chris Metzen [artist and designer on WarCraft II] was in on it. I think we dragged him into it, and he became one of its biggest advocates. He was against it at first, then we kind of said, “No, it’d be cool!”

It was sort of inspired by Metzen’s idea of the Soulstone [gem]. We said, “Why don’t we have the hero take it on themselves?” So it just became our mission to make it a fucked-up ending, and it stuck. I was honestly surprised that it made it through to the end.

-Duane Stinnett

***

Influenced by Angband, quests in Diablo took the form of pre-defined areas like the Butcher’s lair that the game’s random dungeon generator algorithms squeezed into certain levels. By the early fall, the Blizzard North team saw the need for another type of readymade room.

Everybody else was doing their own game systems, and they needed an engineer to do whatever was left. They had all these levels, but they didn’t have anything in the rooms.

My job was to make the theme rooms: a treasure room, an armor room, stuff like that. So I had to learn all the code and how it worked.

-Jonathan Morin, programmer, Blizzard North

Jon Morin had joined Blizzard North in early October. Swept up in the excitement over Diablo, he immediately looked for a way to contribute to the game. He finished the code that generated treasure chambers and submitted it to Dave Brevik. When the next build of the game went up on the internal server, the team took a break and went treasure hunting.

Jon grinned as he entered dungeon cells and caverns lined with racks of weapons and treasure chests. He clicked a lid and watched as gold flew up and rained down in a neat little pile—another Jon Morin contribution.

Diablo’s sudden influx of treasure rooms, three hero characters, quests that balanced great danger and greater rewards, and the availability of an office network paid for by Blizzard North’s parent company gave rise to another team activity.

The corpse runs were really fun. Somebody in the office started to scream, and everybody would get online to help him out. Most of us would drop what we were doing to help other people do corpse runs.

-Erich Schaefer

“Come on, jump into my game! Help me get my corpse back!” It was kind of fun whether you were on the receiving end or you were going in and giving help.

-Michio Okamura [SQ4]

Corpse-run mania swept the office. The moment a developer cried out for help, the rest of the team dropped what they were doing, logged in, and rushed to fight off the pack of demons that had slain their buddies. More than once, a hero’s demise inspired a new feature.

You know the different portals on the surface that lead to different dungeon levels? That came about because of me, Michio Okamura, and Eric Sexton. We were playing in a group together and decided that instead of going where we were supposed to, we’d jump into a higher-level dungeon.

We were getting killed a ton, sure, but we were also able to level-up really quickly. It was pretty funny because we were yelling and screaming and running back and forth to each other’s desks to see what was happening.

Pretty soon a lot of people were watching us, and we all determined that we needed to restrict access to dungeons based on character level.

-Stieg Hedlund, designer, Blizzard North [SQ5]

The nastiest enemies weren’t demons, but glitches and bugs that disrupted the gamers’ journey to the bottom of Hell. The team would build their characters up to a certain level, or pick up a certain item, or click the wrong button at the right time, and the code processing behind the scenes would come tumbling down like a glass house struck by a rock. Dave, Rick, and Doron pushed new builds through quickly, but even the smallest change rendered old characters obsolete. Nobody seemed to mind. Starting from scratch meant opportunities to play new levels and pry new randomized items from the cold, dead hands of monsters.

It was always a race to see how quick you could build up your character and discover exploits, and how this [character] played with this [character], and what monsters are too strong and too weak.

That’s part of the requirement: playing the game constantly. That’s where you get all the results. It was kind of neat to not get in trouble for playing games at work.

-Peter Brevik, programmer, Blizzard North

Character wipes are a part of the beta process, so everyone was playing the early levels a lot, but never getting all the way to the end. So one time when the releases had stabilized a bit, we had a contest to see who could get to the end first, with a $50 reward.

Ben Haas won, playing as the Sorcerer, but I’ll note that that was before we disabled Blood Boil [spell]. I finished about a day later—the first to do so with the Warrior. [Artist] Mark Sutherland was the first Rogue to finish the next day.

-Stieg Hedlund

The gamers at Blizzard North knew their game was fun. In the early fall, the outside world got to experience Diablo for themselves.

The decision to make Diablo a Windows 95 game was a big controversy in the office. Nobody knew if Windows was going to take off or not. We would say, “Uh-oh, we’re going to prevent all these DOS [Microsoft’s command-line-driven operating system] players from playing the game.” That one kept us up at night, wondering if we were doing the right thing.

-Erich Schaefer

Early in 1995, Dave Brevik had started writing Diablo as a game for DOS. DOS came with a huge user base of gamers, but was a pain to develop for. Since each gamer’s computer contained wildly different combinations of hardware, programmers had to write special files called drivers that coordinated communication between their game software and every conceivable brand of hardware.

Microsoft aimed to make developing PC games significantly simpler with the release of Windows 95, a new operating system with a graphical interface made up of buttons and menus, and DirectX, a suite of programming tools. DirectX functioned like a translator: programmers could simply call routines for graphics, sound, and input devices, such as mice, keyboards, and game controllers, and DirectX would force the instructions through regardless of the hardware in the user’s box.

To entice game developers to embrace Windows 95, Microsoft contacted popular studios and arranged a special marketing promotion.

Microsoft was willing to do a promotion with Blizzard in which we could put a Diablo demo on a DirectX CD. They were going to send out a couple million of these CDs, which at the time was ridiculous because it cost a dollar to make a CD, so they’d be spending a couple million on this thing.

We just had to provide them with a demo and support DirectX.

-David Brevik [SQ6]

Diablo’s demo was short: two levels, an unfinished interface, missing and incomplete audio files, and only one playable hero. The gamers didn’t care.

After leaving 3DO, I naturally looked for a job at Blizzard North. I had seen Diablo in development and knew it would be a hit. After Microsoft included the demo version of Diablo in their Games Sampler 2 [disc] for Windows 95, it was obvious to almost everyone.

-Matt Householder, producer, Blizzard North [SQ7]

All the sudden, magazines are calling, and there was buzz. I don’t think we foresaw that. I don’t think we foresaw a lot of what happened. We were just kind of going blindly through the whole thing.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

***

Pete Brevik’s eyes fluttered open and drifted to his alarm. 4:45 a.m. Far too early for the dawn to break, but not too early for his brother to continue working on his dream game.

Dave would wake up early in the morning, and we would go to work. We would work all day, then we’d come home, he’d eat a quick dinner, and he would go back in the kitchen where he had his computer set up, and he would work for another four, five, six hours.

Then he’d go to bed around two o’clock in the morning, and he’d get up at five o’clock and go back to work. He did that [schedule] nonstop. I mean nonstop. He put everything he had into making games.

He always wanted to learn more, he always wanted to make things better. He was a perfectionist.

-Peter Brevik

A few hours later, Matt Householder pulled his VW Rabbit into a parking space at the Balboa Park train station and put her in park. Matt Uelmen’s train arrived at the station a few minutes later. Uelmen hopped into Householder’s passenger seat and struck up a conversation that covered pop culture, philosophy, music, and politics while Householder guided the rumbling Rabbit through rush-hour traffic along 101 North.

Inside Blizzard North, Kelly Johnson and Chris Root ran through the day’s agenda. For the next twelve to fourteen hours, they started new characters, kicked demon ass, and helped track down bugs. Blizzard North was in crunch mode.

The two Blizzards had pegged the holiday season as the perfect release window for Diablo, but the game still needed work. Dungeons spawned without a path to the exit. Entering certain dungeons inexplicably crashed the game. Quests had to be soldered onto existing code, an inelegant solution born out of haste to meet the Christmas deadline.

The hard part was that the engine had already been written, and the engine was written without quests in mind. So the engine had to be modified to attach these quests, but this late in the project, it wasn’t as feasible.

The quests were almost separate programs, like small little games in the scope of the larger game, that were attached to the engine.

-Robin van der Wel, programmer, Blizzard North

There were a lot of AI bugs. The last levels, Hell, didn’t even [enter into production] until probably summertime. So we had to finish the content, and we had to do this multiplayer transition, and we had to get the thing PC-compatible, all the problems debugged.

There were lots of difficult bugs to iron out. A lot of people on the team were very green in that this was their first PC game. I think Diablo was the very first program I ever wrote in C. I’d only written stuff in assembly before that. So it was kind of a different workflow.

-David Brevik [SQ8]

For the programmers, the distinction between night and day became meaningless.

I remember one of the worst times. I’d just done a 72-hour stint, and I was falling asleep while coding. Dave tapped me on the shoulder and goes, “Dude, go to bed. Move over. I’ll finish.”

I remember that because it was just so cool. I don’t know what to say about that; he saw that I was suffering and said, “I’ll pick up for you.” I went to another room and immediately passed out because my body was shutting down.

-Rick Seis

The phone rang late one night, and Karin Colenzo winced. Before, only publishers and the guys from Blizzard Entertainment had called, usually to check in or talk shop. Now, cradling the phone to her ear, she listened patiently to another significant other asking when her boyfriend would be finished making that game. One afternoon, Karin thought of a way to make it up to all the significant others and give her team a much-needed break.

In mid-December, Karin rented out the main room of the local Marriott hotel and threw Blizzard North’s second annual Christmas bash. Ken Williams and Karin showed up first, dressed to the nines. Wives and girlfriends filtered in. Ken and Karin made the rounds, mingling from table to table, glancing between their watches and the doorway. Where were the guys? Karin called Dave. He’d forgotten about the party, and so had everyone else. Half an hour later they arrived, positively sparkling in suit jackets, button-up shirts, polished shoes, and ties.

The guys met up with their significant others, danced a few songs, and dropping into chairs at tables to eat. Michio listened to the music, feeling his eyelids grow heavy. He felt someone tap his shoulder. He jerked his head up and turned to see his wife glaring at him. He had fallen asleep.

Several hours later, Karin finished cleaning up the hotel room and drove back to the office to pick up a few papers. Just inside the door she found a snarl of ties on the floor. Following a trail of formalwear, she found the main room dark except for the glow of monitors. The guys were once again clad in jeans and sandals and back at work in one final push to get the game to stores before the holidays.

Like a demon leaping forth from shadows, Christmas ripped the two Blizzards’ holiday release plans to shreds. The game just wasn’t ready. Together, Allen Adham and the North bosses made the call to delay Diablo.

It was not the first time Blizzard Entertainment had made the call to hold a game back to guarantee it reached full potential.

We thought [The Lost Vikings] was basically good enough. […] Brian Fargo took the game home and had a ton of feedback for us. We thought we were in the home stretch. He had a list of things that we weren’t eager to hear.

It was our first painful iterative process. It’s been repeated on every single Blizzard game. Generally, you start off going in one direction, think you’ve got it figured out, and everyone on the design team thinks it’s great, then open it up to the rest of the company and find out, no, it isn’t great, [it has] lots of serious issues.

-Mike Morhaime

WarCraft: Orcs and Humans almost suffered a more serious delay. When Allen had reported to Bob and Jan that WarCraft’s sync bug might cause the game to slip past its Christmas 1994 window, the Davidsons had told him to consider dropping multiplayer if it prevented the game from cashing in on Christmas sales.

Allen stood firm: the game would ship with multiplayer.

We are a game company, staffed only by gamers, and managed at all levels by gamers. We make all of our strategic decisions through the eyes of gamers. Our first goal is not to “make money” but rather to “make great games.”

Of course, it is a happy side effect that great games, regardless of release dates, have long shelf lives and make lots of money. So if you truly put the game first, then decisions like holding a product an extra couple of months, even if it means missing Christmas […] become fairly clear.

Over the long run, we have NEVER regretted a decision that put the quality of the game first.

-Allen Adham, co-founder, Blizzard Entertainment

Pat Wyatt spent five months crawling through multiplayer code until he finally hit on a solution: checkpoints that verified every piece of data passed between both computers to ensure they stayed on the same page. The Davidsons had squirmed, but put their faith in Blizzard. Their faith had paid off. Blizzard’s Orcs and Humans invaded retail stores just in time for the Black Friday shopping blitz. WarCraft did not fly off shelves right away. Blizzard’s reputation among PC gamers and critics was nonexistent. Slowly, magazine critics took interest. With each award and high score, more and more gamers hit up stores to get in on the fun. Bob and Jan Davidson rarely questioned Allen’s game development savvy again.

Like Allen and his team down south, the North bosses and their team were gamers first and businessmen second. Nobody wanted to miss out on the holiday shopping frenzy, but everybody including the Davidsons understood that delaying Diablo would make the game better.

Blizzard Entertainment devoted all of their resources to helping North cross the finish line as soon as possible.

One thing that’s not widely known is that while Blizzard North got the credit for releasing Diablo, literally every single person at Blizzard worked on it.

We were supposed to be working on StarCraft, and over time, every single person got pulled away—the art team, the designers, the tech team, the programmers—until there was only one programmer left, and that was the lead programmer on StarCraft. He got pulled off to finish the installer I had half-completed because I was too busy working on Diablo multiplayer.

So Diablo was very much a joint enterprise by Blizzard and Blizzard North.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

When we had signed the contract to do Diablo, the scope and size of the project [were beyond our budget]. Part of the problem was we were under-resourced for what we wanted to do. Adding something like Battle.net at the last minute, with six months left, was a huge undertaking.

We were definitely already under-resourced. There were a lot of people working on the game at that point.

-David Brevik

There was a sense of, “They’re Blizzard North. We’re all comrades in arms. Let’s get this done.”

-Stu Rose, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Bob Fitch, StarCraft’s lead programmer, eventually abandoned his charge and helped the other developers test the game. Stu Rose and Sammy Didier touched up artwork here and there—duplicating some of the armor sets Blizzard North had created and dipping them in new colors to add more variety to the random item drops and painting cracks into the stone-facade game interface.

On Christmas morning, developers from the two Blizzards opened presents and visited with family. On December 26th, they returned to work.

With Diablo, we just got a taste of the crunches to come. We all just loved the game. We all loved making it. It didn’t occur to me too much that we would [work fewer hours]. I’m sure some of the other guys in the office had more of a life than I did, but it wasn’t hard to motivate the team.

We knew we were making a fun game, and we agreed that we had to do it right and not ship something shoddy. I don’t think it took too much motivation other than the love for what we were doing.

-Erich Schaefer

Somehow I get this nickname of “den mom,” probably because I was the only female. A lot of people found out that I’d been a counselor and said, “Oh, I can talk to her.”

Toward the end of projects when people were spending the night, the office kind of got a little smelly. So—I think this was at the end of the first Diablo—I remember getting kits of toothpaste, a toothbrush, and deodorant, and passing them around, like, “Here!”

I felt like I was accepted, like I was one of them. It was good. They were good guys.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager/“den mom,” Blizzard North

Alongside the demo included on Microsoft’s Game Sampler 2 disc, Blizzard released a limited beta test so players could venture online and check out the free Battle.net service. Stepping into chat rooms and jumping into games with players from around the world stirred the gaming world into a frenzy and also generated speculation about hidden secrets in Diablo.

This was in the last two months of development. People were tired, and they didn’t want to work on stuff like town NPCs [non-playable characters]. I’m like, “I’m dying to do something! I’ll do it!” Erich Schaefer said, “We need some farm animals.”

They didn’t have a list; I just came up with my own animals. I was thinking maybe a dog, a cat—but a cow. There was just something about a cow. For some reason, I thought a cow would be cool.

I got the model from… actually, I didn’t build the model. I stole it. We had a program called Bones, which was one of the first programs for boning a skeleton. It was very simple back then. They gave you a cow model as a sample for how to work with the software. All that moved was the head.

I put a backbone in; that’s all I had time for. As soon as the beta for Diablo came out, people started tripping over the cow. People were saying, “There’s a cow level, and you have to do these things to access it.” And I said, “There’s no cow level!”

But people never believe you are who you are. You say you worked on a game, and they never believe you. It was fun to see that legend grow and to see the gaming community take the game in their own direction.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Blizzard North

Motivation to push through long days and nights came in the form of the growing buzz surrounding the game.

Condor and Blizzard North was a dream time. Yes, we worked very hard and very long hours, but it was this tight, small group of people working on this thing together, this ragtag group of guys that really had not proven themselves yet, putting something together that was obviously going to be special.

-David Brevik

***

At midnight on December 27th, Dave, Max, and Erich summoned everyone to the kitchen. The team dragged themselves in and flopped down in chairs and on countertops. Dave cleared his throat and spoke up. Diablo had gone gold. The team needed a few minutes to process the news. Gone gold. Industry jargon for finished and sent off for mass production and distribution. [SQ9]

Max opened the fridge and drew out bottles of bubbly. Karin rummaged through cupboards she kept stocked with snacks and supplies and pulled out paper cups. Together, the team raised their cups and took a few minutes to bask in crossing the finish line. Almost two years and thousands of man-hours had been spent throwing together tools held together with spit and backups of code on floppy disks to accomplish technical feats for which their industry, still a squalling infant compared to the more mature music and film businesses, had no solutions. They had spent more of those years together than at home, feeling their way through game design and sacrificing time with family to create something fun and uniquely their own.

A love of gaming was the common element that had drawn all these different people from different backgrounds together.

Now, within a week, their game would be sitting on store shelves next to all the other games that had inspired them. All that was left to do was wait and see how gamers around the world responded to their labors—and get some much-needed sleep. [SQ10]

Diablo was a total labor of love. Dave, Max, and Erich loved this game. Rick and Michio loved this game. Eric Sexton loved this game. Everybody loved this game.

-Karin Colenzo

It was a magical time. People were staying late and playing our game. When the developers are playing it when they don’t have to, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be something pretty special.

The team atmosphere was so great at the beginning of Diablo. We were riding the high of being able to create our dream project.

-David Brevik

I’m most proud of the random dungeon algorithm. I love that puzzle-piece type stuff. I was making the pieces and then collaborating with Rick Seis and Dave Brevik on how to turn those pieces into these random dungeons.

It became a living world that you could play in, and I never got tired of that. I still point to that as a big accomplishment for the time.

-Erich Schaefer

I have nostalgia for Diablo. Just working on a game for the first time, and it was the first Diablo… I’ll always have a fondness for Diablo more than Diablo II.

There are some issues with Diablo II, for me, gameplay-wise. I think Diablo II was the best we could do at the time, but I’ve got to say, I love Diablo I.

-Michio Okamura

The appeal of Diablo is a tribute to the guys at Blizzard North. The game is simple and understandable. People just instantly get it: just run around and kill monsters.

The most important thing in any game—which a lot of game designers have failed to realize—is: what you do from minute to minute is one of the most important things that matters in gameplay. You can have a great story and you can have a great endgame, but if it’s just a drag to get to the endgame, then why are you playing? If the minute-to-minute stuff isn’t fun, why are you doing it?

You’re also getting rewards on all sorts of different schedules. I’m working on a character level, and I’m working on seeing what’s coming out of these barrels and chests, and what monsters will drop, and I’m saving up money for stuff at the vendors, and every once in a while the vendors have some special items, and every once in a while the monsters drop a little bit more of a cooler item than they normally do, and every once in a while I get a quest and I work on that quest, then I complete it and I get a reward for that…

You’re just constantly getting pats on the back for stuff that you’re doing. And that’s fun. That’s why people play games.

-Pat Wyatt

Diablo’s success was an affirmation that the theories we had about what the industry needs and what people want, were true. That was a huge boost to our confidence, because until you actually do something and it works, you have no idea if you’re on the right track at all.

So I think it gave us a lot of confidence to say, “Hey, you know what? When something seems like a good idea and it feels right, it probably is, even if no one else is doing it.”

-Max Schaefer [SQ11]

Epilogue: Phenomenon

Every developer who’s honest with themselves knows when their game is shit, and when it’s really good. There was one time when I finished a game, and one guy said, “Man, you know, I think this game is really good.” And I said, “Dude. No. This game is shit.”

We knew Diablo was a good game. We knew it would sell as good games sell. But we didn’t know it would be a phenomenon.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

End of the First Book of Stay Awhile and Listen

Side Quests

Side Quests: Chapter 1

[SQ1]: Byte-Sized History: Apple Computer Monitors

Apple introduced its Apple II personal computer in 1977. Younger readers might find it odd to learn that the company did not release a monitor until the Apple Monitor III in 1980. Before the Monitor III, owners of Apple II or III computers used television sets to interact with their software.

Apple manufactured Monitor III with a “non-glare screen” to display “sharp, highly readable, 80-character by 24-line text and high-resolution graphics” via a single RCA video cable. It was compatible with the Apple II Plus but specifically designed to fit “neatly on top of the Apple III … for exceptional reading comfort.”

A few years later, Apple followed Monitor III with Monitor II, named not so much for the timing of its release, but for its Apple II Plus-styled case design. Apple’s first consumer display had roughly the same specs as Monitor III, but the simple, classy, swiveling CRT still turned a head or two as the industry began to shift away from TV-reliant computing machines.

-Michael Simon, Mac|Life

Michael Simon’s Mac|Life article goes into more detail on the Monitor II and III, as well as other displays released by Apple.

* http://bit.ly/f0onUN

Readers interested in a more extensive history of computer displays should read “A Brief History of Computer Displays,” written by Benji Edwards of PC World in 2010.

* http://bit.ly/19sXib8

[Back to Chapter 1]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: Brotherly Love

Pete and I were very close and played together a lot when we were little. Mainly that involved me beating the crap out of him. What are big brothers for? Even in my terrible athletic condition, I was still five years older.

Now is not the same case. He could beat the crap out of me.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 1]

[SQ3] Byte-Sized History: The PDP-11

I started high school in eighth grade. We had all sorts of ancient computers in the math lab in high school [such as the PDP-11], a computer with no screen. It was a printer, like a typewriter and computer combined into one with a scroll of paper. It would jam and the whole nine yards.

I was able to learn a little PDP-11 assembly language at that time. My math teacher was helping me out.

-David Brevik

PDP11.org provides a comprehensive history of the PDP-11 computer.

* http://www.pdp11.org/

[Back to Chapter 1]

[SQ4] Byte-Sized History: Drawing Dungeons in Rogue

Curses, the text-based graphics library Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman used to draw dungeons in Rogue, was written by Ken Arnold, a student at University of California Berkeley. Curses allowed users to move the cursor to any position on the screen and drop text there, effectively turning the cursor into a pen able to draw anywhere on the screen’s canvas. Curses became so popular that it was packaged with BSD UNIX, a version of the UNIX operating system developed at UC Berkeley and installed on computers across UC’s network of schools.

Ken Arnold, a big fan of Rogue, met Michael Toy when Toy transferred to UC Berkeley from the Santa Cruz campus. The two kicked off their own version of Rogue while Glenn Wichman worked on another version at UC Santa Cruz.

[Back to Chapter 1]

[SQ5] Byte-Sized History: Homemade Arcade

A side project David Brevik undertook during college convinced FM Waves’ co-founders that David was the right guy for the job of programming their first video game.

When I was in college, I built a cabinet out of wood. I built it in my girlfriend’s apartment and got switches, joysticks, buttons, and all sorts of stuff, and I wired it up to make my own controllers. Then I hooked it all up and put a Sega Genesis, I believe, inside [the cabinet].

So I’d constructed my own arcade-console cabinet. I had it in my room at the fraternity house. It was a lot of fun.

-David Brevik

[Back to Chapter 1]

Side Quests: Chapter 2

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: Pong Imitators

After Atari’s Pong took arcades by storm in 1972, dozens of imitation table tennis games flooded arcades. Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell tried to stay ahead of imitators, whom he referred to as “jackals,” by releasing Home Pong, a version of the game available exclusively through Sears that consumers could hook up to their televisions.

As with the original Pong, the Jackals didn’t wait long before trying to get a share of the new home video gaming market. More than 70 companies all around the world, from electronics giants like Philips to domestic kitchen appliance manufacturers like Italian Zanussi, developed their own version of the game.

While most of these companies soon faded away without leaving any meaningful trace, two of them would actually write important pages in the history of video games. Those Jackals were Coleco and Nintendo.

-Roberto Dillon, The Golden Age of Video Games

Because one version of the table tennis game looked the same as any other, many competitors tried to distinguish themselves by releasing versions featuring multiple game modes such as doubles match-ups for four players. Nintendo attempted to capitalize on the TV-game craze with the release of the Japan-exclusive Color TV Game 6, a collection of colorized table tennis games.

[Back to Chapter 2]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: Jack Tramiel, Father of the Commodore 64 Computer

Jack Tramiel’s story is one of the most popular rags-to-riches legends in video games. A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Tramiel bought a tiny shop in the Bronx and named it Commodore Business Machines. He positioned Commodore as a typewriter repair garage and manufacturer of business equipment such as calculators, but the company struggled until Tramiel decided to try his hand in the home computer market. Unlike the Apple II computer, which required users to supply their own monitor, Commodore’s debut machine, the Commodore PET, featured a monochrome screen, keyboard, a cassette player for storing and reading data, and computer, all wrapped in one attractive plastic case and released in 1977.

There are several rumours about the source of the name PET. Officially it was an acronym for Personal Electronic Transactor, but P.E.T. are also the initials of one of Jack Tramiel’s relatives (his wife I believe). Whatever the origin, Jack thought that PET sounded better and would have some positive linkage with the Pet Rock fad of the late 1970’s.

-Commodore.ca

Admitting that the PET couldn’t go toe-to-toe with peer machines, Tramiel reevaluated the personal computer market. He realized that the lofty price tags associated with PCs made them unattainable to working class families and decided to fill that niche, famously saying that he needed to build computers “for masses, not the classes.” In 1982, the company released the Commodore 64, a low-cost machine able to compete with higher priced competitors.

The PET was an important early computer, but the machine that Tramiel will be forever associated with is the Commodore 64. It was introduced in 1982, offered a crazy-generous 64KB [kilobytes] of memory for a surprisingly low $595 and became one of the most popular computers in history.

[…] He was, essentially, the anti-Steve Jobs: he wanted PCs to be very cheap and very utilitarian, and didn’t care in the slightest about elegance or technical sophistication. The C64 was cheap, utilitarian and inelegant—and for a good long while, that was a recipe for huge success. The rest of the industry was forced to slash prices to compete with Commodore, a trend that got PCs into lots of homes just when the idea of a PC in the home was getting exciting.

-Harry McCracken, TIME Tech

The C64 built a huge following, in part due in part to its vast library of games. The machine’s staggering amount of memory, solid graphics, and sound chip made it appealing to both game developers and players interested in immersing themselves in state-of-the-art worlds.

Two years later, Tramiel left Commodore and formed a new company, Tramiel Technology, Ltd. TTL purchased Atari’s consumer division from Warner Communications. Under Warner’s ownership, the consumer division had concentrated on developing game consoles such as the Atari Video Computer System as well as software for the consoles, but had fallen on hard times after the video game market crash of 1983.

Renaming his acquisition to Atari Corporation, Tramiel came up with a plan to revitalize the company. Atari was bloated with a back stock of game software, so Tramiel convinced retailers to unload the cartridges at bargain-bin prices. Meanwhile, he assigned his best engineers the task of designing new game consoles. One new machine was the Atari Lynx handheld, which Atari launched in September 1989. The Lynx featured a color display that gave it a technical advantage over Nintendo’s Game Boy, released two months earlier.

[Back to Chapter 2]

Side Quests: Chapter 3

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: The Fate of the Atari Lynx

Various articles provide insight into why Atari’s handheld didn’t catch on with gamers.

Lynx games looked better than the Game Boy’s black-and-white display, but the system couldn’t run them for extended periods. The Lynx was lucky to squeeze five hours from six AA batteries, while the Game Boy lasted twice as long with fewer batteries.

The Lynx was also a bit too big. Atari went with a large, bone-shaped chunk of gray plastic, with plenty of grip space and two separate buttons for ON and OFF. It was nearly twice the Game Boy’s size, and it proved cumbersome to carry around.

[…] Atari redesigned the Lynx in 1991, resulting in a smaller system with better grips, a lower price, and better battery life. By the time the Lynx II came out, however, it was competing against the [Sega] Game Gear as well as the Game Boy […] and many players had already decided against Atari.

-Todd Ciolek, 1up.com

The Game Boy retailed for $89.95 at launch in the US. Compare that to its closest competitors at their launches: the TurboExpress sold for $249.99; the Game Gear, $149.99; and the Lynx, $189.95.

Nintendo could afford to offer the Game Boy at a lower price primarily because of the unit’s less expensive non-backlit monochrome LCD screen.

-Benj Edwards, Arstechnica.com

[Back to Chapter 3]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: DTMC, Inc.

Not much information on DTMC exists online, so Matt Householder provided a brief summary of the publisher’s beginnings to help preserve its place in industry history.

DTMC, Inc. was a small company based in Hong Kong that had licensed California Games II from Epyx for the SNES and Genesis. When it became clear that Epyx planned to downsize and would not develop new games after [Laptop Getaway Entertainment 6-Pack] and California Games II, DTMC approached several key Epyx employees, including John Brazier (sales), Allyson Johnson (operations), and me (design/dev), offering us positions at their newly-created US subsidiary in Redwood City.

DTMC developed the Genesis version of California Games II, but could not publish it because of Nintendo’s licensing agreement’s anti-competitive policy that prohibited [Nintendo publishers from] publishing a third-party title on both the SNES and Genesis.

-Matt Householder, vice president of development, DTMC

DTMC published six games in total, all on Nintendo platforms. Interested readers can learn more about the games here: http://bit.ly/15oDhzd.

[Back to Chapter 3]

Side Quests: Chapter 4

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: Arduin Grimoire

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, Arduin Grimoire didn’t fix itself firmly in sword-and-sorcery themes. Author Dave Hargrave created the game as a personal project to play with his friends. He populated Arduin Grimoire with science fiction, horror, and medieval fantasy elements, making the game appealing to a wide array of tastes.

For readers interested in learning more about Dave Hargrave and his Arduin Grimoire setting, the author recommends RPG.net’s profile of publisher Grimoire Games found below.

* http://bit.ly/Kc1SRB

[Back to Chapter 4]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: Placeholder Artwork in Justice League Task Force

There was the [placeholder] artwork that Max and Erich were doing just to get the game to concept stage, and then there was Michio’s artwork. If you’d have seen that early art, it was hilarious.

I don’t know if any of the other guys remembers this, but there was Fatman, a smoking Batman, tubby, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. We had that in the game for a little while. He wasn’t animated; he was just a slightly overweight, smoking Batman.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

[Back to Chapter 4]

Side Quests: Chapter 5

[SQ1] Level 1: Stuart “Stu” Rose

I had a roommate who was working at Silicon & Synapse at the time. He talked to me and said, “Hey, we’re looking for artists.” I was working as a struggling freelance illustrator at the time, so I thought, Okay, I’ll try it out.

[My roommate] didn’t paint [the company] in the best light: “Oh, it’s just a company that does interesting little games.” I wasn’t sure if I was into that. But my roommate was also in a band at the time with, remarkably enough, Bill Roper, called The Shatners. I went to see them play at Bogart’s, a night club in Long Beach, and I ran into Allan Adham and Samwise Didier there.

So I was sitting there talking to them, and they mentioned, “Hey, we’re looking for artists.” Two days later, I walked in, and at the bar I’d been this freaky hippy-looking dude, and Allen later said he was quite surprised how professional I suddenly became when I was setting up meetings and interviewing.

Working as a freelance illustrator, I was all about professionalism. I had the business cards, the resumes. As soon as I was out of the bar environment and talking to them, it was like, “Yeah, I’m professional. Let me show you my portfolio.”

At that time [Silicon & Synapse] gave all artists a drawing test to make sure that they had the creative chops to think out of the box. I had to draw some guy in a suit of armor, an environmental scene, and a monster. It was all done with paper and pencil.

I met Allen on a Wednesday, set up an interview on Friday, and was working at Silicon & Synapse by Monday.

-Stu Rose, artist, Silicon & Synapse

[Back to Chapter 5]

[SQ2] Game Design 101: Marketing

We built four vehicles for RPM Racing: one was a futuristic race car, one looked like a VW Bug, one resembled a Camaro, and one looked like a Jeep. Allen went to talk to Jeep to see whether they’d give us any money or whether we would have to give them money for putting the car in the game, and they told us that if we made a vehicle look too much like a Jeep, they’d sue us.

So the vehicle that ended up [in the game] was not very Jeep-like. Today, Jeep would pay big bucks to be in a game. Their marketing folks would say, “Oh my God: exposure to young, suggestible minds? We’ll pay for that!”

-Pat Wyatt, programmer, Silicon & Synapse

[Back to Chapter 5]

[SQ3] Game Design 101: Focusing on Characters

[The Lost Vikings] was re-envisioned as being about five Vikings instead of hundreds. That’s about when I came on board the project. I started doing level design and tried to figure out how it would all work. I spent some time drawing levels on paper because we didn’t have any level design tools at that point.

One of the things I discovered was that controlling five Vikings was going to be a hell of a lot to keep track of without some sort of auto-follow functionality. There was going to be a lot of hassle switching between Vikings and getting them to do what you wanted them to do.

Based on that early design, we switched to only three Vikings, each with more capabilities.

-Pat Wyatt

I’ll say that there was a push back then to make games very character-based, because characters are bankable and cool. That’s how [Silicon & Synapse] came up with Olaf, Erik, and Baleog. You could attach stories and emotions to characters.

Making them unique also reinforced how each was used in the game.

-Feargus Urquhart, producer, Interplay Productions

[Back to Chapter 5]

[SQ4] Byte-Sized History: RPM II

Rock ’n Roll Racing was originally billed as RPM II, a direct sequel to RPM Racing. Near the end of development, Allen Adham and Brian Fargo evaluated the game and decided it lacked a distinctive feature that distinguished it from other arcade-style racers.

If I could get on the phone and call up the head of Nintendo, I’d tell him to have American companies do more development or have Nintendo of America create its own development so that they could compete on a cultural level. A clear example is our “Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing,” a game we did for Interplay Productions.

We came up with a concept that put rock music hand-in-hand with the racing culture. So we said let’s get George Thorogood and the Destroyers’ “Bad to the Bone” and put it in the game.

-Allen Adham, co-founder, Silicon & Synapse

Feargus Urquhart, a producer at Interplay, handled the surprisingly simple process of licensing music for Rock ’n Roll Racing.

One thing I had to do was license music, which I’d never done before. I was told, “Here’s five songs. Go license two of them.” Um… okay! Who do I call? Brian [Fargo] goes, “Here’s the guy we used before. Talk to him.”

I did it enough times and learned to license music. It got done and the project got approved. I think we maybe got rejected once for something stupid, but mostly it was smooth.

-Feargus Urquhart

[Back to Chapter 5]

[SQ5] Game Design 101: Box Art

The picture on the [Sega Genesis] box kind of showed that the people in marketing at the time were just not of the digital world yet. That picture was actually painted, and the artist had finished it before any of us got to see it.

So because it was a painted picture, he couldn’t change it. I was livid, far more so than I had a right to be. It was totally not active. It ended up getting better, but it was a painful process.

Even today, marketing doesn’t see us [game developers] as a useful resource. If they would check with us early on, we could usually pick a better course that’s good for everybody. Good marketing people figure that out. The rest don’t.

-Feargus Urquhart

[Back to Chapter 5]

[SQ6] Byte-Sized History: Real-Time Strategy Games

Westwood’s Dune II set the template for the modern real-time strategy game—harvest resources, build up a base, train combat units, and attack opposing factions—but it was not the first RTS. If you trace the genre’s ancestry back several decades, you’ll discover many early strategy games that used one or more elements that were later rolled into the modern-day RTS template. More surprising is that the RTS, a genre associated with the PC, originated on consoles.

One early example is Utopia, released in 1981 for the Intellivision. Two players build up settlements on separate islands. Gameplay unfolds over turns, during which players construct buildings, maneuver their fishing boats over schools of fish, and guide a torpedo-equipped boat to sink the opponent’s fishing boat. Players earn points by building up their island and catching fish. The game ends after a set number of turns.

Another example is Herzog Zwei for Sega Genesis, which gives players control over a fighter that can morph into a ground unit or an air unit. Players duke it out with their fighters and lay claim to prebuilt bases that boost their income supply. The game ends when one player destroys the opponent’s base.

[Back to Chapter 5]

Side Quests: Chapter 6

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: WarCraft Series

The name WarCraft came from Allen Adham. He shared his idea of how to create a series of historical war games, which was actually bigger in many ways than what we ended up doing.

Allen was a student of how retail worked. In fact, we all spent a lot of time thinking about how retail worked. One thing that was really obvious was that having a line of games on a shelf was really valuable because it would create more of a brand identity. If you walked up to a shelf and saw 10 of one kind of a game and one of another, you’d say, “Wow, there must be something to this game series if there’s 10 of them. They’ve got a lot of shelf space.”

So the idea was to do a series of games called WarCraft that were about various times in history: a fantasy game, a Vietnam game, a World War II game, earlier historical periods, futuristic games. It would eventually be a huge line of games on the shelf that players would see, buy one, and then come back and buy others.

That purchasing pattern actually happened: whenever we released a new title, all our old titles would pick up in sales pretty dramatically. That’s why the first WarCraft isn’t titled just WarCraft. It’s called WarCraft: Orcs & Humans. Our fantasy game sold so well that we never actually went back and completed the historical games to round out the series.

-Pat Wyatt, programmer, Silicon & Synapse

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ2] Game Design 101: Harvesting Two Resources in WarCraft

[Harvesting a single resource] worked effectively for Dune II, but it also meant there was a limited source of resources to draw from. If any of the spice fields started off richer than the others, you wouldn’t have to explore very much. You could just harvest in one place.

So we created two resources: lumber and gold. In gold mines, we could change the amount of gold, so you could have a gold mine that lasted a really long time without having the gold diminishm or a really short time to force you to build secondary bases near other gold mines.

-Pat Wyatt

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ3] Byte-Sized History: Blizzard’s Hack-n-Slash Game

Sunsoft’s collaboration with Silicon & Synapse almost gave rise to an action role-playing game that might have played similarly to the final design of Diablo.

We were actually talking with Blizzard about doing a coin-op game for us called Denizen. It was going to be an action game on the Sega Titan arcade hardware, which would become the Saturn [console] hardware.

-David Siller, publishing director, Sunsoft

We started Denizen twice: once in the early era, and another time in the post-WarCraft era. Blizzard had a lot of titles that were started but didn’t progress to completion.

Denizen was sort of a Gauntlet-style game. We started with a concept called Wizard and Warrior, which was more or less Gauntlet with some unique twists. We actually had a prototype up and working that used Mode 7* on the Super Nintendo, but we never got funding for it so we ended up doing other projects.

One of the reasons was because Sunsoft had a hard time pulling the trigger on projects, and that’s probably because they were having a hard time paying bills.

-Pat Wyatt

* Mode 7 was a graphics mode on the Super Nintendo that allowed programmers to rotate and scale backgrounds, creating rudimentary 3D effects and giving players a sense of perspective. For example, racing games like Super Mario Kart and F-Zero set the camera behind the player’s car. As the player accelerated and steered, the race track scrolled and rotated to give the impression of movement.

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ4] Byte-Sized History: Designing Backgrounds in Justice League

Like developers at Condor plugging away on the Sega Genesis version of Justice League Task Force, Silicon & Synapse’s team had to jump through hoops to get DC’s approval on the Super Nintendo version of the superhero-themed brawler.

Every super hero had his or her background tileset, and Green Arrow’s was a forest. There were all these little animals in the background that would peek out from the trees, and the feedback from SunSoft and DC was, “Once the fight’s started, all the animals would be scared and they’d run away, so you should not have any animals in the background.”

They didn’t realize that the most important thing is to make your game fun, and then secondly you heed to the constraints of the license.

-Pat Wyatt

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ5] Byte-Sized History: The Sale of Silicon & Synapse

Bob Davidson’s and Blizzard Entertainment’s account of how Davidson & Associates acquired Silicon & Synapse differs from Brian Fargo’s. Since Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham, and other representatives currently employed by or affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment respectfully declined interviews for Stay Awhile and Listen, I was unable to ask them to clarify the two accounts, so I documented both versions.

Chapter 6, “World of WarCraft,” chronicles Blizzard’s and Davidson & Associates’ account of the acquisition. Here, you can read Brian Fargo’s take on events, as well as his thoughts on comments made in Blizzard’s twentieth anniversary documentary video, released online in 2011.

Allen comes to me and we’re signing the agreement to do the distribution deal [for WarCraft]. He goes, “Brian, I told Davidson the deal we were doing with you, and now [Davidson & Associates] wants to buy my company for three and a half million dollars.”

I said, “Why would you want to do that? Three and a half million? Frankly, the industry’s blowing up. If you guys get that much, you’re going to pay your taxes, you’re going to split that money two or three ways, and you’ll be lucky to get a condo in Irvine. It sounds like a lot of money, but it won’t get you to where you want to be. I think you should wait. I don’t think you should do it.”

And I told him that as a friend even though I owned 10 percent of Blizzard at the time. At this point, there was no WarCraft to see, and Davidson was primarily buying [Silicon & Synapse] because they did strong ports of their educational games from one format to another. So then Allen comes back a week later and says, “Brian, they’ve doubled it to seven million.”

I said “Ahhh, Allen as your friend, I agree with you that you should probably take the sum.” Davidson was extremely lucky in that purchase.

-Brian Fargo, founder, Interplay Productions

The following Monday Allen called me, and he said, “I’ve been thinking about what Jan has said all weekend and I didn’t get a minute’s sleep.” And I’m thinking, That’s pretty good.

Finally, he said, “You know, we really want adults. We really want the business acumen that we see with the folks at Davidson.” He said, “We’re going to change our mind, we’ll go with you.”

-Bob Davidson, CEO, Davidson & Associates

Bob Davidson gave what I considered a pretty insulting interview [in Blizzard’s 20th anniversary video]. He said, basically, the reason Blizzard chose them was because they wanted adults. They didn’t want to work with kids anymore like [the staff] at Interplay.

That was just not true. The truth was he doubled the offer to seven million, and I didn’t have seven million. I didn’t have any money on the table other than a distribution deal. As a friend, I said to Allen, “Yeah, that’s a good amount of money.”

We weren’t bidding against Davidson, and it wasn’t adults versus kids or any such nonsense.

-Brian Fargo

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ6] Byte-Sized History: Blizzard’s Company Logos

I was the third artist in, so they said, “We need a logo for the opening splash page [of our games].” I spent a week learning DPaint at the time and coming up with the Silicon & Synapse logo.

I guess because of that, I wound up being the graphic go-to guy. When we were becoming Chaos Studios, I was the guy Allen went to and said, “Okay, we need a logo for Chaos Studios.” Then we [became Blizzard Entertainment].

They said, “You’ve got one day. We need a new logo. Make it look like the Chaos Studios logo, but called Blizzard.”

-Stu Rose

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ7] Byte-Sized History: How Warhammer Influenced WarCraft

Soon after the release of WarCraft: Orcs & Humans in late 1994, many gamers picked up on the similarities between Blizzard’s RTS and Warhammer, a tabletop game created by Games Workshop where players arranged painted figurines and engaged in turn-based battles.

Warhammer’s influence was massive. There were lots of people at Blizzard who played Warhammer and they were obviously heavily influenced by it.

During the course of development—and this didn’t happen beforehand; it was somewhere along the way—Allen proposed that we license the Warhammer IP so the game wouldn’t be WarCraft, but Warhammer. That was met with a negative reaction because a lot of us felt we would lose control of the game.

Several years after WarCraft was done, my dad came back from a trip to Asia. He brought back this really cool skeleton chariot; it was a chariot drawn by some skeletal horses. And he said, “I found this really cool thing in Asia, and they totally ripped off WarCraft!”

It said Warhammer on the bottom, and I said, “Oh, yeah, um, not exactly…”

-Pat Wyatt

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ8] Byte-Sized History: Heroes in WarCraft

WarCraft II’s expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal, introduced heroes, unique versions of base units, such as the Human Archer, but with more health points and stronger attacks. WarCraft III expanded heroes even further, giving them unique abilities and items. Blizzard actually experimented with stronger-than-normal units in the original WarCraft.

The concept for heroes was you’d have units that had specialized skills – lots of skills, not just a few like the magic-casting units that the game launched with

Heroes were cut for several reasons: lack of design time, lack of game-balance time, lack of programming time, lack of space to fit the artwork in memory, lack of time to animate artwork.

-Pat Wyatt

For details on the development of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness, please see “Bonus Round: ‘Rock Balls’ - The Making of WarCraft II“.

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ9] Game Design 101: Balancing WarCraft’s Two Factions

We tried to implement some differences between the races, but in particular, there was a huge imbalance between the Human Archer and the Orc Spearman. The Archer has a longer range than the Spearman, but the Spearman throws harder because, you know, he’s throwing a big branch instead of shooting a twig with feathers on the end.

In one-on-one combat, the differences are small enough that they sometimes don’t make a difference. But when you have a whole line of Archers and a whole line of Spearman, the Archers will win because they’ll get one more hit in and can wipe out the spearmen faster.

Part of the reason we didn’t iterate on the balance component was the tight timeline and the small team size. And we were doing an original game, so we really didn’t even know what we were doing yet. The design of WarCraft evolved along the way.

-Pat Wyatt

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ10] Game Design 101: Selecting Units in WarCraft

I know there were other compelling reasons to think about decreasing the number of units we could select. For example, on games that take place over modems, the more units you can select at a single time, the more network packets you’re going to have, and that would potentially reduce performance of the game.

I don’t think Allen was fundamentally wrong in making that determination. I was probably against it, but not necessarily for compelling game design reasons. One thing as a programmer is, whenever you implement something, it’s really hard to see your baby die.

The hallmark of a really good designer is that you can kill your babies when they turn out not to be very good. Selecting hundreds of units? That would be awesome! I probably fought for that just because it was my baby, but ultimately, Allen won the day on that one.

-Pat Wyatt

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ11] Byte-Sized History: Influences on WarCraft’s Design

Creative people draw from numerous wellsprings to water their own creative gardens. The name “Azeroth,” the continent where Orcs and Human clashed in several WarCraft games, comes from the novel Fires of Azeroth by novelist C.J. Cherryh. Published in 1979, Fires of Azeroth is the third installment in The Morgaine Stories science fiction series that follows time-jumping heroine Morgaine. To escape certain death at the hands of a large army, Morgaine flees into the forests of the world of Azeroth.

[Back to Chapter 6]

[SQ12] Sanctuary Speaks: “Best Blizzard Stories” Contest Co-Winner

I was around 12 years old when my neighbor lent me his copy of WarCraft, my first real-time strategy game. I started the install straight after getting home from school. I wondered what was in store for me as my imagination went wild over the medieval imagery—the universe felt solid and real right from the onset. From the first “My liege,” I was hooked. WarCraft was the first game to truly captivate me.

I had great times playing FPS games like Wolfenstein and Doom. Playing the action hero was great, but [those games] lacked the feeling of power I was craving: A feeling that can only be gained by spawning new life, looking down on your minions, and sending them to their death in your name! I was playing god, only I didn’t have to feel bad about the poor insects I was toying with. Building tiny towns was my favorite thing to do, until I realized how much fun it was to raid an enemy village.

I was snapped back to reality by my dad’s shout: “Are you still up?!” I was covered in a cold sweat, tired, hungry, and had to pee badly. It was 2:00 a.m. and I had school the next day. WarCraft made me lose my sense of time and space. I felt elevated above my mortal coil and into a plane of existence in which intellectual stimulation and enjoyment was the only thing of true value.

-“lord_omega,” Shacknews.com user

[Back to Chapter 6]

Side Quests: Chapter 7

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: X-COM’s Origins

X-COM was originally conceived as Laser Squad 2, the sequel to a turn-based strategy game developed by Julian Gollop. In Laser Squad, players controlled a squad of units to wipe out enemies and rescue hostages. Every unit could perform actions such as moving, attacking, and picking up items, and actions cost varying amounts of action points. To complete objectives, players had to use action points efficiently and also mind the morale of their units, who could attempt to flee in panic if they witnessed a teammate fall in battle.

Julian Gollop and his brother Nick put together a pitch for Laser Squad 2 and presented it to MicroProse, publisher of the popular Sid Meier’s Civilization series of turn-based strategy games where players guide a civilization from the dawn of time into the future. MicroProse expressed interest in Laser Squad 2, but wanted a game as epic in scale as Civilization. The Gollop brothers went back and forth with MicroProse, adding elements such as an in-game encyclopedia and extensive upgrade options, changing the setting to modern-day earth, and rebranding the game as UFO: Enemy Unknown.

For UFO’s North American release, MicroProse changed the game’s name to X-COM: UFO Defense. In various interviews, Julian Gollop said that the growing popularity of The X-Files science fiction TV show might have been responsible for MicroProse’s decision to use the X-COM name.

[Back to Chapter 7]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: Claymation Art in Diablo

Blizzard and Condor engaged in a tug-of-war over numerous aspects of Diablo’s design. One early debate took place over the game’s art style. According to Blizzard Entertainment’s twentieth anniversary documentary, Condor proposed an art style called Claymation, sculpting characters from clay and recording each frame of movement, for the game. Playing animations back created the perception of movement, like paging through a flipbook.

It’s not claymation, actually. Maybe this is a good time to kind of set the record straight because that story’s kind of grown and festered. Really, the backgrounds were all 3D from the beginning.

There was a popular arcade game at the time, Primal Rage. It had dinosaurs fighting each other. The game had models made with stop-motion animation, with articulated limbs. So it was the stop-motion graphics that they used from that game that we explored.

We talked to one guy from Blizzard South about it, saying, “Here’s what we’re exploring.” But we never went anywhere with it. We talked about maybe making monsters with stop-motion models with articulated joints, and we were going to take pictures of those in various poses and put them in the game, but 3D was a better choice.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 7]

Side Quests: Chapter 8

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

The 3DO Company was founded by Trip Hawkins, a technology entrepreneur who got his start as Apple Computer’s Director of Strategy and Marketing. He left Apple and co-founded game publishing giant Electronic Arts in 1982. In 1991, Hawkins started The 3DO Company and partnered with multimedia companies including Time Warner, AT&T, Panasonic, and his previous company, Electronic Arts, to get the venture off the ground.

Rather than develop and publish games through 3DO, Hawkins wanted a slice of the hardware market dominated by Nintendo and Sega. He put together plans for a new console called 3DO Interactive Multiplayer—or “3DO” for short—so named for its ability to play different types of media. Where Nintendo and Sega consoles could only play games, the 3DO would play music and movie discs as well, offering consumers an all-in-one entertainment box.

The 3DO was incredibly powerful for its time.

Spearheaded by EA co-founder Trip Hawkins, Panasonic’s foray into video game entertainment was the first game system to use CDs for content delivery. The resulting increase in data storage [compared to game cartridges] allowed developers working on the system to blaze trails in the realm of 3D graphics, getting game visuals that much closer to being able to portray the real world.

-TIME Tech

Unlike Nintendo and Sega, The 3DO Company did not manufacture its hardware. Companies such as Panasonic could license the hardware and build their own versions of the box. Unfortunately, the versatility inherent in Hawkins’ licensing idea doomed the console.

One downside of this scheme was that the manufacturers had to make their money from the hardware itself (unlike Sega or Nintendo who could make up a loss with software sales). Consequently, cutting-edge gamers found themselves shelling out an astounding $700 for the system when it was first introduced [in 1993].

-The Video Game Critic

The 3DO stalled due to a classic catch-22: Consumers hesitated to adopt the machine due to its exorbitant price tag and thin library of games, while game publishers hesitated to fatten that library because too few consumers owned the system. Nintendo’s and Sega’s machines were significantly less powerful, but featured droves of games and appealing price tags. In 1994, Sony exploded onto the scene with the PlayStation, a game console that played CDs and cost only $299. Gamers adopted the PlayStation in droves, leaving the Super Nintendo, Genesis, and 3DO behind.

Hawkins attempted to rally back in 1995 with the announcement of The 3DO Company’s M2 console. For information on the fate of the M2, please refer to “Chapter 11: Light and Dark.”

[Back to Chapter 8]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: Switching Gears

Originally, the football game for 3DO was for their original machine [the Interactive Multiplayer] but then got switched to the new M2 platform part way through development, which required a modification to the development contract and additional development budget.

I remember Matt [Householder] pulling Max and me aside and telling us about the desire for the switch.

-Ken “Kenny” Williams, business director, Condor

[Back to Chapter 8]

[SQ3] Level 1: Peter Brevik

I went to Chico State as a business major. My brother gave me the opportunity to learn programming. It was something I’d taken some classes on, but since it wasn’t my major, there wasn’t a whole lot of focus. So he spent the time to help train me, and I read what was available at the time on programming. It took off from there.

In high school, Dave taught a class in his senior year, he had a little jump on the game. He was able to teach me.

-Peter Brevik, programmer, Condor

What better way to learn than to try doing it yourself? If you’re interested in it, you’ll study it, research it, try to figure it out. If you get stuck, you can ask questions. I thought it was better than any other method: teach somebody how to do something by letting them try to do it.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 8]

[SQ4] Level 1: Karin Colenzo

I came to the Bay Area, and I was actually already working as a mental health counselor. I just happened to be talking to Dave and his wife at the time, and they were saying that they needed somebody, and did I want to check Condor out.

I said okay because I needed a second job anyway; my first job wasn’t covering all the bills. I came in and Dave didn’t interview with me. He said, “I don’t even want to be part of this, this is all up to Max and Erich, and I’ll put Ken Williams in on this because I already know you.”

So I met and interviewed with Max, Erich, and Ken. Max had a red pen; he was holding a red pen the whole time I was talking to him, and so I was kind of curious what the red pen was for.

We were talking, and talking, and then [Max] took my resume and started looking over it with his red pen, seeing if there were any meticulous mistakes. He found one comma. So I thought that was pretty good.

I started working for them part-time, and then they wanted me to work for them full-time as an office manager, and I said, “Sure.” So I was able to only work one job, and ended up working there from 1995 to 2005.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Condor

[Back to Chapter 8]

Side Quests: Chapter 9

[SQ1] Behind the Code: Converting Gameplay from Turn-Based to Real-Time

A lot of the turn-based stuff was going to be movement, drinking potions, casting spells—things that were just translated seamlessly into the real-time game. There weren’t any features that made us say, “Well, now that it’s not turn-based, we can’t do this thing.”

At least 95 percent of the content translated instantly: instead of drinking a potion taking a whole turn, it just happens instantly in one game frame.”

-David Brevik, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ2] Sanctuary Speaks: “Best Blizzard Stories” Contest Co-Winner

What I remember fondly from Diablo was the mystery of it all. There were items like “The Thinking Cap” made for wizards that my friend and I thought was so clever and appropriately named. The mood was dark and gothic with the dungeon floors streaked with blood. Sounds in the periphery were haunting and put you on edge. The whole experience was so new.

My friend finally got up from the computer seat to take a break and let me try, so I picked a Warrior and entered the dungeon. I clicked on a barrel, and my Warrior walked over and cracked it open. Just from the visceral feel of that action, I instantly understood the appeal of the game and fell in love.

Even though Diablo II was an improvement to the original in almost every way, Diablo had two things going for it—a noticeably darker, more gothic feel and the fact that it was a completely new genre for a huge audience.

Having played other games that defined their respective genres, that sense of mystery and thrill at experiencing something completely new is an amazing feeling that genre creators have access to. I’m happy I was there to experience it with the original Diablo.

-Andy Lee, Shacknews.com user

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ3] Cutting Room Floor: Town Names

It [the town] wasn’t called Tristram at first. It was called Crossroads. I [also] had this idea of having random townsfolk. From time to time when you went back to town, there [might] be wandering merchants there.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ4] Behind the Code: Recycling Character Models

Kelly took the healer, Pepin—he took the model I made and turned him into Deckard Cain.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ5] Sanctuary Speaks: “Tristram’s Tune” Contest Winner

I have a terrible confession to make: I have only defeated the Lord of Terror once or twice. Even though battling the denizens of the burning hells was the primary focus of Diablo, I spent most of my time on the surface in the darkened village of Tristram: talking to all the townspeople about the terrors below, listening to them gossip, while Matt Uelmen’s music played on and on.

I’ve led many Warriors, Rogues and Sorcerers to their doom in the depths below Tristram. Diablo was a harsh game and your hero started out brave but very vulnerable, fighting hordes of demons and undead. Death—and the potential loss of your arsenal of weapons and armor—was a very real threat. Every time the howling, ghostly music swelled and my hero noted that the sanctity of the cathedral had been fouled, I’d get goose bumps.

My heroes battled bravely, but often they had to flee. Whenever the monsters were too numerous or all healing potions had been gulped down, I’d quickly cast a town portal and scamper through it. The first chord of Matt Uelmen’s defining music always was a welcoming beacon of relief. Tristram was a desolate, nearly abandoned village where the cold wind howled trough the rickety shacks. But it was a safe haven. My safe haven.

I’ve only dared to take a handful of heroes into hell to confront the Lord of Terror. Sure, I defeated him, but I liked it better on the surface, just staying awhile and listening. Not to Deckard Cain, though. I was listening to Matt Uelmen.

-René de Hoog, DiabloFans.com user

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ6] Behind the Code: Testing Dungeon Algorithms

The program [used to test dungeon algorithms] created a dungeon layout, like one that I’d draw on paper. All around would be hash marks, which were walls. There’d be hash marks in between, and then there were doors, which were Ds, and more hash marks. So you’d get this dungeon look: maybe a door here, stairs here—and that was an S.

This program just printed out text. All you’d have to do is hit the spacebar and it’d print out another map. This let you see random dungeons in a quick manner, because if we [experimented] in the game, you’d have to scroll around and try to figure out problems. But this was a top-down, no-messing-around thing.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ7] Behind the Code: Generating Cathedral Levels

During our interviews, Erich Schaefer and Rick Seis supplied extensive detail on the different algorithms they used to build Diablo’s cathedral, catacombs, caves, and Hell levels.

For the church tier of dungeons, the first room we made was a single square. Then we attached to that the stairs [leading] up to town, which we put on one of the room’s side walls. On each wall, right in the middle, was a place where we could stretch a passage [leading to another room]. The game decided if one or two possible passages would then lead to another square.

If the algorithm picked one passage, the whole level would be made from two giant squares. If there were two exit passages off of that first square, you’d have three giant squares. [The passage] could be in an L-pattern, or could be a straight line.

So, [cathedral levels consisted of] two or three giant square rooms connected by a passageway. Then there was a “stairs down” exit. You had these giant rooms connected by hallways, and then these little random rooms just popped off the sides.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ8] Byte-Sized History: Internal Names Used During Development

I never remember what anything in my games is called; I always remember the internal development names. One time I was playing World of WarCraft and trying to explain to some guys that I was the designer of Diablo.

And they’re like, “No, there’s no way!” So they start asking me questions, like, “Okay, well what does this sword do?” or “What’s this monster?” And I couldn’t answer anything. I got their questions all wrong. I’d say, “Well, that’s not what we called it during development, so I don’t know.”

They all just laughed and didn’t believe me.

-Erich Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ9] Level 1: Patrick Tougas

I went to Vancouver Film School, and a good friend of mine was Ben Haas who also went to film school in Vancouver. He actually lived in San Francisco, and when he moved back to San Francisco he ended up getting a job at Condor.

Ben actually got me an interview at Condor. I flew down for an interview maybe a month and a half after school. That was with the Schaefers and Brevik. I got the job as a character artist and animator. That was my big break: I literally [graduated from school and] went straight into Diablo.

I built my own desk. You know that O’Ryan furniture? Comes in the box and takes about three hours to put together? Yeah.

-Patrick Tougas, artist, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ10] Behind the Code: Randomizing Quests

Diablo’s random elements extended to quests players received over the course of each game. After the player created a character, the game code browsed all possible quests and selected a few for that game session. Installing a quest involved a little extra work on the part of Erich Schaefer’s and Rick Seis’ dungeon algorithms.

The Butcher’s lair was a cratered-out little area that the algorithm would try to [fit into] the dungeon. If it couldn’t find a place to put it, it would generate a whole new dungeon and try again.

-Erich Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ11] Behind the Code: Butcher Glitches

The Butcher was designed to be really, really hard. But when we first put him in, he was impossibly hard. And yet Uelmen still found a way to kill him. He would find a space where you could shoot arrows through wall gratings.

You could pluck away [and kill the Butcher] with arrows, but it would take forever.

-Kenny Williams, business director, Condor

The stairwells were shaped kind of like a horseshoe. So you could run around the stairs leading down [to the next level] until the Butcher got caught on a little spot on the stairs. Then you stood to one side, pulled out a bow, and just shot him.

We might have fixed that at some point, but for a long while you could run around in circles and get him stuck on the stairs.

-Eric Sexton

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ12] Game Design 101: Encountering Difficult Enemies on Early Levels

David Brevik and Max Schaefer elaborated on why Condor allowed players to confront powerful monsters like the Butcher long before they were strong enough to survive such encounters.

We wanted the game to convey a sense of, “I am becoming more powerful, but there are greater challenges ahead.” When you smack the player down, they say, “Wow, I wasn’t ready for that. I’m feeling good about myself, killing all these guys that are dropping loot, I’m gaining more experience, I’m feeling invincible—whoa, whoa! I’m not invincible!”

It’s this balance of, these guys are awesome and really powerful, but they’re going to drop great loot. From the player’s perspective, they have a reason why they want to risk fighting those guys. I love having obstacles like the Butcher where we say, “Okay, here’s this challenge. Maybe you’re ready for it right now, but maybe you’re not.”

If you’re not, it gives you something to shoot for, an hour-to-hour goal. You say, “I’m going to clear out the rest of the dungeon and then come back and face that guy. I’ll be another level higher, or maybe I’ll find an item to help with the battle. Now I’m ready to kick his ass.”

And you feel great when you do.

-David Brevik

You didn’t even have to fight the Butcher if you didn’t want to, but your first time through, you couldn’t help but open his door. It was a one-time thing: if you had to open that door every time you went through the level, it would be frustrating.

But after the first time, you learned. You knew what it was, where it was, what to look for. That made it okay.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ13] Sanctuary Speaks: Shacknews.com “Tales of Fresh Meat” Contest Winner

We played Diablo on a pair of midrange Pentiums connected by an Ethernet crossover cable my freshman year of college. Five or six of us took turns playing the game. Between swapping players regularly and the newness of it all, strategy was the sort of thing that happened by accident.

The first time I remember encountering the Butcher was a complete ambush. The Sorcerer opened the door and was killed before we knew what was happening. I was playing as the Rogue at the time and foolishly tried to kill this hulking mass that had just eaten my friend. It didn’t go well.

So now both of us were naked and in desperate need of our gear. Relying entirely on Holy Bolt for damage, we worked our way back to our corpses, picking up garbage equipment on the way. I don’t know what we were thinking; we couldn’t take the guy fully outfitted. How could we hope to kill him wearing rags and clubs? But whatever.

Then, in the final approach, a bow “of the Bear” dropped. I hadn’t ever seen one before, and I didn’t pay any attention to the affix’s stated effect, but when we rounded the corner and I started shooting the boss… and kept knocking him back… well, there was much rejoicing and also maniacal laughter.

We got our stuff back, but I kept that bow as my primary weapon. To this day, “knockback” is one of my favorite game mechanics, regardless of genre.

-“aalaryin,” Shacknews.com user

[Back to Chapter 9]

[SQ14] Game Design 101: Lost in Translation

The biggest problem with any loot system is translation. A lot of languages don’t have the idea of suffixes or prefixes. Definitely in Japanese, for instance, you can’t have a Fiery Sword of Pain; it’s more like a Fiery Pain Sword.

The construction of the way we phrased things didn’t make sense in a lot of languages.

-Erich Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 9]

Side Quests: Chapter 10

[SQ1] Byte-Sized History: Roller Hockey Anecdotes

I loved it [playing roller hockey]. I was turning 30 right about that time, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve never stopped playing; I still play today. In fact, I have a game tonight at 7:30 [May 5, 2010].

I took to it and really enjoyed it. It’s a great thing to do when you have a computer job, just get out and go crazy and burst your lungs a couple times a week.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Condor

They [Condor] tried to join a co-ed league, so they needed at least one or two girls on the team, so they asked me if I wanted to join. I tried and so did Ken’s [Williams] wife. That wasn’t pretty.

I remember watching the team play one night—and this was before they had any glass around the rink—and I remember taking a slap shot right there [points to collar bone]. Actually, I think it’s still cracked; the bone protrudes out.

I got a lot of flak for that, but I didn’t cry! I didn’t cry in front of anybody, because I didn’t want to. But it hurt like a mother. I stayed in the very, very back after that.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Condor

I guess my claim to fame would be that I got a ton of penalties. I was very, very aggressive. Every team’s got that guy that’s just an asshole. That was me. I mean, if you look around and it’s not anybody else, it’s you.

We had a lot of fun times. We played in a beginner’s league. That first year, we lost by an average of over 15 points. We were one of the only teams that had girls on it, also, and we got throttled. And that was the beginner league.

Half [of our players] couldn’t skate; they’d just gotten on skates. Any time one of the girls would get hit, Mark [Sutherland] would get all fired up, I’d get all fired up, and we’d try to get payback.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

[Back to Chapter 10]

[SQ2] Game Design 101: Using Color Palettes Strategically

We had a certain number of color palettes we could use, but in a way it kind of worked out well because we had to maximize that functionality. The creature had to represent something, be a certain color.

It made spotting monsters an easily recognizable, elemental thing for the players: “Oh, I know what that monster does. Here’s what I need to counter that.”

It really adds to the gameplay because [triumphing over Diablo’s] randomization element depends on a bunch of elements stacking up. And then there’s the fact that you can customize your character. [Playing with] certain builds means you are going to do better against some monsters than others.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Condor

[Back to Chapter 10]

[SQ3] Byte-Sized History: Condor’s Other Offer

Bob and Jan Davidson weren’t the only executives who recognized Condor’s potential.

3DO was talking to us as well. Trip Hawkins is great. He’s probably one of the most influential speakers I’ve ever come across. He is the ultimate salesman. He can say things that make you believe. He’s incredible, really incredible.

We had meetings with him, and at the time we knew 3DO was having all these struggles so we’d say, “Well, why would we choose them?” We’d go into these meetings and come out going, “Wow! Yeah!”

Then a few hours later, we’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

-David Brevik

Cooler heads prevailed when Dave, Max, and Erich caught wind of 3DO’s behind-the-scenes troubles. Gamers hadn’t queued up around city blocks to shell out seven hundred dollars for the much-hyped 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console when it released in October 1993. Hemorrhaging money, 3DO banked on the M2 and several key games in development for the new system to put it back in the black. One of those games was NFLPA Superstars, which 3DO envisioned as the perfect software to show off the M2’s 64-bit graphics and processing capabilities.

By acquiring Condor, Hawkins would hold on to a vital weapon in his battle against Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s PlayStation—consoles less powerful than the M2, but less expensive and already available at retail. Dave, Max, and Erich gave serious consideration to 3DO’s offer.

We got a pretty serious pitch from Trip Hawkins at 3DO. They actually wanted to give us more money for the company, but we had to turn it down because they wanted to fold us into the 3DO location and we wanted to stay a separate company.

-Max Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 10]

[SQ4] Author’s Note: Stock Talk

“Vesting” refers to how long employees must wait to buy stock in a company. Besides vesting terms, stock options also dictate how many shares of stock employees can buy at a fixed price, known as the strike price.

As an example, suppose an employee’s stock options permit her to buy 100 shares of stock at a strike price of $40 per share. Let’s say the company experiences great success that propels its stock price to $100 per share. When the vesting period expires, our employee can buy 100 shares of stock at the agreed upon strike price of $40 per share, even though the price to outside investors remains $100 per share. She can then sell the stock for $60 in profit per share or hold onto her stock and hope the company’s earnings climbs even higher.

Strike prices and vesting periods can also work against employees. Suppose the company’s stock plummets from $80 down to $10 before the vesting period expires. The strike price remains in effect, leaving employees to purchase stock at a price far above its worth.

[Back to Chapter 10]

Side Quests: Chapter 11

[SQ1] Author’s Note: Brian Piltin’s Departure

Brian left Blizzard North over 17 years ago, so he and Dave Brevik, Max Schaefer, and Erich Schaefer were understandably foggy on the exact details behind his departure. I decided to print both parties’ sets of recollections to present a fair and balanced account.

I remember Brian quitting was sort of out of the blue because we had just given him a big raise. He basically made an outrageous demand, maybe doubling his salary, and presenting it in a way, like, “You have to do this or I’m out of here.”

So… yeah. You can’t do that. We said, “Well, then you’re out of here.” I remember we felt like it was a substantial raise we’d just given him, and he was one of our highest paid employees. It was just not in our purview to go much beyond that.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

It’s hard for me to remember the details of people leaving, but I do remember it was unfortunate that Brian left. I thought he was a good programmer.

Obviously he felt slighted by what happened, but we were trying to do right [by the employees], and even when we did try to repair rifts by giving people bigger bonuses and things like that, it still was never enough.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

I do remember them giving me a raise, but it was around $1,000 or something close to that. It was nothing compared to what I expected. And to be honest, I don’t know if I ever confronted them about the whole [buying a sports car] thing. I wasn’t a confrontational person.

They had told me they were going to buy me a car, and then I think they offered me a raise, and then I got upset and just left. It may be true that I asked them for another raise; I really don’t remember. And honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe they were just saying, “You’re going to be rolling in it when we finish this game” and not realizing I was taking what they were saying seriously. And when they offered me a small raise, that was quite different from a $100,000 or $200,000 car. I felt like that was a huge slap in the face.

I honestly have no bad blood with [Brevik and the Schaefers]. They’re forgiven in my book. It’s not even an issue. I haven’t really spoken with them [since leaving Blizzard North], but I’m not upset with them at all. Some things are just better left in the past.

-Brian Piltin, programmer, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ2] Byte-Sized History: The Fate of 3DO and the M2 Console

After selling off the M2 hardware to Matsushita, 3DO transitioned from a console manufacturer to a developer and publisher. From 1997 until 2003, the company developed the Army Men series featuring generic green, plastic toy soldiers popular among children, and Meridian 59, one of the earliest 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). During that time span, 3DO acquired developers including New World Computing, the makers of the well-received Heroes of Might & Magic series of role-playing games.

As for the M2, Matsushita prepped the hardware for release but eventually decided against facing off with Nintendo and Sega. Japanese developer Konami used the M2 hardware to power several arcade games such as Evil Night, a horror game where players blasted monsters using plastic guns.

Arcade owners expressed frustration with games that used the repurposed M2 hardware. All M2-powered games ran off of CD-ROM, which took considerably longer to load and earned fewer quarters than games stored on microchips. Konami M2 games also loaded data from CD-ROMs constantly, wearing out CD drives and leaving games prone to failure.

In 2003, 3DO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold off its game properties. Unseen64 compiled a list of cancelled 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and M2 games. http://bit.ly/17aP7ku.

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ3] Behind the Code: Generating Catacombs Levels

The catacombs were more a [process of generating] random mazes. A passage would just wind around, trying to interconnect itself.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ4] Behind the Code: Light Radius

The way we organized the [color] palette was 256 colors in bands of 16 colors. You had a bunch of red hues, a bunch of blue hues, gray hues, et cetera.

[Coloring] went from the brightest down to the darkest, so that when we were drawing something, you could take a pixel and have it say, “How bright am I to start with, and how bright am I going be in the end?” We’d just shift that pixel down the palette so it got darker and darker when we drew an area.

To do this lighting scheme, where the edge of the dungeon was black, and then as you got closer your character’s light radius lit up the surroundings, was something nobody else had.

-David Brevik

The light radius had an interesting effect: your light radius determined when monsters woke up. So you could see more with a bigger light radius, but you’d wake up monsters sooner. It was something we knew while developing it, and then people in the forums caught on later and thought it was good.

There were [items] that reduced light radius, and that was actually pretty handy, especially for lower levels where you wanted to scare up as few monsters as possible.

-Erich Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ5] Game Design 101: Setting the Mood

I think the way we played fast and loose with so much religious imagery was a big part of Diablo’s appeal. It really gave a sense of being something occult in a junk-culture way, like comics or heavy metal albums from earlier eras.

I think it was pretty apparent that Diablo had a good niche in terms of the horror element. The first Resident Evil came out [in March 1996], but it was still in a puzzle-game paradigm to some degree. I think this was David Brevik’s big contribution in many ways: not just in seeing the roguelike as a good model, but in stripping out things like puzzles and making the flow of [Diablo] much more straightforward.

-Matt Uelmen, musician, Blizzard North

X-COM did give you the feeling that you were sitting there fairly safe, but at any point, from just around the corner, suddenly the calm would explode. It was that sense of impending doom that influenced Diablo’s combat and atmosphere. In fact to a large degree, while we were all playing X-COM, we said, “Hey, what if you were just one guy, a lone warrior with a sword, and you’re exploring this land?”

That seemed natural to us. We’d play X-COM battles over and over and just imagine [the game] as a fantasy role-playing game.

-Erich Schaefer

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ6] Behind the Code: Music Bytes

A funny and somewhat ironic thing about the original Diablo soundtrack was how liberating it was to make it all mono and 22K.* It meant that I could be really fast and loose with recording quality.

When the entire top quarter of the harmonic spectrum is missing, white noise isn’t such a concern!

-Matt Uelmen

Mono sound is a type of recording where all audio equipment, including microphones and instruments, go through one sound channel. Although recording in mono costs less, stereo sound carries the advantage of giving a true sense of movement during playback.

For example, suppose you record a band through two audio channels. During stereo playback, you could hear the instruments on the right side of the stage through the right speaker, and vice versa with the instruments on the left. During mono playback, instruments placed further away from the recording equipment would sound faint. Most entertainment mediums, especially cinema and video games, record in stereo to provide more immersive experiences.

22K refers to sampling rate. The higher the sampling rate, the better the playback quality of the sound.

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ7] Game Design 101: Using Music to Set the Scene

I definitely felt that I could become a little more aggressive [with Diablo’s musical score] as the player descended through the level types, and knew that I wanted to put the choral sound a little more up-front in the final level.

I think a good deal of that was just serendipity in terms of the feel of the background sets and music connecting somewhat well. I think it was hard to screw up what was a really good overarching design of the structure of the [catacombs] giving way to a feeling of just churning through dirt until a real Blake-style version of hell emerged.

Making the music more primitive, with more basic structures, was an easy call for accompanying that.

-Matt Uelmen

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ8] Behind the Code: Generating Cave Levels

The most unique set of levels was the caves, the really rough organic region. That was a really fun process. We’d just take a big rectangle that represented the whole level and filled it in with ‘X’ characters.

Then we’d randomly choose locations to drop circles in. We dropped 10 randomly sized circles, each about a 5 or 10 ‘X’-character radius, to crater-out the whole place like there was an asteroid that had hit it and had knocked out all these rooms. Then we did that process a second time to [drop] in the lava areas. [The levels] ended up looking a lot like natural caverns.

We had to come up with all the right connectors for, say, a lava river when it hit the corner of a wall, or the side of a wall.

-Erich Schaefer

My favorite area is the caves. The lava river uses an algorithm to make sure you have a bridge that can get you from one side to another. There are chances that if you draw a [lava] river in any given setup or scenario, the game might say, “I’m going to put down a bridge to get to the other side.”

But in some cases that won’t work. You might go through a door and you’re stuck on the far side of a river. What I did was, I made the level first, then I made the river. The algorithm had to make sure that anywhere you went, you could get out.

It took me awhile to figure out, but I really enjoyed conquering that problem.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ9] Behind the Code: Generating Hell Levels

I didn’t think Hell had the best layouts. Those levels were just kind of weird symmetrical patterns. I did like the graphics, though. I got a lot of the ideas from [Antoni] Gaudí’s* architecture. I had a book of his stuff and just kind of put together a lot of his walls to form those areas.

I liked the graphics more than I liked the layouts. That worked out because Hell became more [about the] chaos of gameplay. It wasn’t as much about exploring a few halls, so we amped up fights in open areas.

-Erich Schaefer

I think Erich did a solid job [on Diablo’s backgrounds], especially because we had such a limited color palette at the time. We had a very limited amount of colors: this was how much we could use for backgrounds; this was how much we could use for the characters.

Considering what we had, I think he did an amazing job. It took forever to render those backgrounds. He would queue it up before he left, basically come in the next morning and it would still be rendering.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

* Readers interested in learning more about Antoni Gaudí, the artist whose works Erich Schaefer referenced in creating Diablo’s Hell architecture, should read his profile on Biography.

http://bit.ly/18CHaou.

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ10] Game Design 101: Using Music to Set the Mood

I think you always want to take at least 20 seconds to establish a new environment when you’re writing [music] for a game interior. Of course, that experience works because the flow of the monsters is really well-designed in terms of seeming easy at first, then quickly becoming a little more overwhelming, and I can’t take credit for that.

-Matt Uelmen

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ11] Game Design 101: Animation Matters

When animating, my thing was, “I’m going to see this over and over again, so as a gamer, how quickly will I grow bored of seeing this?” We always had in mind that there will be a million people or more playing this character, and they’re going to see the character do moves over, and over, and over, and over again.

We’d do an animation and put it in the game, and we’d play the hell out of it because we needed to know how it would feel after we did it a thousand times.

-Kelly Johnson, artist, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ12] Cutting Room Floor: Lazarus Villain

Lazarus was originally supposed to be an NPC in town that you talked to up until a certain point, then he would disappear and become a bad guy that you fought. He ended up just being a boss monster.

-Eric Sexton, artist/designer, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

[SQ13] Game Design 101: Defining Characters

As I concepted [the Diablo boss character] I wrote out “Diabolous Tyrannicus Rex.” Usually when I draw things I make up a story, give them titles and names. I came up with a Latin name for Diablo, and “rex” means emperor or king.

We had some ideas about doing the spell and demon names in Latin—or at least [making them] Latin-sounding—at the beginning of Diablo’s development.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 11]

Side Quests: Chapter 12

[SQ1] Author’s Note: Kali and WarCraft II

Kali grew so popular that Blizzard Entertainment included a file on the WarCraft II disc optimized for the multiplayer gaming service. Running the file thrust players right into Kali’s interface where they could rally up to eight players together.

[Back to Chapter 12]

[SQ2] Behind the Code: Peer-to-peer Connections

The way peer-to-peer connections work is, all the computers attach together, you wait for input, and then you send it to all the other people involved. Once everybody’s input has been received for that turn, the computers process that turn.

That happens a zillion times a second. It keeps all the games perfectly in sync: All the information is received by everybody.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

When I select a WarCraft unit and tell him to move somewhere, he doesn’t move until there’s sort of a message made round trip over each player’s computer. Diablo uses what I call a loosely coupled asynchronous model. If I [click the ground], the player starts walking immediately and says, “Hey, I’m walking over here.”

But that information might not get to the other players’ computers for a couple hundred milliseconds. You and I can both walk onto the same square in Diablo. Try walking on the same square when you’re both on high-latency connections. On my computer it looks like I walked there and you’re standing next to me, and on your computer it looks like you walked onto that square and I’m standing next to you.

So there are two versions of the truth, whereas in WarCraft, there’s only one version of the truth.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

[Back to Chapter 12]

[SQ3] Level 1: Jeff Strain

I worked for Hewlett Packard in their R&D labs, first in San Diego and then up in Vancouver, Washington, doing color image compression. It was fairly dry work for a big corporation, and was just kind of paying the bills.

I’d come home every night and stay up until 4:00 a.m. working on my own awesome game. I was a huge WarCraft player. I was one of a lot of early guys using Kali […] so we were actually able to connect over the Internet and play WarCraft even though it wasn’t designed for that. And then, of course, came WarCraft II.

It got to the point where I was going to work all day for 10 hours then coming home for another 10 hours and working on my game, and then sleeping for four hours and getting up and doing it all over again. My wife finally said, “Look, this is clearly your passion. If this is what you want to go do, go do it. If you could go anywhere and work for any company, what would it be?”

I said, “Well, it would be Blizzard Entertainment, of course.” So I pulled the WarCraft II box down off the shelf and got the address off the back. Somehow I got an email address to submit my resume. I sent it at about 11 o’clock at night. Woke up the next morning, went to work, and on my way to work, got a call on my cell phone from Patrick Wyatt, who at that time I believe was already the VP of R&D.

He did a quick phone interview and a week later I flew down there for a full interview with the team. Two weeks after that I was packing the car and moving from Portland to Orange County.

-Jeff Strain, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

[Back to Chapter 12]

Side Quests: Chapter 13

[SQ1] Game Design 101: Character Abilities

The Warrior had the ability to repair items, the Sorcerer could recharge staves, and the Rogue had the ability to detect traps. [The Rogue’s] was the most useless skill ever because springing traps doesn’t do enough damage for people to care. You just take the hit.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Blizzard North

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[SQ2] Cutting Room Floor: Unused Quests

I wrote all kinds of quests that we didn’t use. We had a map, this timeline where you were racing against the clock to prevent Diablo from awakening. There was this map that showed a moon or something moving across the map. In the end we decided racing against a time limit isn’t fun, so we yanked [the quest].

Wirt [the peg-legged boy] was supposed to have a quest at one point. He’d buried some treasure in town, and you were supposed to go around and [dig for the treasure]. We ended up not using that one.

That was the process back then: you throw a whole bunch of [ideas on the table], and some of it sticks and some of it doesn’t. Some things generate other ideas.

-Eric Sexton

Assorted design documents donated by members of Diablo’s development team outline unused ideas for other side quests. Some of those quests include:

- The Abandoned Mines: Entering the second level of the caves triggers a special event in Tristram. Returning to the surface, the player fights off a horde of monsters while Tristram’s inhabitants cower inside their homes and shops. They emerge after the player kills off the last of the invaders and suggest that the monsters might have come from an abandoned mineshaft to the north of town. The player must return to the dungeon, find the unused earthquake spell, and cast it on the mineshaft to destroy it.

- The Village of Lost Souls: While visiting Tristram, the player learns of a strange villager who claims to live in a city secreted away in the catacombs. Players enter the hidden city only to discover that all the inhabitants are demons in disguise.

- Tomb of Traps: Legends speak of a king who hired townsfolk to build a tomb to hold all his treasures. The king then executed the engineers so they could never reveal the tomb’s location. Players who find the tomb can plunder its halls for all sorts of weapons and trinkets.

- Izual the Fallen Angel: Izual, one of Heaven’s most powerful seraphs, was overwhelmed by demons and thrown into a pit that transformed him into an abomination. Now fighting for Hell, Izual engages heroes along their path down Diablo. (Izual appeared in Act IV of Diablo II as a unique boss monster, and again in Act IV of Diablo III released by Blizzard Entertainment in 2012.)

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ3] Game Design 101: Game Narrative

I think for a game to be really great, it needs to have meaning, and that comes from story. Story comes from the setting, the world, the culture, the story itself—all of these things that are very, very subtle. The more compelling those things are, the more people can relate to them and understand them.

All along [Diablo] was designed like other roguelikes. The story’s not complicated, here: Bad guy. Go get ‘im. But the more you weave into that, having some lore and twists and turns, stuff like that—many people say they don’t pay attention to that, but the fact that they participate in some of that story, even to the degree where they’re not reading the text but they’re going through a sequence of events, will alter their perception of the game.

They see the wounded guy lying on the ground outside the church, and that gives them a feeling of, you know, wow, that’s going to be dangerous in there. They didn’t need to read any text; there’s a guy groaning on the ground.

So when they come up against the Butcher, and he’s a badass, they say, “Ah, so that’s what that guy was groaning about.”

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ4] Sanctuary Speaks: “You Can’t Take It with You” Contest Winner

My friend and I were playing Diablo, and we had spent a good 6 hours making our way past the Skeleton King. We had played the game many times before, but we had never actually gotten as far as this. Fortunately for us, we ended up farming a plethora of amazing unique items so we were bashing through nearly everything.

We headed down into the caves thinking we were going to just destroy everything like we had before. We soon found ourselves getting surrounded by monsters. My friend died, but I managed to snake my way out of the caves.

So here we were, my friend’s body unrecoverable because of the congregate of monsters throwing a party over his body and me too terrified to risk going back. I said we should just farm up and get him new items, but apparently his items were more valuable than my safety.

The perfect plan we devised was that I would run through the dungeon leading the monsters away from his body using the excellent parkour skills I had honed from our last encounter. Sure enough, I went scrambling down into the caves leading the monsters away, but only about half of them followed and the other half stayed near his corpse. I waited eagerly for him to come in and try to reclaim his gear.

Well, as it turned out, Internet in the dial-up days was not so reliable. While I was running through the dungeon, I ended up dying and he ended up getting a phone call and disconnecting. Our bodies and loot were lost forever down in those caves.

-rkvanraay, Diablo.Incgamers.com user

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ5] Behind the Code: Unwanted Intrusions

At one point groups of Skeleton Kings, intended to only be a boss monster, started spawning on a level. The same kind of scenario started happening, where we were getting killed a lot, but getting massive [experience points] each time we killed them.

-Stieg Hedlund, designer, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ6] Behind the Code: DirectX

DirectX brought about a massive, massive difference [in PC gaming]. To run DOS games, you had to be a computer scientist. Which interrupt is your sound card on? Are you running extended or expanded memory? Can you create the batch file to make this thing run?

Most of us can’t do that, so having all that taken care of by DirectX was a massive relief. Part of the reason there was an explosion in PC gaming in the mid-90s was because the audience size, those who could insert a disk and install the game, increased tenfold.

-David Brevik

This [graphics programming library] called Win-G* came around. You could think of it as DirectX 0. Basically it was Microsoft trying to let you accelerate video and standardize some things. Win-G was very short-lived, and I was the one who started porting everything [the DOS version of Diablo] over to Win-G.

And then DirectX came around. Microsoft saw what we were doing and wanted to put Diablo on the sampler disc, which was a huge coup for us. It meant huge visibility. So we were one of the first games on DirectX.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

* For readers interested in learning more about Win-G, read “A Whirlwind Tour of Win-G” by programmer Chris Hecker.

http://bit.ly/2S6PwH.

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ7] Game Design 101: Polish

Matt Householder joined the Diablo team late in the game’s development, giving him the perfect opportunity to help square away some of the game’s presentation issues.

I immediately sat down and played Diablo non-stop for a couple days, getting familiar with it and looking for bugs, of course. It was clear to me that a final editing pass on the quest dialog was called for, so I jumped into that, working with another recent hire, Jon Morin, who coded my changes.

I played through every quest repeatedly, talking to every in-town NPC and in-dungeon monster. I fixed typos and reconciled recording-session ad-libs against the final text.

The most painstaking task was to adjust the scrolling speeds of all the on-screen text. I had to iterate several times to settle on the best value for each line–and it required Jon to recompile [the game] for each iteration.

-Matt Householder, producer, Blizzard North

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ8] Cutting Room Floor: Extra Dungeon Levels

We were going to add a fifth level of each of the four [dungeon environments]. The fifth level would have been a special transitional level [leading to the next environment].

-Erich Schaefer

I think we [created] each one of the dungeon layers in order, so when we got close to the end, it was like, “We’re running out of time, and we’ve got to have Hell, and we’re pretty much done with the caves, so this other one’s off the block, and we’ll have 16 levels instead of 20.”

I think 16 worked out better than I thought it would. Maybe it’s just the computer scientist in me—a love for powers of two.

-David Brevik

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ9] Byte-Sized History: Historical Notes and Corrections

In December 2011, Diablo celebrated its 15th anniversary. Various media posted retrospectives that took gamers on a trip down memory lane, and Blizzard Entertainment released an eleven-minute retrospective looking back on the making of Diablo and the history of the entire series in early 2012.

* http://bit.ly/wVu2c0

Details are bound to slip and slide over fifteen years, and the history of Diablo’s development, and that of its maker, Blizzard North, was not immune to inaccuracies. At the 4:22 mark of Blizzard’s retrospective video, the narrator refers to Condor as “Condor Games.” David Brevik and the Schaefers founded their company as Condor, Inc., although a similarly named company, Condor Software, did exist. Condor Software released only one game, Planet Soccer, in 1994.

Blizzard’s retrospective also suggests that Condor pitched Diablo to Blizzard Entertainment after Blizzard finished WarCraft II. An article on Blizzard Entertainment’s website, now stored on archive.org, includes quotations from both Condor and Blizzard founders confirming that Condor’s founders made their pitch to Blizzard in early 1995 after Blizzard released the first WarCraft game.

* http://bit.ly/t34feo

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ10] Cutting Room Floor: The Original Diablo Design Document

The final implementation of Diablo varied greatly from the design that Condor pitched to Blizzard Entertainment in 1995. Turn-based gameplay was accelerated for more visceral real-time action, and the game grew to make room for the free Battle.net multiplayer service. But other changes were made to the core game as well.

Real-time and multiplayer functionality were the biggest additions, but Diablo transformed in other, seemingly minor ways, too. I explored the same design document that Dave Brevik placed on Kelly Johnson’s desk in 1994 and put together a list of more original intentions that did not make the cut.

- In addition to tentative cooperative modes for two players, Condor planned to include an arena dungeon where players could duel to see whose hero was strongest.

- Since Diablo was envisioned as a turn-based game, Condor foresaw the need to keep multiplayer sessions moving in case one player took too long to complete her turn. To circumvent long delays, Condor intended to implement a timer for each player’s turn. Players who failed to take action before their timer expired would have to wait until their next turn to make a move.

- Certain weapons in Diablo proved more effective against some creatures than others, such as using blunt weapons to make quick work of brittle skeletons. Condor intended to take this concept further, mentioning a “Mephistopheles Cloak” that allowed players to control lesser monsters.

- Condor outlined plans for players to choose their race and class, as was typical in RPGs. Races were largely undefined, but the design document mentioned that all races would be derivatives of human; hill people and forest people were cited as rough examples.

- The Thief class left on the cutting room floor could move faster than the Fighter and Magician, and could use stealth-based skills to kill monsters without attracting attention.

- After choosing a race and class, players received a few stat points to spread across attributes, such as vitality and strength.

- In the town’s original design, players visited a temple for healing instead of speaking with Pepin in front of his hut.

- Condor wanted to sell Diablo expansion disks modeled after booster packs of Magic: The Gathering trading cards. Each Magic booster contains a dozen or so trading cards; consumers never know what cards they’ll get before they rip off the foil and look over their purchases. Along the same lines, Diablo expansions would contain a random assortment of weapons, magic spells, monsters, dungeon environments, and one rare item. Expansions would be priced at $4.95 each.

- Diablo expansion disks would also contain a collectible trading card describing a rare item included on the disk.

- Condor wanted to place Diablo expansions near cash registers to position them as impulse buys, like packs of bubblegum at supermarkets.

[Back to Chapter 13]

[SQ11] Byte-Sized History: Reflecting on Diablo

More members from Diablo’s development shared their thoughts on finishing Blizzard North’s groundbreaking action-RPG.

I’m most proud of helping to bury the wavetable era with a shovel to the back of the head. I think Diablo made a nice statement about putting digital audio soundtracks front-and-center and helped end that period where a better sound card meant better MIDI [Musical Instrument Device Interface] fonts and hence better music. There was something deeply annoying and undemocratic about that world, and I’m glad I helped kill it.

I don’t like to see any particular genre become too defined or common. I’m proud of the fact that we did give a nice horror twist to high fantasy in the original Diablo and that our player character design had some strong original elements that also tweaked the genre a little.

I’m also proud of the fact that we have been fairly successful at using some steampunk elements in the Torchlight series at Runic [Games]. Things need a twist, or they can descend into predictability and cliché pretty quickly.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Blizzard North

Diablo went stellar. It was unbelievable. I’m so proud of that game. I mean, it was awesome. To walk into E3 wearing a Diablo development t-shirt… We had people come up and ask us for those t-shirts. We’d be offered 300, 400 dollars. I still have those shirts.

-Patrick Tougas, artist, Blizzard North

In hindsight, I learned everything from modeling and animating my first characters [during Diablo’s development]. Even though I’d learned Autodesk and 3D Studio, I’d never animated any characters.

To come right in and start animating the main characters and monsters and start opening chests—it was amazing to just drop right in and learn it all.

-Eric Sexton

I didn’t entirely make the game I wanted to make [in Diablo]. Not because I didn’t make the game I wanted to make; in a lot of ways, I did. But it’s not a personal enough experience for me to call it my own.

It’s such a collaborative effort. Because there are so many people involved, it’s not a personal enough effort for me to say, “I set a goal for myself and accomplished it.” I set a goal for a group, and we accomplished it together.

I think for me, it’s all about the group effort. People become more involved in what they’re doing because they care about it more. They matter more, and they know that. They have some freedom in their job and creativity, and those things are very important to a lot of game makers.

Having an experience like that is important. It means that not all of your ideas are going to get used, but that’s okay, because sometimes people have even better ideas. You can’t come up with everything. It’s important for you to listen to other people, especially when making a game or something like that where it’s so big, it really helps to do it as a collaborative effort.

-David Brevik

[Back to Chapter 13]

Bonus Rounds

Bonus Round 1: Condor’s Lost Games

From the moment Dave Brevik described Diablo to Max and Erich Schaefer, Condor’s three founders knew they wanted to bring the graphical roguelike game to life. They also knew they needed a Plan B in case publishers did not share their enthusiasm for dungeon crawling. They came up with two: Tyran Conquest, a science fiction-themed action game; and The Crystals of Quexlcoatl, a tentative and nigh unpronounceable title about an adventurer in search of magical crystals. Both games were envisioned as 3D, first-person action games that Condor intended to develop for the Atari Jaguar, 3DO, or Sega Saturn consoles.

Dave, Max, and Erich, drew up design documents for all three games and took them to the 1994 Summer CES trade show, where they fortuitously met Allen Adham from Blizzard Entertainment. From the moment Allen expressed interest in Diablo, Condor’s founders dropped their Plan B designs in a filing cabinet and forgot about them. Certain developers from Condor were kind enough to dig up copies of documents detailing Tyran Conquest and The Crystals of Quexlcoatl so I could preserve their details along with the rest of Condor’s/Blizzard North’s history. I was unable to include the documents in their entirety for legal reasons, so I pulled quotes from select sections.

An amalgam of Condor’s two favorite PC games, Tyran Conquest: The Battle for G-42 takes the fast-paced, first-person action of Doom and adds the extraterrestrial-themed upgrades and strategy found in X-COM.

A brutal intergalactic war between the Kalix Federation and the Tyran Empire has been raging for centuries unbeknownst to Earth. But, in the year 2145 […] the planet G-42, or what we call Earth, was selected as a strategic target along the war’s rim.

-Tyran Conquest design document

Despite Earth’s advanced technology, the Tyran Empire invades and wipes out most of the human species. Survivors scrabble underground and form a resistance to fight against the Empire. They hang on long enough to join the Kalix Federation, another group of scrappy survivors from a distant planet who had turned back an Empire assault shortly before Earth was attacked.

As an elite solider in the Earth-Kalix Federation resistance effort, players serve a pivotal role in 40 missions set on land and across space. Land missions in Tyran would have unfolded inside space stations, Kalix installations, and spaceship corridors. Objectives range from defending friendly installations from attacks, sneaking into enemy bases to swipe top-secret documents, sabotaging weaponry, rescuing P.O.W.s, and learning alien technologies.

For a change of pace, space missions would strap players into Kalix star fighters and let players dogfight against Tyran foes.

The player will navigate their spacecraft from a cockpit view. A comprehensive sensor and radar system will be at the pilot’s disposal. This will include an array of instruments detailing system status, enemy identification, targeting information, and communications.

A wide range of cannons, missiles, and lasers will be available, as well as variable armor and shield options.

-Tyran Conquest design document

Space mission objectives include destroying different types of Tyran vessels, defending friendly planets, escorting Kalix convoys, and running cargo and intelligence to allies. Environmental hazards, such as asteroid fields and black holes, pose even more dire threats than Tyran ships.

Between missions there will be cinematic transitions detailing the Federation’s progress. The player will also be informed of their personal progress as they move up in rank. Higher ranks will allow them access to better equipment for future missions.

-Tyran Conquest design document

Trading space stations and alien overlords for lush jungles and secret treasure, The Crystals of Quexlcoatl would have asked players to step into the boots of world-famous archaeologist Dr. Harry Diggs, who had found the long-lost Temple of Quexlcoatl.

Though its existence has been hotly debated, legend states that hidden within the temple, fantastic treasures can be found. The most valuable of these are the six crystals of Quexlcoatl. Though many of Dr. Diggs’ colleagues have disappeared in this very same search, he has ignored concerns for his own safety in his quest for knowledge and the undiscovered.

-The Crystals of Quexlcoatl design document

Dr. Diggs sets one foot inside the musty temple and is suddenly sent back in time to the year 461 A.D. To return to the modern era, he must make his way through obstacle course-like temples, round up all six crystals of Quexlcoatl, and go up against all sorts of nasty creatures and vengeful deities.

Seven giant levels each hold new challenges: the first six yielding one of the Crystals, and the last, a hair-raising, death- defying escape. Some sections of each level are generated randomly through our proprietary process, creating a new experience and different challenges each time the game is played.

-The Crystals of Quexlcoatl design document

Players must first pass through the Jaguar Temple and pyramid entrance. Then, in the spirit of adventure, players can choose to tackle the Serpent Temple, Rain God Temple, Fire God Temple, or Undead Tombs in any order they please. Each temple contains environmental traps and trappings uniquely settled to each area: hungry cats and quicksand in the Jaguar Temple, spirits and skeletons in the Undead Tombs, and lava streams and fireballs in the Fire God Temple. To take down monsters, Dr. Diggs starts out wielding a machete and finds more powerful weapons along the way. After collecting all six crystals, players must charge through an escape maze to return to the modern day and finish the game.

Condor estimated “approximately fourteen months” to develop Tyran Conquest, and “approximately twelve months” to develop The Crystals of Quexlcoatl.

Bonus Round 2: “Rock Balls” - The Making of WarCraft II

It wasn’t the numbers we sold that made us realize we had done something special with WarCraft. I think it was the play experience. WarCraft was really fun to play. It had a different look and feel from the other games out there. It was more like a cartoon. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was amazing and just so damn fun.

-Frank Pearce, co-founder, Blizzard Entertainment

If you look at the title credits for our early games, they say “Design by Blizzard Entertainment,” and that was a conscious decision. A lot of people were deeply involved in the design process, and it’s hard to single out all of those folks.

-Pat Wyatt, vice president of R&D, Blizzard Entertainment

We definitely make games that we want to play. By making games that we want to play first, we’re able to make better games.

-Samwise Didier, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment’s push to get WarCraft: Orcs & Humans on shelves in time for Christmas 1994 left Allen Adham’s team weary yet satisfied. Like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, sales started off slow then picked up through January as critics took notice. PC Gamer magazine gave the game an Editor’s Choice award and named it runner-up for Strategy Game of the Year. Computer Gaming World magazine and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chimed in, granting Blizzard’s maiden PC title Best Strategy Finalist status.

Bob and Jan Davidson gave Blizzard’s boys little time to recoup. The Davidsons wanted a sequel, and they wanted it by Christmas—only eleven months away. Allen and his team saw the wisdom in following up WarCraft sooner rather than later, but they also saw the value in tempering haste with careful consideration. Every developer had suggestions to make WarCraft II bigger and better.

One school of thought was more modern era stuff where humans had fighter jets and modern technology, and Orcs rode around on dinosaurs and cast magic spells. A lot of people in the office thought, That’s a cool idea. Let’s not just do the same thing over again. Let’s go somewhere different.

It was probably best [that WarCraft II retained its fantasy theme] because we didn’t know that Command & Conquer was in development [at Westwood Studios], which meant our game would have been too close to C&C’s modern warfare-themed units.

-Pat Wyatt

That was a huge fight between me and Allen. Allen wanted to take WarCraft II into space, and I was like, “No, that will destroy the title. That will kill it.” Allen and I went back and forth, back and forth on this. At one point, a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip [printed 1-1-1995] had come out showing Calvin playing with a dinosaur toy, and he made the dinosaur [pilot] jet fighters. The last frame of the comic showed Calvin playing and saying something like, “This is so cool!” And Hobbes was saying, “This is so stupid.”

Someone pasted that comic on the doorway with “Stu” written under Hobbes and “Allen” written under Calvin. Allen saw the comic. I saw his shoulders kind of slump, and he said, “Okay. I get it.”

-Stu Rose, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard’s team had no intention of phoning in a quickie sequel. They wanted to add more units, more strategies, more maps, more players able to mix it up in multiplayer—more everything.

The WarCraft design document I wrote is probably the furthest we got with design documents. I don’t remember if there even was a design document for WarCraft II. We knew we needed barracks, we needed town halls, and we already knew what their functions were.

-Stu Rose

To add new layers of strategy to the familiar “gather resources, raise an army, and destroy opponents” gameplay, the developers added island maps to the mix of forest and grassland battlegrounds. Traveling between islands required players to build shipyards and send oil tankers out to install refineries overtop oil patches. Combined with gold and lumber, a steady supply of tankers sucking up oil from the seafloor enabled players to construct warships to patrol the high seas and transports to ferry troops between islands.

Oil originally worked much differently. The way it worked was you’d send out a ship into water, and you’d press a button for that ship that would start this radar-like ping. And you’d see, on the minimap, “This area’s dark so it has lots of oil” or “This area’s light so it has no oil.”

I argued vociferously against that idea. We implemented it [to experiment], but I hated it because it involved a lot of micromanagement, and that was antithetical to the spirit of WarCraft II, which used a much faster play style to that of WarCraft.

-Pat Wyatt

Blizzard refreshed the Orc and Human rosters to give veteran players new tactics to try. Footmen, Grunts, and Archers returned, but the Orc Spearman was replaced by the Troll Axethrower. Both sides received updated long-distance, heavy-damage units in the Human Ballista and Catapult, Gryphons and Dragons sprayed magic and fire across the skies, and Dwarven Demolition Squads and Goblin Sappers exploded when they collided with buildings, units, and even solid rock.

A version of the game leaked, which we called WarCraft II Alpha. A German magazine we’d given a preview copy to let it leak out. We were super pissed off about it, but it gave players an opportunity to see an early version of the game.

The resources were gold, lumber, rock, and oil. At some point after that, we decided that there were too many resources; it made the game too complicated. So we cut rock as a resource, but you could go around with Goblin Sappers and Dwarven Demolition teams and blow holes through mountains to get to somebody’s base that might otherwise only be accessible by water.

I’m glad we were able to use that because I didn’t want to see harvesting rocks go to waste.

-Pat Wyatt

As in the first game, WarCraft II’s factions largely mirrored one another. The Human Mage had 60 health points and cost 1200 gold to build, the same stats as the Death Knight on the Orc side. Human Knights galloped around on horseback but did the same damage as the two-headed Ogre that lumbered about on foot. Where the Orcs and Humans differed was in tactics and abilities that opened up after players had constructed advanced buildings. After building certain prerequisite structures, players gained the option to convert Knights into Paladins that healed friendly units on command. Ogres transcended into fearsome Ogre Mages able to cast Bloodlust, a spell that enhanced a unit’s speed and strength.

It’s much easier to differentiate [factions] in the late game because you have less risk of one side being unbalanced compared to the other than you do in the early game, where differences are critical. Really what you want is for both sides to build up and then have tactical options that split in different directions [in the late-game stage].

Now, interestingly, we still made a mistake. Paladins are really underpowered compared to the ogre mages. From a micromanagement standpoint, Ogre Mages are much more powerful because you can cast bloodlust on all your guys then go attack, and your troops will go about their business. With the Paladin’s healing, you have to wait until the unit takes damage then heal [manually].

The Paladin required a lot more micromanagement, and that was something the design team didn’t perceive as being a balance issue at that point, but it ended up being a big deal. Orcs were a much better race to choose in WarCraft II.

-Pat Wyatt

Outside of new units and faster gameplay, WarCraft II underwent numerous under-the-hood changes. In August 1995, Westwood Studios released Command & Conquer, the spiritual successor to the studio’s Dune II RTS that had influenced WarCraft. Blizzard’s developers played Command & Conquer extensively and applauded some of the adjustments Westwood had made to the RTS genre’s gameplay. Notably, Command & Conquer eliminated the need to click command buttons like Attack and Move by implementing an intelligent interface driven by the left mouse button. After selecting units, players simply left-clicked on the ground to move, left-clicked on enemy units to attack, and left-clicked on buildings to select them.

Blizzard’s programmers appreciated Command & Conquer’s streamlined controls but encountered a common problem: because every action was mapped to the left mouse button, players sometimes performed actions they did not mean to, such as sending a pack of troops charging forward when they had intended to move their cursor up a smidge more to click on a building and peruse its upgrade options. Jesse McReynolds came up with a way to reduce such user errors in WarCraft II. Pulling up the game code, he divided functions between both mouse buttons. Left-clicking selected units and buildings, while right-clicking carried out context-sensitive actions like moving and attacking.

Another improvement was the fog of war, a black shroud that covered all terrain at the start of each game except for the player’s starting location. As in WarCraft and Dune II, the darkness peeled back as the player sent units roving across the map, revealing terrain, gold mines, forests, and enemy bases. WarCraft II one-upped the fog mechanic by adding a new layer of strategic possibilities: Terrain and enemy structures remained visible after the player’s units moved away or were killed, but in the state the player had last seen them, as if frozen in time.

What ended up being really challenging was [drawing] the knowledge of what the player had seen in an area. Mike Morhaime might have written code for this: You go to explore an area, and you happen to see a building, maybe a barracks. Then you go away.

Well, is that building still there, or not? What if that building gets destroyed or more buildings appear around it [before the player returns to that area]? I can’t just show all the buildings that are there in the fog; I need exact information about what the player saw. You don’t want to give away information like a building that signifies the [opponent’s] production of Ogre Mages.

We did that by making shadow buildings. Each player sees what he saw, and shadow buildings represent the buildings that were there when he scouted the area, but might not be there now.

-Pat Wyatt

Crafty WarCraft II players used the fog of war to their advantage.

The idea of roads [in WarCraft] was taken directly from Dune II. In that game, you could only build buildings next to roads, and roads had to connect to other roads. So the designers were able to control where you could build buildings, or not build them, by laying out roads on the map.

We argued about that quite a lot in the early design process [for WarCraft]. Allen was one of the chief proponents of roads. He pointed out, “What if someone builds a barracks right next to your base?”

-Pat Wyatt

With roads out of the way, WarCraft II players could initiate construction on any patch of clear land. Devious generals made a habit of sneaking a worker unit just outside an enemy’s base and walling them in with watchtowers, constructing farms in a line that blocked access to gold mines and forests, and building a barracks that pumped fighters right into the base.

Another improvement offered in WarCraft II was as technical as it was cosmetic.

Super VGA graphics were not very popular for games yet. Windows 95 was coming out, and Allen said, “We need to do a hi-resolution Windows game.”

Having worked on one of those—that was MPC Battle Chess—I said, “To do [high-res graphics] for a real-time strategy game is not possible.”

-Pat Wyatt

Pat argued to Allen that rendering high-resolution graphics on the screen would prove too taxing on contemporary computers. Video games had to refresh the screen every time players performed any action like scrolling and moving a unit around. Refreshing super-detailed images every few seconds would slow WarCraft II to a crawl. As was standard at Blizzard, the push-pull argument turned into a raging debate that swept up the whole office.

Allen would say, “We have to do this,” and I’d say, “No.” Lots of other people were saying “No.” We had a meeting where he railed on a whole group of us. He said, “You say ‘no’ to this, and this, and this. I want to do something, and I can’t do anything around here.”

So I gave up and said, “Okay, we’ll do Super VGA,” and it was really hard, but we were able to pull it off for WarCraft II.

Allen was right. Sometimes we just had to try to do impossible things and succeed or fail. Fortunately we succeeded more often than we failed, but those kinds of arguments really wore him out.

-Pat Wyatt

WarCraft II’s resolution doubled in size, enabling the artists to create maps, buildings, units, and special effects that were sharper, crisper, and more detailed than WarCraft’s already-dated graphics. Although the resolution changed, WarCraft’s cartoony graphics and humor remained intact.

We doubled the resolution of the game so we could insert all these details we didn’t see before, and I did a test with some realistic Orcs running around. They were just rendered sprites, but they were rendered in 3D with armor and skin tone and everything.

I really liked it, and a lot of people really liked it. It was a totally different look. But then some of the other designers came in and said, “No, it’s got to look more cartoony. It’s got to look more goofy.”

As a petulant kind of “Fuck you,” I turned the shaders all the way up on the characters so they were 100 percent saturated, like obscene neon and glowing green, just to show them how ridiculous it would look. And they said, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s what we want.”

Shot myself in the foot on that one. We dialed it back maybe 10, but that’s what the game ended up looking like.

-Duane Stinnett, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Honestly, I think it [the WarCraft series’ color palette] was more an effect of doing so many Super Nintendo games. If you look at Blackthorne, [vibrant] colors was just the style we used at Blizzard, and we carried it over into WarCraft. Blackthorne, Justice League, Rock ‘n Roll Racing—that was just the style of the art we made.

-Stu Rose

***

Without a story beyond “Orcs and Humans fighting each other,” Bill Roper had made up WarCraft’s dramatic plot and history on-the-fly in sound booth recording sessions. For WarCraft II, Blizzard handed over world-building duties to an enthusiastic new artist.

I was singing in a few bands and just having a blast at that. […] We were playing a gig at a club one night, and I guess I had drawn a little dragon on a cocktail napkin, just screwing around. And this guy walked by who knew a friend of a friend of a friend and went, “Hey, that’s pretty good! […] I know this one place that’s hiring artists.” And he handed me a card that said “Chaos Studios.”

[…] I walk in the door and there’s radio-controlled cars and superhero posters and Iron Maiden posters all over the walls. I didn’t even know what they did. All I knew is that whatever this is, I want a piece of this.

-Chris Metzen, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Metzen had started out animating Batman on the Super Nintendo version of Justice League Task Force. Eager for more work, he pitched in on the text and detailed illustrations that made up WarCraft’s instruction booklet. When the team started in on design idea for WarCraft II, Metzen let his imagination run wild.

By the time we began WarCraft II, I stayed late and wrote up a few paragraphs of what might have happened between the games that would set up a sequel, or begin to set up the scope or anticipation of the sequel.

I didn’t plan to show it to anybody, and I guess one of the other designers showed it to the boss one night, unbeknownst to me. A couple of days of later, we’re at a meeting, and the boss says, “Oh, and, by the way, Chris is our new designer on WarCraft II.”

I’m like, “Holy crap! Really?! Why?” But he knew. He knew that while I loved drawing […] ultimately he knew I just wanted to make stuff up.

-Chris Metzen

Metzen submerged himself in the fiction that defined Azeroth and its surrounding lands. Picking up where Bill Roper’s off-the-cuff construction of the lore had left off, he decided that the Orcs had won the first war, leaving Azeroth in a state of desolation and panic. All surviving humans retreated to the kingdom of Lordaeron. Eyeing another conquest, the Orcs set off in pursuit.

To expand the scope of the game, Metzen and the other designers brought other races into the Orcs-versus-Humans conflict. Elves and Dwarves sided with humanity to form the Alliance, and the Orcs rolled trolls, ogres, and goblins into their ranks. Metzen’s yarn of conquest and bloodshed unfolded over the game’s two campaigns. Players who took command of the battered and bruised Alliance explored, built, and fought their way to a final showdown at the Dark Portal from which the Orcs had invaded. Those who threw in with the Orcs set off on a string of plundering and pillaging that culminated in an all-out assault on Lordaeron.

Chris Metzen used to be this kid who had a lot of brilliant ideas about story. He wrote the story for WarCraft II and beyond. He didn’t do a good job of expressing how cool things were going to be in meetings, but when he delivered the goods, they were always epic.

The terms he used to describe what our games should be were, “[The game] needs to be epic. Bold, epic, and rock balls.” We all just sort of knew what that meant even though it sounds really wacky. It had to be bold and epic, and it had to “rock balls.” So that’s what we did. We made games that rocked balls.

-Pat Wyatt

Alongside Sammy Didier, Metzen also helped evolve the cartoony visuals used in WarCraft.

I think the cartoony look definitely works. Compared to other games out there, which have a main character who is a normal guy, [WarCraft: Orcs and Humans had] this giant massive green Orc riding a wolf, with an axe that is too huge to carry in one hand, yet he’s got two of them, one in each hand.

Everything is just over the top.

-Sammy Didier, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

Sammy Didier was very much the driving force behind the look of WarCraft [series], and he always has been. Between him and Metzen, they had this “it’s goofy and cartoony, but it’s badass at the same time” style.

-Duane Stinnett

Saving or decimating Azeroth for a second time offered plenty of action and drama, but Blizzard’s developers knew multiplayer was the reason players continued to play WarCraft long after they had finished the game’s story. Just like the artwork, gameplay, and storyline, multiplayer offerings in WarCraft II needed to be exponentially better. WarCraft had permitted only two players to engage in epic, rock-balls clashes. WarCraft II quadrupled that limit, offering dozens of maps set in forests, islands, and winter wonderlands—complete with twinkling Christmas lights that fit in perfectly with WarCraft’s jocular personality—for up to eight players.

Even more important to WarCraft II’s success was its multiplayer play. Although it lacked the free Battle.net connectivity of later Blizzard products, it did feature eight-player local network play and supported two-player modem gaming.

It was also another early beneficiary of Kali, a gaming community tool that allowed primitive TCP/IP gaming connections across the nascent Internet.

-Jason Bates, PC Retroview, IGN.com

***

Blizzard Entertainment released WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness in early December 1995, right on schedule. One year earlier, the original WarCraft had been just another box amid dozens of other games at retail. From the moment the sequel dropped, hype for the game swelled from a snowball rolling downhill to a full-on avalanche.

Cool is one word for it, but blockbuster hit is another way to describe WarCraft II. It became Blizzard’s first game to hit the million-unit-seller mark. […] Up until that point only games like Myst and The 7th Guest could claim such a distinction.

-Geoff Keighley, “Eye of the Storm,” GameSpot.com

Critics and gamers responded to WarCraft II right away. PC Gamer piled on the praise, bestowing an Editor’s Choice Award and crowning it Best Strategy Game of the Year and Best Game of the Year overall for 1995. Years later, GameSpot.com, Computer Gaming World, and other venerable media outlets inducted the game into their respective Hall of Fames.

Once you had learned the nuances and intricacies of multiplayer WarCraft II, you’d find yourself hopelessly addicted to fine-tuning your build orders in an effort to find the most efficient play style possible.

Team games could involve certain team members getting extremely specialized—for instance, one team member would try to get dragons or demolition crews as quickly as possible while the other team members would protect him or her. Water maps with battleships and ship transports added yet another wrinkle to the game strategy.

-Bob Colayco, “The Greatest Games of All Time,” GameSpot.com

Critics also expressed satisfaction with the game’s accessibility and personality.

In WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, I always took umbrage at having to tell a unit what to do when, in many cases, it should be obvious: if you tell a peon to go to a gold mine, you want him to harvest gold.

WarCraft 2 lets you right-click to quickly dispatch your units. Click on clear ground and you move there. Click on an enemy unit and you will attack him. If you’ve been playing a lot of Command & Conquer lately, you’ll welcome this feature.

-Tim Keating, Computer Games Magazine

Although no reviewer ever put it in Metzen’s words, Blizzard’s developers knew WarCraft II rocked balls. Other developers thought so, too. Caught up in the excitement over the growing popularity of the RTS genre, competitors littered store shelves with imitators that tried but failed to pry loose the grip that Blizzard and Westwood had on think-on-your-feet strategy gaming.

Just as importantly as ushering in waves of real-time warfare games, WarCraft II proved that Blizzard was no one-hit wonder. Never again would a Blizzard Entertainment-branded game get lost in the shuffle of other boxes. For gamers and critics, the next great PC game developer had arrived.

Bonus Round 3: Cartridge Chronicles

One of my goals in writing Stay Awhile and Listen was to explore topics that influenced the meteoric rise of the two Blizzards. More gamers recognize the Blizzard name from the success of WarCraft, Diablo, and StarCraft than they do Justice League Task Force and RPM Racing, but developing console games gave both Blizzards a leg-up during their early stages.

It occurred to me that many who read Stay Awhile and Listen might not realize just how much effort and risk was involved in developing games for cartridge-based systems, so I seized the opportunity to fish information out of developers who worked on Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo Game Boy games.

On a more personal note, I regard the 1990s as my favorite era in video game history. The fierce competition between Nintendo and Sega prompted countless playground debates over which system was superior. That same competitive vibe spurred both console manufacturers to lock down top-notch games for their respective machines: Nintendo secured an exclusive release of Street Fighter II for Super Nintendo; Sega allowed Acclaim Entertainment to sneak a code into the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat that let players perform the head-twisting, heart-ripping fatalities from the arcade game, giving Sega an edge over the Super Nintendo’s tamer adaptation.

While gamers took sides and volleyed arguments back and forth, developers like Interplay and Blizzard fretted over how their console games, nowhere near as renowned as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, would fare at retail.

Publishers just had to roll the dice on games. No one made cartridges in the U.S. Japan made the cartridges, and they’d put them on a boat and ship them here.

So you had to make this guess: How many units do we think we’ll see in the first X amount of time? We don’t want to get too many because we don’t want to sit around with cartridges, and [Japan] won’t take [our] money back [if we can’t unload the stock]. But we need to order enough, because if the game is a hit, we don’t want it to be off the shelves.

“On the shelves” was one of the major ways people knew your game was out. There was no Internet; people just went to the stores and saw the games.

-Feargus Urquhart, producer, Interplay Productions

Back then, not only did you have to buy your cartridges from Nintendo, but they also told you how many you could have. They finally stopped that practice, but you would go to Nintendo with orders for maybe 150,000 [cartridges], and they’d say, “We’ll give you 60,000.”

There were long lead times with the cartridges—months by the time you went through Japan and everything else. There was a minimum purchase, maybe 50,000 or 60,000 units. You put a minimum number out into the field. I want to say the cost of goods was close to 20 bucks [per cartridge].

[RPM Racing] took every single dime we had in the bank, and I had to borrow money from my father-in-law at the time, another $100,000. It tapped me [and Interplay] out financially to get the order out there. That was betting the farm.

-Brian Fargo, founder, Interplay Productions

Today, selling above a certain number of units qualifies a game as a success. During the Super Nintendo and Genesis era, smaller publishers needed to sell every cartridge they ordered.

RPM Racing was successful in that I sold everything I bought. We played conservatively, made a nice little amount of money, and got out.

I knew [the game] wasn’t groundbreaking. The development time was six months or so. But I was a nobody. For me, the only way I could open up accounts like Wal-Mart and Kmart was to have a [Super Nintendo] title [near the system’s] launch. Otherwise, six months later, they wouldn’t have even spoken to me.

-Brian Fargo

While publishers placed pricey orders for cartridges, developers wrote the code that would eventually occupy microchips sheltered within those plastic cartridges. Programmers wrote the games in assembly, a language whose commands were close to the binary machine language computers used to process commands.

Because we were working without official development kits, we didn’t have official development documentation. We had photocopied, poorly translated Japanese documents. We also had a bunch of documents that had been photocopied, probably from someone at Electronic Arts.

You’d reference it and say, “Okay, there’s a [storage] register that can do such and such,” and you’d plug in values. “We don’t know what this register does; you just set it to 1 when the program boots up.” There were several values that nobody knows exactly what they did [but were required for games to run].

It was really sparse documentation, and it was only later when we finally got official documentation that we said, “Oh, so that’s what we were doing.”

-Pat Wyatt, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

Spartan documentation was only one obstacle in getting Super Nintendo games up and running. The console’s processor clocked in a 2.58 megahertz, the same snail-like speed as the Apple IIgs computer’s processor. In fact, the Super Nintendo’s processor was a modified version of the processor under the hood of the Apple IIgs. To create special effects, developers called on the rudimentary graphics capabilities included in the Super Nintendo’s circuitry. (Later on, British developer Argonaut Games engineered the Super FX Chip, a special chip that developers could affix to cartridges to create even flashier effects.)

If you think back to a lot of those games, one common effect was the screen looking very wavy. The line at the top of the screen moved to the left, and then the next line down moved a little bit more to the left, and the next line down a little bit more—the whole edge of the screen would move in waves back and forth.

The way you did something like that was every single time you moved a new line that was drawn by the TV’s raster [the component responsible for drawing images on the screen], the code would say, “Wait! Before you draw that line, let me adjust the scroll position just a little bit.”

So you’d adjust various parameters in your main output for each individual line or for the whole screen.

-Pat Wyatt

Blizzard’s programmers relied on a special board conjured up by one of Interplay’s programmers to test the code they wrote for Super NES games like RPM Racing.

There were two ways to do development [on the Super NES]. One was to license development systems from Nintendo. The other was to reverse-engineer your own system. The Nintendo kits were really expensive.

So Interplay decided not to go that path. They reversed engineered enough of [the Super NES] to be able to create their own plug-in board [called the Sluggo III].

-Pat Wyatt

I invented a board called the “Sluggo III” that allows a developer to create Super Nintendo software using [an Apple IIgs] or IBM PC as a host. […] This device is a “ROM” emulator that you can [use to] emulate just about any Super Nintendo cartridge. […] You download the cartridge data into the Sluggo III and then you play them on the Super Nintendo you also have hooked up.

-Rebecca Heineman, Interplay Productions, Apple II Roundtable

What would happen is you’d finish doing cross assembly on the PC—you’d write a bunch of assembly code, build some binary files, and then use a cross assembler, which is an assembler that runs on the PC but generates 65c816 [assembly] code—and you would take the binary image [of the game] and dump it to the Sluggo.

And it was really slow. [Super Nintendo games were] one-megabyte games, so they’re not really big. But it would take a good minute to upload that game to the Sluggo. It was a painful process to do that. You’d try to get everything right before you uploaded it. Once you uploaded it, you could actually play your game.

One thing we knew was if we iterated faster, we’d find success faster. You want turnaround time between writing code and testing it to be as fast as possible. When you can’t [achieve those results], it’s time to start retooling.

We used the Sluggo kits for a while, but later, on we found a company that made special cartridges for about 100 bucks. They were essentially piracy devices, so if you were pirating images of Super Nintendo games, you could download the ROM, stick it on the cartridge, and play the game.

We got our hands on tons of those things and used them to develop games, and that worked great. Instead of taking a minute to download [using the Sluggo], it would take three seconds to download.

-Pat Wyatt

While Blizzard and Interplay wrestled with the Super Nintendo, Condor’s programmers tackled the challenges of writing for the Sega Genesis.

We bought a development system for the Genesis. There weren’t any for sale for the Game Boy or Game Gear; you had to develop your own. It was pretty expensive at the time. We [David Brevik and the Schaefers] didn’t pay ourselves almost anything. I think it cost like $20,000 for those development systems, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but to us, it was a third of our budget. It was ridiculous.

The 68000 processor chip in the Genesis, made by Motorola, was really a remarkable chip at the time. It had a lot of [memory] registers in it. So if you wanted to add two [numbers] together, you had to take them out of memory and stick them in registers, then you could do whatever you want.

When you were done, you put stuff back in memory. Having a lot of registers to work with was very, very handy. And [the Genesis] was very fast, too. I really loved working on the Genesis from an engineering standpoint.

Acclaim had access to a sound library or something; that’s how we were able to get our hands on that, the code for a sound library. That really helped a lot. I think that was the only library we used. Everything else we had to do ourselves.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

The dev kit [Sega] had for the Genesis was a great kit. For kits of that era, it was really well done. You could code on your own box, but you couldn’t test [the code on any machines] except for that kit.

If you wanted to test on a proper Genesis, you had to burn an EPROM [erasable programmable read-only memory chip].

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

Burning EPROMs was also the approach Condor used to test code for the Game Boy versions of NFL Quarterback Club.

You had to write code in assembly [language] in order to convert your code into machine language that consoles understood, so manufacturers would give you technical schematics, and you had lots of choices for what you could do.

We ended up not making development systems [for Game Boy and Game Gear games]. We just burned EPROMs, microchips. After burning a microchip, you could put it in a cartridge that had a place for a microchip.

Then you yanked it out with pliers [when you were done running tests] and burned new information. The cartridge was a special type that Nintendo sold to developers.

-David Brevik

Bonus Round 4: Interview with Brian Fargo, Founder of Interplay Productions, Inc.

Interplay Productions founder Brian Fargo has left numerous indelible marks on the video game industry. During our interviews, Brian and I concentrated on his relationship with Blizzard Entertainment, information that proved critical in helping me understand Blizzard’s early days. We also covered history leading up to and beyond Interplay’s founding, and I did not want to scrap all that information just because it did not directly relate to Blizzard or Diablo.

This chapter collects the rest of that interview and explores Brian’s exposure to game programming, the guerrilla marketing tactics he used to get his early games on store shelves, and much more.

***

David Craddock: What led to your interest in making video games?

Brian Fargo: When I was in junior high school, they had a mainframe computer. People talk about the cloud now, but everything was in “the cloud” back then. You just had a dumb terminal talking to a mainframe. I was fascinated by computers even though there wasn’t much in terms of games. The coin-op business had just gotten to the point where games like Pong and Space Invaders were emerging, and it was those games that first got me interested.

Then my parents got me an Apple II in high school, and that really opened my eyes to how you can make games, how I could go beyond just playing them. I played a lot of the older titles. I remember there were some old strategy titles where you would make a move and the computer would take two to three hours to process its turn. You’d go crazy when a game crashed halfway through because that meant you just lost three days of playing.

So I really discovered games through those means. I always had a background in reading a lot of fiction: comics, Heavy Metal magazine. Playing Dungeons & Dragons was a big part of high school for me. But the thing that I think led me to create games—which I think most people would give the same answer to—was, I looked at what was out there and thought, “You know, I could do better.” That’s what sent me down my course.

David Craddock: What was the first game you made?

Brian Fargo: One of my high school buddies was Michael Cranford. His parents wouldn’t get him a computer, so he used to borrow mine. We made this little adventure game. I’d give him the computer over the weekend, he’d write code for a section, then he’d give it back and I’d try to finish his section and do my part, then he’d go through mine. We’d go back and forth. We did this all summer.

We made this little game called the Labyrinth of Martagon. We actually put it in some baggies and probably sold five copies. That would be a very obscure, technically speaking, first game. But one that really got into distribution would be The Demon’s Forge [released in 1981].

David Craddock: Before Interplay, you created Saber Software to release The Demon’s Forge, an adventure game in the vein of games like King’s Quest where players typed in commands to interact with the game. What made you want to create an adventure game, and how did you attract attention in Demon’s Forge as a small, one-man studio?

Brian Fargo: I was a big fan of adventure games. I loved all the [adventure games developed by] Scott Adams, all the Sierra adventures. I also liked Ultima and Wizardry, but from a coding perspective I wasn’t strong enough to do that stuff, but I thought I could do an adventure game. It was a category I liked, and I liked medieval settings.

As far as attracting attention, I had a budget of $5,000 for everything. My one ad in Soft Talk [magazine] cost me about 2,500 bucks, so 50 percent of my money went into a single ad. One of the things I did was I would call retailers on a different phone and say, “Hey, I’m trying to find this game called Demon’s Forge. Do you guys have a copy?” They said, “No,” and I said, “Oh, I just saw it in Soft Talk. It looks good. They said, “We’ll look into it.”

A few minutes later my other line would ring and the retailer would place an order. That was my guerrilla marketing. I was selling to individual chains of stores. There were two distributors at the time that would help you get into the mom-and-pop places. It was a store-by-store, shelf-by-shelf fight.

From a magazine perspective, there was really only Soft Talk. There was another one at the time, but Soft Talk generated the most business, so it was all about getting their coverage. In a way, they were like the iTunes of the day. You had to have their support.

David Craddock: It sounds like Saber Software got off on the right foot. What led to your transition from Saber to Interplay Productions?

Brian Fargo: There were some Stanford graduates who wanted to get into the video game industry, and they bought my company. They paid off my debt and I made a few bucks, nothing much to brag about. They made me the vice president and I started doing work for them. It became one of those things where there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians, and I was doing all the work. I was with them for about a year when I quit and started Interplay in to do things my way. I’d gotten used to running development, so that seemed the next natural step.

With Interplay, I wanted to take [development] beyond one- or two-man teams. That sounds like an obvious idea now, but to hire an artist to do the art, a musician to do the music, a writer to do the writing, all opposed as just the one man show doing everything, was novel. Even with Demon’s Forge, I had my buddy Michael do all the art, but I had to trace it all in and put it in the computer, and that lost a certain something. And because I didn’t know a musician or sound guy, it had no music or sound. I did the writing, but I don’t think that’s my strong point. So really, [Interplay was] set up to say, “Let’s take a team approach and bring in specialists.”

David Craddock: Mindshadow was Interplay’s first game. What do you feel set Mindshadow apart from other text-input adventure games of the time?

Brian Fargo: I think most other adventure games were about good versus evil or trying to survive in a hostile environment, that kind of thing. Mindshadow was about remembering who you were. It was loosely based on the original Bourne Identity. That made it a very unique approach. You would discover clues, and if somebody said, “I ran into a David Craddock,” you’d say, “Think David Craddock,” and if that toggled something in your mind, a memory would come rushing back.

It was all about discovering who you were after waking up on an island with amnesia. That, and I got a pretty decent artist to work on it, a guy named Dave Lowery, who eventually went on to work at Skywalker Ranch and do Willow. We didn’t give him the greatest tools, but he did great work with what he had.

As a funny adjunct, I found the source code for Mindshadow about a month ago. I was searching through all my records, and the programming was done by [Allen] Adham, one of the founders of Blizzard. When he was still in high school, I had him doing contract coding for me on adventure games.

David Craddock: Text-input adventure games were a very special genre to a lot of developers and gamers. I always felt like I was reading an interactive book as I played, even when the genre started to combine graphics and text input in games like King’s Quest and Mindshadow.

Brian Fargo: I remember Infocom was the big text adventure king at the time. They used to run ads talking about how graphics weren’t necessary. I used to get a kick out of that. I can appreciate the cerebral nature of it all, to say that graphics weren’t important. They ran ads saying something like, “We don’t need graphics because the best graphics come from your brain.” That certainly gives one perspective of that era.

David Craddock: In addition to Mindshadow being Interplay’s first game, I believe it also marked your first opportunity to partner with a big partner, Activision. How did that partnership come about? What was it like working with Activision?

Brian Fargo: That’s a good question. I think because of the work I did at the other company—it was called Boone Corporation*, the one right before Interplay—we had some awareness. Somehow we hit Activision’s radar. They contacted me and liked what we were doing. They were moving from being an Atari VCS company to being a publisher for the computer, the Apple II in this case. I think we made the first floppy disk product Activision ever shipped in Mindshadow.

They liked it. They liked the plot line and what made it novel. We ended up doing a multi-product relationship with them.

David Craddock: Arguably Interplay’s most popular game during the early 1980s was The Bard’s Tale [Tales of the Unknown: Volume I]. The game also marked a transition from adventure games to proper role-playing games for Interplay. How did Bard’s Tale come together?

Brian Fargo: I had a lot of diverse friends. I was big into track and field, I played football, so I had those friends, then I had friends from the chess club, the programming club, and a Dungeons & Dragons club. Michael [Cranford] was from that side. I always thought he was a pretty bright guy and one of the better dungeon masters.

We played a lot of D&D. We always tried to focus on setting up dungeons that would test people’s character as opposed to just making them fight bigger and [tougher] monsters. We’d do things like separate the party and have one half just getting slaughtered by a bunch of vampires and see who would jump in to help them. But it wasn’t really happening. It was all an illusion, but we’d test them.

I always got a kick out of the more mental side of things, and Michael was a pretty decent artist, a pretty good writer. He was my D&D buddy, but then he went off to Berkeley, and I started [Interplay]. He did a product for Human Engineering Software, but then I said, “Hey, let’s do a Dungeons & Dragons-style title together. Wouldn’t that be great?”

That’s really how the game came about. He moved back down to Southern California, and I think we actually started when he was still up north. But then we worked on Bard’s Tale together, kind of bringing back the D&D experiences we both enjoyed in high school.

I found the original design document for Bard’s Tale, and it wasn’t even called Bard’s Tale. It was called Shadow Snare. The direction wasn’t different, but maybe the bard ended up getting tuned up a bit. One of the people there who has gone on to great success, Bing Gordon, was our marketing guy on that. He very much jumped on the bard [character] aspect of it.

David Craddock: Putting a bard in a starring role was the most interesting aspect of Bard’s Tale for me, plot-wise. That protagonist slot is usually reserved for meatheads and wizards.

Brian Fargo: At the time, the gold standard was Wizardry for that type of game. There was Ultima, but that was a different experience, a top-down view, and not really as party based. Sir-Tech was kind of saying, “Who needs color? Who needs music? Who needs sound effects?” But my attitude was, “We want to find a way to use all those things. What better than to have a main character who uses music as part of who he is?”

David Craddock: Electronic Arts published Bard’s Tale, not Activision. What drew you to EA instead of sticking with Activision?

Brian Fargo: EA was more gamer-focused as a company. Activision’s executive management was more the big business, CEO and CFO types, whereas EA, starting right up with Trip Hawkins and all his guys, they were gamers. When we would try to explain Bard’s Tale to Activision, but they didn’t really get it. Whereas when I would take it to EA, they got it—boom. Just like that. You want to be with somebody who gets it, and they clearly got it and were excited about it, so we moved fast with them.

One of the big things at the time was, they hated each other, Activision and EA. Just hated each other. We were maybe the only developer doing work for both companies at the same time and they just grilled me whenever they had the chance. Whenever there was any kind of leak, they’d say, “Did you say anything?” I was right in the middle, there. I always made sure to keep my mouth shut about everything.

David Craddock: While we’re on the subject of Bard’s Tale, I’d like to know more about the remake your post-Interplay company, inXile, put out in 2004. That one was dramatically different in tone; it was much more humorous than the original from ’85. What brought about that change in theme and direction?

Brian Fargo: I’ll give you my mindset at the time. I took some time off after Interplay. I’d been working for almost two decades straight. So you take some time off. Great. But you start getting an itch after two or three months. I spent that time playing everybody’s games, especially the role-playing games, and they’d always start off sending me into the cellar to kill rats and just doing this super generic stuff.

I thought, Oh my God. I’ve been [making RPGs] for so many years, and it’s all still the same thing. So I thought—this was kind of like a comedian deciding he wants to do a drama—I just wanted to do something different. The player would play a main character who felt how I felt, about the same old dialogue and the lack of creativity.

If you want to design a role-playing game, I can sit down and bang out a design in an hour as long as it’s, “Okay, here’s a dragon, here’s two trolls guarding a dungeon entrance.” We can all sit down and do that in an hour. But if you want to do stuff nobody’s heard of before or seen before, that’s creativity. That takes a while. I wanted to do something that was just totally different and sort of poked fun at the RPG.

The Bard’s Tale [released in 2004] is nothing like the original. For people who were dying to recapture that experience, that wouldn’t be what they wanted. But for people who just took it at face value, they got it and loved it. The real testament to that was we released it on [iphone and iPad] in December 2011. It was the number one RPG on iPad and a top ten game. We were up there with Angry Birds and Words with Friends. It got all five-star, 90-percent reviews just because of all the humor in that game.

That crowd took the game for what it was. They didn’t try to compare it to the original. And I understand some people were hoping for that, but it was a console game, right? Not to mention I could not have gotten a PC RPG funded at that point anyway.

David Craddock: That makes me curious as to your thoughts on the MMORPG genre. Now there’s a category of games in need of a different direction.

Brian Fargo: I haven’t gotten into them [MMORPGs] as much, probably because I like more of a narrative structure. To me, whether it be Wasteland or Fallout where you have these morally ambiguous situations—my favorite movies are like that. I love the Guy Ritchie films where there’s an edge to the story, you’re making it through and hearing really witty dialogue. I love that.

Whereas MMOs are more about interacting with other human beings and not so much about story structure. I appreciate MMOs, but they are more of a grind and more formulaic. They’re just a very different experience.

* Boone Corporation was owned by Stanford University graduate Mike Boone. Boone Corporation acquired Saber Software and re-released The Demon’s Forge under the Boone Corporation label.

Bonus Round 5: Interview with Feargus Urquhart, Producer at Interplay Productions

From his humble beginnings as a game tester at Interplay Productions to his current post as co-founder and CEO of Obsidian Entertainment, Feargus Urquhart has made a living designing and producing some of the game industry’s most prolific role-playing games. Over the past 22 years, Feargus has influenced the direction of properties such as Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He has also helped guide the creation of new properties like Obsidian’s upcoming Project Eternity RPG, a Kickstarter sensation that raised $3.9 million when it only needed $1.1 million to meet its funding goals.

During his early days at Interplay, Feargus also helped shape Blizzard Entertainment’s—then known as Silicon & Synapse—console games, such as The Lost Vikings and Rock ’n Roll Racing. We also chatted about the early days at Interplay, the life and times of game testers and producers, and much more.

***

David Craddock: How did you get your foot in the door at Interplay?

Feargus Urquhart: From very early on, I was playing games. I had an Atari 2600, and we had a Pong console before that. I had an Intellivision and a lot of friends had game systems. My friends and I would spend hours playing Decathlon on PC. Then we sort of graduated to some of the original Infocom adventures, games like Wizardry. I also played a lot of pen-and-paper RPGs. So that was just the world I was in at the time: from playing a lot of paper stuff, to more video and computer games.

I actually went to school not to do games, but to be a bio-engineer. Medical equipment and things like that. I just didn’t think, “How would I get a job in the games industry?” That just never occurred. I’d written a few games myself from scratch, but I didn’t really know where to take it. Where would it go? Well, a friend of mine from school, Chris Taylor, ended up getting a job as a tester at Interplay. He said, “Hey, we need testers this summer [1991].” I said, “Cool. Can I come in?”

My interview was: I walked in and talked to the VP of operations, got introduced. He said, “You’re Feargus.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You want to test games?” I said, “Yeah.” That was my interview.

David Craddock: Do you remember your first day? What were you expecting from a place where you made fun for a paycheck?

Feargus Urquhart: I showed up on the first day, and there were three testers at Interplay, and two chairs, so someone had to sit on the floor testing… a Game Boy game, I think. We eventually got a third chair. One of the first games I ever tested was an 8-bit, NES Star Trek game that Interplay had made for Acclaim. The next thing I tested was RPM Racing by Blizzard, but when they were still Silicon & Synapse and still pretty small.

To make the “how I got into games” chain even weirder, another friend, Curtis, was working at Egghead Software. He got a new D&D game, and there was a person there who had worked in customer service at Interplay, and that’s how Curtis got in. So I think that’s a normal way that people got into the industry back then: through friends. You didn’t really need to have a resume. You needed to live in the right place—I lived in Orange County—and you had to have friends who were in the industry.

David Craddock: What was the culture like? I imagine with so many friends of friends working at Interplay, the office must have been a very chill, relaxed kind of place.

Feargus Urquhart: Interplay’s culture was interesting. It’s funny: I was just at lunch with a friend of mine, and we were talking about it. I’m trying to think of how to explain it, and I guess it’s, “People just showed up and did stuff.” That sounds like a very bizarre way of saying it, but there were no [required working] hours, no schedules, no budgets. Just, “Hey, we’re doing stuff.” The industry collected a lot of very smart, quirky people. Some people worked from 10 at night until 7 in the morning, some people worked from 7 in the morning until 10 at night.

Sometimes my friends and I get together to talk about some of the characters who were in the industry at that time. That was the tail end of the hippy phase where there were whole groups of very odd people. Back then, there were no schools [for game development]. Everyone was just kind of figuring it out as they went along. That’s really how a lot of those early games got made. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. You just kind of got in there, you asked questions. It helped that a lot of us played board games and role-playing games.

David Craddock: Interplay sounds very similar to Silicon & Synapse and Condor, and I imagine most game studios of the time. The studio was kind of a home away from home for you guys.

Feargus Urquhart: It was just fun. You showed up when you showed up, you left when you left. If you needed a place to hang out on the weekends, you just went there. In many ways, it was a home away from home. I mean, to me, Brian Fargo was like, “Oh my god, that’s Brian Fargo!” I was there, actually, before I got a job. My friend was working on this game called Castles. I was there playing it one weekend, and Brian walked up and said, “Hey, what do you think?” I stumbled through telling him what I thought. I was like, “It’s Brian Fargo. He made Bard’s Tale. He did this. He did that.” Brian just kept that circus running. All these crazy people, marching them in the right direction.

Now, on the flip side, there’s an amazing amount of games and work that never actually got done. I look back on a lot of games and think, Wow, with just a modicum of planning or conversation, we could have made that even better. But back then, a game was made by one, two, three, maybe five people. A very small group. So it was very hard for the time to fall out of sync because it was the same five guys who probably went to lunch together every day, probably went to dinner together, probably drank at the same bar. For us, it was an Irish bar in Newport Beach every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

So, really, the best way to explain Interplay—and, I think, a lot of game companies from back then—was that there was no separation between your work life and your social life. And I think that’s what made it awesome. You enjoyed the people you worked with, even if they made you crazy. There was pressure to get stuff done, but it felt more like, “We’re all moving in a direction, and it will get done.”

David Craddock: We’ve seen the rise of indie gaming over the past several years, and they hearken back to that early-90s culture that sort of counteracts the corporate “cog in the machine” culture that exists at the big triple-A studios today. Do you think that culture can exist at bigger studios, or is it reserved for smaller operations operating out of garages and basements?

Feargus Urquhart: That’s actually our goal at Obsidian: We try to create that culture. The one big challenge, of course, is the magnitude of the money. That’s where we’re different from, say, Blizzard. Blizzard has to worry that they’re making money, but it’s not something where they have to deliver consistently every four to six weeks. We have milestones every four to six weeks that we have to turn in to our publisher. They look at it and decide if they’re going to pay us or not.

We work very hard to have that process work in a positive way, but it often works in a very negative way because of how a lot of development contracts are written. How they’re written is, a publisher can just say, “You didn’t do this one thing [so you don’t get paid].” We’ve had milestone payments worth a million dollars, and to say, “We’re not going to pay you the million dollars because of the one thing you didn’t do. You did 732 other things, but because of the 1 thing we didn’t like, we’re going to hold off paying the million dollars.”

What we try to do is fight against that. Not fight the publisher, because a lot of the guys we deal with, it’s not their fault. They’re just delivering messages from CEOs, and my job is not to be on the phone with CEOs every week; it’s a waste of their time and mine. So how we try to manage the company and bring back elements of the old days, is you hear about agile development, SCRUMM, and all that kind of stuff. Ultimately, there are a lot of good ideas as well as ones that haven’t been properly used. But I think the core thing that’s very helpful is taking large teams, breaking them into small teams, and making them goal oriented.

David Craddock: That’s something I’ve learned over the course of researching Stay Awhile and Listen: that loose, party-type of culture where everyone vacillates between work and play for 12 hours a day fades as you add more people to the team. Not because new recruits care less, but because smaller companies inherently have a different vibe than bigger ones, especially once the bigger ones start making money.

Feargus Urquhart: What happens on really big teams is, everything starts becoming about tasks. You break down the game into the 17,000 things that are in it, and people just start building those 17,000 things, whether those things fit together or not. So we try to break down these large teams into smaller teams where there may be some crossover, but not a ton. Then each of those teams have goals, and those goals feed into a larger goal of the project.

People feel like they can make their own decisions; in essence, they’re running their own little teams. It just happens to be part of a bigger team. That helps make [the culture] feel a little bit like it used to.

David Craddock: Going back to Interplay, how did Brian Fargo facilitate the culture at his company from your perspective as an employee? How did he enable you to do what he’d hired you to do?

Urquhart: Brian really wanted us to do our thing. He wanted us to make awesome games. The thing I can always appreciate about Brian was, there was a game we made at Interplay when I was running Black Isle Studios. That was Icewind Dale. I remember I was at Costco getting stuff for a party. I get this call on my cell, and it’s Brian. He got stuck about halfway through Icewind Dale. He said, “I can’t figure out this part.” I said, “Oh, yeah. There’s this lever, and you pull it, and you open this place. It’s not very obvious.” He said, “No, it’s not. You guys need to fix that.”

I think that’s a good example about Brian. I don’t know if he played every one of our games, but I knew he loved the games we made, and I could always depend on him to play those. The other thing Brian did a good job of was, if I needed to talk to Brian, I could talk to him. It wasn’t like, “Oh, he’s the CEO so he’s unavailable.” The attitude at Interplay changed, but this never did: the guys making the games are the most important people at the company, because that’s what we do.”

An example I use is, I was this piss-ant producer. I’d maybe been doing that for three months. We needed to submit the game, and back then, submitting games was a ridiculous process. But it was important because you couldn’t just upload your game through the Internet; you actually had to FedEx it. We needed to have all the FedEx packages done by 7pm and mailed to Japan. If it didn’t get to FedEx by 7, we missed a whole day. So I needed to get these packages delivered. There were people lined up at the copier, but I’d just go to the front of the line and say, “Excuse me. I need to get this printed off.”

I’d get nasty looks, but they would stop, I’d do my thing, and move on. They knew that if they didn’t let me do that, even though I was number 79 in the ranks of employees at the company, it was all about producers and game teams. When they needed things, they got the benefit of the doubt. They had the power. I certainly couldn’t do that every day of the week, but when I needed to, I could. You knew Brian had your back on that stuff. That was what was important to me. It really created a different kind of attitude at the company.

David Craddock: Could you tell me more about the role of a producer? I think that’s a position that’s not understood by many on the outside looking into the industry. Programmers and artists have obvious duties, but what exactly did a producer at Interplay do?

Feargus Urquhart: One of my friends got me a job at Interplay as a tester when I was away from college. I then got three or four of my friends jobs as well. When a full-time producer position opened up, they let me know, and I got that. They were producers by that time, and I kind of knew what they did, but a lead tester back then? Nowadays, we’d consider them a producer because of all the stuff they do. You didn’t just test the game. You interacted with the developer, you did some design, you just did a ton of stuff.

So I became a producer, and early on, I don’t want to call that position a glorified QA tester, but you just did everything you needed to get things done. Initially I was an external producer; I didn’t have a team internally that I was working with. So I learned that whole part of the business, and it might sound silly, but one of my jobs was to burn EPROMs. No one probably knows what that is anymore, but the original cartridges you used to test games were actually little circuit boards. You had this chip burner hooked up to your PC, and you’d burn the ROM of the game onto the EPROM, then plug those into the cartridges and test them.

It was an involved process. When you had to make a game to be reviewed, you couldn’t just burn DVDs. You had to send these cartridges. So we’d have to send maybe 50 copies out for review. That meant I had to burn 50 of those cartridges, make sure they all worked. I would also get recruited to do that sort of stuff for the internal teams. I had to put a database of all the developers, I built desks, I got lunch. You just did a ton of stuff. That changed when I became an internal producer. I had a team, so I was more of a project manager: ran the team, and back then, producers did a lot of design.

For instance, the first game I worked on with BioWare was called Shattered Steel. Most of the voiceovers for the script I wrote myself. It’s less that way nowadays, but back then, producers filled in all the holes.

David Craddock: You’ve seen the industry change in many ways—some for the better, others for the worst. What do you miss from your earlier days?

Feargus Urquhart: My perspective is skewed because I have the joy of running an independent developer. This will sound like a strange thing to say, but back then, there was no real worry about failure, and there was no real worry about, “Are we doing the right thing?” Nobody worried about how many people might fiddle with what you do. Nowadays, games cost so much money, and people don’t just want their hands in it. Not just to guide it, but so they can say they had their fingers in it. It feels like, particularly if you’re project management, you put so much more time into stuff that is not the game. Back when I was a producer, a much larger percentage of my time went into the actual game.

Back then, most games made money. Maybe not a ton of money, but they did make money. Nowadays there are a lot of games that don’t make money. Everybody’s worried about failure. This is a stupid analogy I sometimes say, but it’s very interesting when you’re first working with a publisher because early on, you’re patting each other on the back, having beers, saying how awesome this is going to be. Then, the minute you [as the developer] sign the contract, often the publisher goes into a risk mode. “How do we cover our risks?”

And the relationship suddenly changes. It changes to “How do we not lose money?” from “How do we make more money?” It’s about how do we not lose money. And it’s not that I’m complaining. I’m sure it’s very similar for a lot of industries. The money gets bigger, things happen, and you figure out how to deal with them. [Working in sales] has always been a good example. The sales force has to project how many units they think they can sell. That’s what then determines, “Does it make sense to spend this much on the game, and that much on marketing?”

Well, the sales force is not incentivized to give an optimistic number because someone will get in trouble if they don’t sell that many units. Also, their bonuses are based upon doing a large percentage of what they estimated, so they want to be careful about the numbers they give. But, low numbers can reduce the money you can get to make and market the game. Now you’re not spending as much, but that’s actually hurting the potential of the game. It’s a weird cycle. A lot of it is learning to manage it and talking to the sales guys, listening to what they want. That was just not something we ever thought of doing 20 years ago.

Bonus Round 6: Interview with Scott Coleman and Jay Cotton, Creators of Kali

My first experience with multiplayer gaming on the PC was a disaster. Over three hours, I struggled and failed to dial into a friend’s computer for a round of deathmatch in Doom II. From our separate zip codes, we followed the game’s command-line-driven instructions, crossed our fingers as our modems screeched at each other… and then dropped out, leaving us blinking at blank monitors instead of racing down corridors and firing rockets.

In 1995, programmer Scott Coleman and fellow Doom fanatic Jay Cotton solved my and legions of other PC gamers’ problems when they released Kali, a program that tricked computers into thinking they were plugged into a local network but instead whisked them into an Internet arena to face opponents from all around the world. Today, online gaming is considered a given on PCs and consoles alike. Back in the mid-90s, it was a novelty.

Kali’s ability to connect friends and complete strangers ushered in a wave of online gaming services that included Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net (which you can read about in chapter 12 of Stay Awhile and Listen). I caught up with Scott and Jay to learn the origin of Kali, how the program works its magic, as well as iDOOM, Kali’s predecessor.

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David Craddock: How did you discover games and programming?

Jay Cotton: For me, video gaming started with an ancient Pong game my great uncle had back in the 70s. I don’t recall which make it was (Magnavox or Atari), but I was instantly hooked and over the years, with very little access to any console gaming device, I realized the primary purpose of home PCs was gaming, even if many others justified their purchases for other reasons. The VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were amazing machines and exactly what I needed to start experimenting during college.

Arcade games, especially Pac-Man, inspired me to learn programming as a means to understanding how these games worked. I’ve never really written any games myself except for a text-graphics version of Pac-Man on an old Commodore Pet computer during high school (yes…that’s all we had to work with). Armed with the “peek” and “poke” commands, I soon learned how easy it was to crash a PC and also how to make it do more than just output text.

Scott Coleman: Like most kids, I was addicted to playing computer games, dating back to the Magnavox Odyssey video game that you hooked up to your TV. Once I learned programming in high school, I got a computer of my own (an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P) and wrote my first game: the player would drive around in a little tank and attempt to shoot a buffalo, which would randomly appear and disappear on the screen. Later, I moved on to a TRS-80 and an Atari 400, which was an awesome game machine for its day.

During those days, I spent far more time playing games than writing them, however. While my interest in writing software was probably due in part to my interest in games, but there was more to it than that. Programming itself held (and continues to hold) its own fascination for me. It was only later, after Doom was released and I had been playing it a while, that I started writing game-related software again.

David Craddock: Before Kali, I discovered in my research that you first teamed up to write a program called iDOOM that allowed players to take Doom online. How did you discover Doom?

Jay Cotton: I discovered Doom as a result of a memo sent around by campus networking personnel at work [University of Georgia] regarding problems with Doom and its all-broadcast networking code. The entire UGA campus was “flat” (no sub-nets, and no internal routing or even switching) and just a few people playing Doom were bringing down the entire campus network. I was working at UGA’s vet school at the time doing some programming and network setup.

When I downloaded the game to investigate, I had found that the problem was already resolved. An update to the game fixed the code to use unicast IPX [network protocol that transmits data between computers connected to a network] instead of broadcast. However, it was too late. I was already setup to test it and managed to get “help” with my testing from co-workers. It was around this time we setup a packet sniffer, and I became fascinated by how the networking code worked and what exactly was changed to fix the problem.

Scott Coleman: I have always loved the idea of multi-player, multi-machine games, but they were a rarity when I was growing up. Those that did exist were usually turn-based games like Chess, not fast action “twitch” games. I had also played modem games like Knights of the Sky and Modem Wars, but these were limited by the bandwidth available on a modem and were not very engaging for me.

Then I read about Doom on USENET in the fall/winter of 1993, just before the first beta came out. Doom with its IPX network multi-player mode promised to be a quantum leap forward; I couldn’t wait to play it! I downloaded it and was fragging my office mates on the day of its release.

David Craddock: Can you share some anecdotes from your early days playing Doom?

Jay Cotton: I remember reading about “circle-strafing” and the need for a custom keyboard-mouse configuration. Re-learning the game using the mouse and keyboard was quite a challenge at the beginning, but paid off handsomely. Strafe-running and wall-running were tricks to outrun opponents. After playing against a keyboard-only opponent, and being accused of cheating many times, I always ended up teaching these techniques to other players, so they would provide a better challenge the next time we played.

It [multiplayer Doom sessions] was all LAN-playing at work initially. However, there weren’t many people willing to play and no one enthusiastic enough to provide any real competition.

Scott Coleman: I started out as a “keyboard” Doom player, using the arrow keys on the keyboard to turn left and right. One of the guys in my office was a big Wolfenstein 3D player, and he used a mouse to play; he encouraged me to play Doom using the mouse. That was a major turning point (pun intended) for me. I was a pretty good player before that, but once I got the hang of using the mouse, I became unbeatable. It got to the point where none of my office mates would play against me anymore. I was the biggest fish in my little office pond.

My favorite kind of map is one that is designed specifically for a fast-action deathmatch with continuous fragging. What might be interesting for a single-player game is probably the last thing you want for deathmatch. Who wants a huge, sprawling map where you spend 20 minutes just trying to find somebody to kill? You also want to situate the respawn points such that other players cannot simply camp out near the respawn points and wait for players to respawn; nothing sucks more to have a rocket explode in your face before you’ve even fully materialized.

And the exit switch should require cooperation from at least two players in order to activate, so that no one can accidentally end the level early. Once level- editing tools like DEU [Doom Editing Utility] became available, people came up with some really fantastic deathmatch WADs [maps]. A couple I particularly remember were called “NIN” and “Danzig.”

The office where I worked held an annual programming contest. My entry for 1994 was a deathmatch WAD laid out like my office area. I took photographs of the actual doors and walls and used them as wall textures; I recorded actual voices and sounds and used them as sound effects. The various monsters in the game became my co-workers. Although none of this was technically “programming,” I won the contest anyway.

David Craddock: What was your first experience playing Doom online?

Jay Cotton: There was a program called TCPSETUP written by Jake Page that replaced the original ipxsetup [program] from the game. Using this small program, and knowing the IP numbers of the other players, you could, theoretically, play Doom over the Internet. You had to find other players via IRC [Internet Relay Chat].

Scott Coleman: I started hanging out in the #doom channel on IRC. Some of the guys there were using a program called TCPSETUP to play Doom over the Internet, so I gave it a try. The program was a great idea, but the implementation lacked polish and stability. My first few attempts at using it were very frustrating, but I kept at it and eventually figured out ways to actually play a complete game every now and then.

David Craddock: Did you two meet through playing Doom, then?

Scott Coleman: I met Jay in the IRC #doom channel. He was another Doom addict like me, and he was the first person I’d ever met who could beat me consistently.

Jay Cotton: Scott Coleman was one of the other Doom players trying to setup and play games using TCPSETUP. We both experienced the same problems and frustrations.

David Craddock: As the author of TCPSETUP, was Jake Page involved in writing iDOOM?

Scott Coleman: Jake shared his source code for TCPSETUP with me. After using it awhile and identifying its limitations, I sent him a list of suggested improvements, but he never responded. So, using his source code as a guide, I wrote iDOOM. iDOOM was a ground-up, clean-sheet-of-paper design that incorporated all of the lessons we’d learned from our TCPSETUP experiences.

David Craddock: What areas of TCPSETUP did you feel needed improvement?

Scott Coleman: For one thing, it was extremely delicate. If your timing was even just a bit off during the initial synchronization phase, the game would bomb out before it even began. The command line required to run it was cumbersome, requiring you to determine and then type in by hand the IP addresses of up to three other players in a particular order; if one of the players in the game got the command line wrong, it wouldn’t work.

It also required an external communication mechanism, such as IRC, to find other players and coordinate the games. To say that TCPSETUP was not user-friendly is a gross understatement.

David Craddock: Was iDOOM meant to support games besides Doom? Could it?

Jay Cotton: We had no other plans for iDOOM other than to replace/enhance TCPSETUP and provide an easier means to play Doom. I just wanted to be able to turn on my PC at work and find an opponent easily and get started playing as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Scott Coleman: iDOOM uses the Doom network driver abstraction, so it can only work with games that use that mechanism. Doom, Doom II, and derivatives like Heretic and Hexen are the only games you can play using this type of driver. After the success of Doom, other multi-player LAN games, such as Descent, started to come out, and we wanted to play them over the Internet also. That’s why I started working on Kali.

David Craddock: What was the process of testing iDOOM?

Jay Cotton: I had two DOS computers at my desk, as well as a packet sniffer so I was able to test launches of the game and see where the communications broke down when things failed. However, most of the testing was more along the lines of “Hey guys! Who wants to help test the new iDOOM?” via IRC.

David Craddock: What was the most difficult feature to get working in iDOOM?

Scott Coleman: Getting the connectivity solid and stable took some doing, mostly because I knew nothing about network programming when I started and had to teach myself. Being able to see how TCPSETUP did it was a major kick-start.

Jay Cotton: Coordinating a launch was the most difficult aspect. Once iDOOM launched the game, you had to hope all of the other clients also launched successfully at the same time. If anything went wrong, the launching process would hang, and not knowing if this was caused by a slow computer or a failed launch would mean waiting a couple of minutes before quitting and trying again.

David Craddock: What was the distribution of work between you both on Kali?

Jay Cotton: Having never written more than schoolwork code in C, Scott was responsible for all of the coding. I provided ideas and had a better test environment at my office so I was able to help debug problems.

Scott Coleman: For iDOOM and iFrag [an expanded version of iDOOM that supported other first-person shooters, released in advance of Kali], I wrote the code, and Jay helped me test and offered suggestions. For Kali, he contributed some code, as well. He liked coding in assembly language, and we incorporated some of his assembly language routines into Kali.

I’ve never actually met Jay face-to-face. Jay worked at the University of Georgia, and I worked at the University of Illinois. Our entire collaboration was done via the Internet. Back in those days cable modems didn’t exist, and if you had Internet access at all is was via a dialup modem to a Unix shell account, or maybe via SLIP [Serial Line Internet/Interface Protocol] if you were a real power user. If it weren’t for the fact that we both worked at major universities with great Internet connectivity, none of this would have ever happened. We were in the right place at the right time.

David Craddock: In my research, I came across a brief history of Kali that Jay wrote. He mentioned a project called MILK and said you both felt pressure to get your program done before MILK. What was MILK?

Scott Coleman: MILK was something similar to Kali that another group had announced they were working on. Jay may have felt pressure to be first, but I wasn’t really worried. I was pretty confident that Kali would blow away whatever anyone else came up with. I don’t recall if the MILK project ever actually released anything.

David Craddock: Where did the name “Kali” come from?

Scott Coleman: My girlfriend (now wife) suggested the name. She grew up in India and had been exposed to Hindu theology, which has dozens of gods and goddesses. The Kali avatar is usually depicted with swords in her hands and a necklace of skulls from those she has killed, which seemed appropriate for a Deathmatch game. Jay liked the name and we went with it.

David Craddock: What was Kali’s development schedule like?

Scott Coleman: I had a full-time job, so I worked on Kali during the evenings and on weekends (in between Doom games, of course). Kali was straightforward to implement once I understood how an IPX network driver functions. Using a book called Programmer’s Guide to Netware by Charles Rose as a reference, along with a “spy” program to determine empirically which IPX functions were being used, I laid out the skeleton for Kali in a day or so.

Most of the rest of the development time was spend doing exhaustive testing with games like Descent and Duke Nukem 3D to make sure Kali would emulate the real IPX driver correctly.

Jay Cotton: Kali’s development went on for several years, non-stop. Although we may have released the first version rather quickly, it was a rather simplistic solution and would require months of further work before it became a success outside of the original iFrag community. I probably spent 12 hours a day working on Kali (or “testing” Kali by playing games). I did this while still working a full-time job. This work-plus-play continued for years. My goal was always to get Kali working well enough to allow me to play more. Unfortunately, I was spending more time providing customer support than doing development or playing games.

Setting up an Internet connection was new for most of our players. We had to recommend ISPs and modems and provide support for every aspect of their Internet setup just to get them to the point where they could install and run Kali.

David Craddock: How did you decide to make Kali a commercial program rather than a freely distributed one like iDOOM and iFrag?

Jay Cotton: I’m pretty sure it was Scott’s suggestion to make money on Kali, but neither of us were sure it would actually work. I set up a P.O. Box, and with the help of my wife, set up a business, but before we even got started, Scott received a job offer and left me to it.

Scott Coleman: Commercialization was entirely Jay’s idea. He wanted to capitalize on the boom in Internet gaming that was just around the corner, and I agreed. Left to myself, I probably would have released Kali for free, just as I did with iFrag, but I figured what the heck, maybe it will earn me a few extra bucks.

David Craddock: I remember downloading Kali, playing through the time limit imposed by the demo, and then immediately shelling out the $20 for unlimited usage. How did you arrive at that particular model?

Jay Cotton: There were quite a few people balking at the idea of paying for something that had been free up until this time. However, a few iFrag users sent their money before we even released the first version of Kali stating that they felt they already owed us for the work we had done on iDOOM and iFrag. Setting the time limit would allow people to play short games for free, and hopefully they’d want to play more and be willing to pay.

Scott Coleman: Limiting the program in some way in order to encourage users to register was an established technique. Doom itself [included] only one set of levels in the shareware version; to get the other two, you had to pay the registration fee. We figured putting in a time limit would enable people to verify that the program would work for them before they forked over their cash, and the $20 fee seemed like a reasonable price.

David Craddock: Were you tempted to charge a subscription?

Jay Cotton: It was always my belief that Kali would continue to be successful as long as I never got greedy. I wanted everyone to be so happy with their purchase that they would never hesitate to recommend it to a friend and never charge more than what someone would be readily willing to pay. It also became a selling point that Kali only charged a one-time fee with free upgrades forever. People really liked this, and it prevented newcomers (TEN, Heat, MPlayer, etc.) from being able to charge enough to pay for their expensive overheads.

Kali was able to compete with TEN, MPlayer and Heat because it already had a large established user base (more users equals more fun) and because it was much, much cheaper. These new services wanted to charge a subscription fee, but didn’t provide enough added benefit to justify the added expense.

David Craddock: How exactly does Kali fool my computer into thinking it’s on a local network when I’m actually going online and gaming with people all over the world?

Jay Cotton: Kali was/is at its core, a local network emulator. Network-capable applications, like games, request access to the local network from the operating system (DOS or Windows in different manners). With Kali running, these requests are intercepted. For each request to send data, query the network, or receive data, Kali would provide a “fake” response so the games would continue to work, unaware that these requests were doing extra work to send and receive this data across the Internet.

Scott Coleman: Because Kali looks and behaves exactly the same as the real network driver, the application has no idea that the packets it is sending are actually being routed over the Internet instead of the LAN.

David Craddock: What features gave you the most trouble, either in writing the code or testing it?

Jay Cotton: Providing IPX emulation for DOS applications running in Windows required something called a VxD: a virtual device driver. The tools needed to write these drivers and the coordination needed to communicate between the driver and the main application necessitated the hiring of new talent. Brian Hayes came on board at this time and his contribution made Kali95 possible. At the time, I knew nothing of Windows and without the help of Brian and another employee, a long-time friend Vance Kessler, I wouldn’t have been able to create Kali95.

Scott Coleman: Probably the chat functions. Those took a while to polish and make user-friendly.

David Craddock: What was the process of adding support for new games to Kali? Was it just, “This game supports IPX, so let’s add it”? Or were you a bit choosier?

Jay Cotton: We weren’t choosy at all! If anyone reported a game worked on Kali, we added it to the list. However, we later had to remove some games from the list because they turned out not to work well enough. We did test many of the games, and many developers sent pre-releases of games to us to make sure we would be able to provide support.

David Craddock: I have to tell you, using Kali for the first time was like magic. I remember telling it to search my hard drive for compatible games and watching the list grow: Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, WarCraft II, Diablo, Rise of the Triad, Command & Conquer… Then jumping into a game and playing with other people. It blew my 14-year-old mind. Was using your technology as exciting for you? I know that sometimes the wizard behind the curtain is less awed by results since, of course, they know how all the moving parts click together.

Jay Cotton: I was just as excited! Features like you mention here, automatically finding games, were being added as fast as we could write them. There was so much potential, and without any road map to follow, we’d show up to work on any random day with new ideas and often have them out in beta before the end of the day!

Scott Coleman: The magic for me was twofold: While Kali and iFrag were primarily a means for me to find and frag other players, doing something really cool that nobody else had done before was extremely gratifying.

David Craddock: When I started playing PC games, it seemed like everyone I knew used Kali. How long did Kali take to become popular?

Scott Coleman: It was popular immediately. Most of the people who had been playing Doom with us on iFrag wanted to use Kali, as well. It snowballed from there as other gamers from outside the iFrag community heard about it.

Jay Cotton: Kali usage grew exponentially for the first 3 years. Because of the very low cost to operate Kali, it was making money after the first week of going live. In only a few months, I was able to quit my old job and started working on Kali full time. Within a year, we had thousands of users on Kali every day.

David Craddock: I didn’t start using the service until Kali95 and understand the DOS version was difficult to use at first. One thing I loved was the simplicity of Kali’s user interface in Windows 95. How important was accessibility and UI as the service expanded?

Jay Cotton: Supporting the DOS version of Kali used up nearly all of my time. I would sometimes answer as many as a dozen emails, or spend an hour in chat helping individual users get their Internet connection setup and Kali working. The process was daunting, with different setups needed for every ISP [Internet Service Provider] and modem or Ethernet card.

Kali95 eliminated over half of the setup support needed simply because Windows 95 came with wizards and tools to help simplify the Internet connection. Windows 95 didn’t solve all of our problems, but more and more users were able to download Kali95 and get started without any technical knowledge, and this greatly increased the number of people willing and able to use Kali.

David Craddock: Blizzard included a file with WarCraft II that improved the game’s compatibility with Kali. Did you hear from Blizzard during War2’s development? Were they fans of Kali and your work?

Jay Cotton: I talked to a few Blizzard employees over the years and from them learned that many of the people working at Blizzard were huge fans of Kali. For a couple of years, WarCraft II was by far Kali’s most popular game, and this was possible because of performance tweaks made by Blizzard to improve [the game’s networking performance] over Kali.

David Craddock: Blizzard’s Battle.net gave rise to free online services packaged in with games. How did you view the arrival of Battle.net and other free-to-play services?

Jay Cotton: Battle.net was inevitable and predictable and definitely the beginning of the end for Kali. There were a few other games to include Internet support before Battle.net, but Battle.net was different in that it was a closed world. You couldn’t join a Battle.net game from the outside (e.g. from Kali). This forced users to choose where to play. Eventually, when it became harder and slower to add support to new versions of Diablo and StarCraft, users eventually migrated to Battle.net. Although we supported many other games, the titles produced by Blizzard accounted for 80-90% of Kali usage.

David Craddock: Scott, what made you decide to leave Kali Inc.?

Scott Coleman: The popularity of iFrag and Kali caught the attention of the folks at Interplay Productions, the publisher of Descent, and they offered me a job in California. I was faced with a choice: accept the job offer from Interplay, or move to Georgia to continue working on Kali with Jay.

Working for an established company seemed like a safer bet at the time, so I handed Kali off to Jay and moved to California. But that’s another chapter…

David Craddock: Jay, what is your involvement with Kali today?

Jay Cotton: I pay for a virtual server (it moves from time to time) to run the Kali website, tracker, and now defunct master server. I make just enough money on website ads to pay for the server. Kali is now free to play. I keep it running just out of habit.

Bonus Round 7: Interview with Efraim Wyeth and Mike Sigal, Founders of FM Waves

Most of my interviews with FM Waves co-founders Mike Sigal and Efraim “Ef” Wyeth covered their time working with Dave Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer. As we talked, I also found their goals in creating a clip art company fascinating and decided to flesh out more of their history before Dave, Max, and Erich arrived.

***

David Craddock: How did you two meet?

Ef Wyeth: We took a French class together, and he let me ride his motorcycle. That’s all you need to know to build a lifelong friendship. Mike was the son of a rocket scientist, and he was my first computer teacher as well.

Mike Sigal: I was a Mac consultant amongst other things while I was going through school, and Ef had the idea of putting together a catalog of uniquely San Francisco products that would be distributed through local hotels, including his dad’s hotel. He wanted to use clip art to develop that catalog, so he came to me and said, “Where can we get clip art?”

We started looking around the market, found nothing, so between his idea and my computer skills, such as they were, we decided to make a clip art company. We saw desktop publishing exploding around us, so we decided to create imagery that was more interesting and topical than what was available on the market.

David Craddock: I’ve liked your company’s name since Dave Brevik and the Schaefers first mentioned it years ago in our interviews: “FM Waves.” How did you come up with the name?

Mike Sigal: FM Waves: “Ef” and Mike, the wave of the future. We figured “Waves” was sufficiently interesting sounding.

David Craddock: Creating a clip art company because you couldn’t find any clip art to use makes sense to me. Did you have a particular market space in mind that you wanted to fill? Like, “Oh, hey, how about clip art showing computers and techy things?”

Ef Wyeth: It [creating clip art] was more of a political statement than it was a business decision. We both believed in the concept of desktop publishing, and we saw that most of the clip art that was available for applications was all from the ’50s and ’60s: every doctor was male and white; every nurse was female and white. Everything was just prototypically conservative and based on assumptions from generations prior.

We thought it’d be fun to mix things up a little bit and make things that weren’t quite so typical. We saw a need for resources for people who had the tools, but weren’t necessarily creative artists themselves. We thought, well, let’s start with clip art. What we really wanted to do was make animations as well. We were just getting out of college, so that’s what we started.

Mike Sigal: We did a lot of themes. To a degree, we were driven a little bit by the kinds of artists we managed to find. I remember we had a line of fantasy clip art, which we thought would be appropriate for a lot of the computer/gaming geeks, that was done by an artist name Chris Lee, who’s now a pretty successful artist. We had a catalog of fashion images.

Probably one of our most innovative projects was we did a subscription service called the Global News Network, and that produced topical news images. I remember we did all kinds of political cartoons around the first Iraq war, the environment, and pretty much whatever you can imagine a couple of kids from Berkeley would come up with.

One of the libraries I still see images from to this day was an anthropomorphic Mac, the original Mac, that had arms and a face doing all kinds of different activities. I still see those on the market to this day.

David Craddock: Ef, did your interest in creating animations ever extend beyond the Gordo 106 game FM Waves made for the Atari Lynx?

Ef Wyeth: There were a few other animation-related projects. One time, we were working on 3D modeling and wanted to come out with animated clips. There was also a company that had a product called Talking Moose. It was a series of characters that appeared in screensavers and dialog boxes. They wanted us to take their still characters and turn them into full animations. At that time, everybody was looking for a way to make the experience of interacting with the computer more animated.

It was just a lot of guesswork. Basically, everything that came out in that regard either never became a product, or had a ridiculous interface design like Microsoft’s Bob. I think that lasted about a day and a half.

David Craddock: Did your shared interest in following and commenting on the politics of the time extend beyond FM Waves’ clip art offerings?

Mike Sigal: We just didn’t want to make a bunch of bubble wrap, so we picked up recycled papers to avoid plastic altogether. We were surprised that people paid more attention to [our “green” packaging] than the product itself.

We thought that clip art should be available to people who were making timely publications. We came up with this subscription where each month we would have political cartoons. We were going to have this thing we called GNN, Global News Network, and that would provide all sorts of [art] for people who were putting things together that were [topical] in nature. People would subscribe, and we’d send out a CD. That was about six or seven months before we closed down the company.

David Craddock: Ef, we know FM Waves was located in the same building as your dad’s hotel and deli businesses. Did you get to interact with your dad often?

Ef Wyeth: My dad fed us well. One distinct advantage we had as a start-up was, my father had a restaurant, and we holed ourselves up in one of the empty office spaces in the back of the building. He kept all of us well-fed, so we weren’t starving while we were trying to start up. I think that was Max and Erich’s favorite part of the job. It was a classic Jewish deli, big plates full of meat.

David Craddock: One of my favorite stories that you, Dave Brevik, and the Schaefers all shared was gathering around Dave’s computer and watching Gordo walk for the first time in Gordo 106. It just seemed so evocative of that era: building something from scratch and sharing in the excitement when your baby takes its first steps. What are some of your favorite memories from FM Waves?

Ef Wyeth: Between Max, and Erich, and a lady named Karen, who was very close friends with Max, Erich, Mike, and me, [FM Waves] was a dorm room mentality. We really wanted to make it work. We put in the hours; there was a lot of pizza and hotel sodas. I remember that Karen and I went on a flight to some trade show. We hit some serious turbulence, and Karen had a great fear of flying. She reached across the aisle and dug her fingernails into my arm, and I had to act all calm.

I just remember thinking, Oh, God; the best thing for this company would be if this plane crashed. We’d become legends. Because we were really close to finishing the game [Gordo 106] at that point. Then I decided that I didn’t want the plane to go down.

Mike Sigal: That first day when you’re getting people comfortable, taking the group out to lunch, there’s this community building. That’s probably the thing that sticks with me the most. Career-wise I ended up as a biz-dev guy, for lack of a better term. I do deals. Early in FM Waves’ life, we did a lot of desktop publishing contract work. We would go and do pitches for that work, so getting those deals done was something I enjoyed a lot.

When you walk out of a meeting and you know you just nailed it? Then you go back to the office bouncing off the walls, and everyone else is bouncing around with you? Celebrating the little wins that feel like big wins because you’re starting from scratch—that’s probably the thing for me.

Bibliography

The following books and materials aided me in my research.

Kushner, David. Masters of Doom. New York: Random House, Inc., 2003.

Waters, John K. Diablo Official Strategy Guide. California: Prima Publishing, 1997.

Walker, Mark. Diablo: Battle.net and Advanced Strategies. California: Prima Publishing, 1997.

Kent, Steve. The Ultimate History of Video Games. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Donovan, Tristan. Replay: The History of Video Games. Great Britain: Yellow Ant, 2010.

Barton, Matt, and Bill Loguidice. Vintage Games. Massachusetts: Focal Press, 2009.

“The Making of… Dune II.” Future Publishing Limited. 10 February 2013. http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-dune-ii/.

“A History of Real-Time Strategy Games.” GameSpot.com. 3 June 2013. http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/real_time/p2_01.html.

Fahs, Travis. “IGN Presents the History of WarCraft.” IGN Entertainment, Inc. 18 August 2009. http://m.ign.com/articles/2009/08/18/ign-presents-the-history-of-warcraft.

Hoeger, Justin. “Retronauts Presents: Blizzard vs. Westwood.” 1UP. 6 May 2008. http://www.1up.com/do/minisite?cId=3167456.

“Unsung Heroes.” GameSpot. 3 June 2013. http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/unsung_heroes/sec2_01.html.

Kosak, Dave. “Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games of All-Time.” IGN Entertainment, Inc. 4 February 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20100616031405/http://archive.gamespy.com/top10/february04/rts.

Leiner, Barry M., and Cerf, Vinton G. “Brief History of the Internet.” Internet Society. Accessed January 2013. http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet.

“The History of TSR.” Wizards of the Coast. 2003. http://www.wizards.com/dnd/dndarchives_history.asp.

Rausch, Allen. “Magic and Memories: The Complete History of Dungeons & Dragons.” Gamespy. 16 August 2004. http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538262p1.html.

Credits

(In order of appearance)

Note that the titles following each Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment developer reflect that person’s primary responsibilities. At the two Blizzards, all developers were encouraged to contribute ideas for design, monsters, weapons, gameplay systems, and any other facet of a game’s development. Thus, all developers held the title of “designer” in addition to their primary title.

Johnson, Kelly: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Schaefer, Max: Artist, co-founder of Condor/Blizzard North.

Schaefer, Erich: Artist, co-founder of Condor/Blizzard North.

Root, Chris: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Brevik, David: Programmer, co-founder of Condor/Blizzard North.

Brevik, “Pete” Peter: Programmer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Sigal, Mike: Co-founder of FM Waves/Tenth Planet.

Wyeth, “Ef” Efraim: Co-founder of FM Waves/Tenth Planet.

Householder, Matt: Producer at Blizzard North.

Okamura, Michio: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Uelmen, Matt: Composer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Siller, David: Publishing director at Sunsoft.

Seis, “Rick” Richard: Programmer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Byrne, Tom: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Adham, Allen: Programmer, co-founder of Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Wyatt, “Pat” Patrick: Programmer, vice president of research and development at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Fargo, Brian: Founder of Interplay Productions.

Morhaime, “Mike” Michael: Programmer, co-founder of Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Pearce, Frank: Programmer at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Barton, Paul: Artist at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Rose, “Stu” Stuart: Artist at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Millar, Ron: Artist and designer at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Urquhart, Feargus: Producer at Interplay Productions.

Hall, Joeyray: Artist at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Davidson, “Bob” Robert: Co-founder of Davidson & Associates, Inc.

Didier, “Sammy” Samwise: Artist at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Fitch, Bob: Programmer at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

McReynolds, Jesse: at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Roper, Bill: Producer at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Williams, “Kenny” Kenneth: Business director at Condor/Blizzard North.

Sexton, Eric: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Van der wel, Robin: Programmer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Piltin, Brian: Programmer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Colenzo, Karin: Office manager at Condor/Blizzard North.

Stinnett, Duane: Artist at Silicon & Synapse/Blizzard Entertainment.

Thavirat, Justin: Artist at Blizzard Entertainment.

Tougas, “Patty” Patrick: Artist at Condor/Blizzard North.

Gartner, Doron: Programmer at Condor/Blizzard North.

Strain, Jeff: Programmer at Blizzard Entertainment.

O’Brien, “Mike” Michael: Programmer at Blizzard Entertainment.

Sutherland, Mark: Artist at Blizzard North.

Morin, Jonathan: Programmer at Blizzard North.

Hedlund, Stieg: Designer at Blizzard North.

Cotton, Jay: Co-creator of Kali.

Coleman, Scott: Co-creator of Kali.

Notes and Citations

“Stay awhile and listen,” indeed. From 2009 through 2013, I conducted hundreds of sit-down interviews, phone and Skype conversations, email exchanges, and instant messages with developers who had worked at Blizzard North or Blizzard Entertainment, as well as those who had key dealings with the “two Blizzards.” Each individual sifted patiently through decades of memories to unearth what probably seemed like minor details. “You’ll have to give me a minute, this all happened so long ago” could serve as a suitable subtitle for this book.

In some cases, representatives from Blizzard North declined to be interviewed, or could not be reached. I did my best to call attention to those individuals and their contributions in the text. Additionally, I contacted Blizzard Entertainment on four occasions to request participation from individuals who remain at the company as of this printing. Blizzard declined interviews, but wished me well. To write their history, I consulted newspaper articles and Internet articles, and contacted individuals who had held key positions at Blizzard during their tenures. All text pulled from those sources belongs to their original authors and publishers, who receive full credit below.

After transcribing my interviews, I organized my transcripts and information gathered during research into a database. Using my database, I reconstructed events as faithfully and accurately as possible into a narrative framework tied together using quotes from my interviews.

The individuals I interviewed for this first book of Stay Awhile and Listen are, in no particular order: David Brevik, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, Eric Sexton, Rick Seis, Michio Okamura, Kelly Johnson, Paul Barton, Peter Brevik, Karin Seis (née Colenzo), Brian Fargo, Stieg Hedlund, Matt Householder, Jonathan Morin, Brian Piltin, Chris Root, Stu Rose, Mike Sigal, David Siller, Duane Stinnett, Jeff Strain, Patrick Tougas, Matt Uelmen, Feargus Urquhart, Robin van der Wel, Ken Williams, Patrick “Pat” Wyatt, Ef Wyeth, Scott Coleman, and Jay Cotton.

What follows is a list of materials used to gather and verify information from each chapter. Refer to the bibliography for other sources utilized during the writing of this book.

Prologue

* A lot of the fun of Diablo: Interview with Kelly Johnson. All quotes from Kelly Johnson come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

* What would happen was, you were in the cave levels: Interview with Max Schaefer. All quotes from Max Schaefer come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

* Almost all of us fell in love with the corpse run: Interview with Erich Schaefer. All quotes from Erich Schaefer come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

* One night, I actually logged in with Erich’s character: Interview with Chris Root. All quotes from Chris Root come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* We were psyched: Interview with David Brevik. All quotes from David Brevik come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

Chapter 1

* No hard drive, 64K of RAM: “Apple II Plus.” Vectronic’s Apple World. Accessed June 2013. http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/profiles/49.html.

* The sleek new machine also came outfitted with a modem: “Modems.” Apple II History. Accessed January 2013. http://apple2history.org/history/ah13/#09.

Chapter 2

* this weird dedicated console Pong game: Klooster, Erik. “Pong Consoles - Remember Them?” Computer Museum. Accessed January 2013. http://computermuseum.50megs.com/collectionpong.htm.

* Max was introduced to us: Interview with Mike Sigal. All quotes from Mike Sigal come from interviews conducted during 2012-2013.

* a scary alley in San Francisco called Derby Alley: Textfiles.com. http://cd.textfiles.com/dtpfmwaves/READ_ME.T*T. I included this link to an FM Waves order form to preserve a piece of the company’s history, rather than out of a need to verify any particular information cited in the book.

* I had an opportunity to have a discussion: Interview with Ef Wyeth. All quotes from Ef Wyeth come from interviews conducted during 2013.

Chapter 3

* publisher poured $10 million into a marketing campaign: Kent, Steven. The Ultimate History of Video Games, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

* Acclaim sold more than 6.5 million cartridges: Ibid.

* even before it released in 1992: Tenth Planet. Gordo 106: The Mutated Lab Monkey title screen. Accessed February 2013. http://www.mobygames.com/game/lynx/gordo-106/screenshots/gameShotId,413672/. Numerous websites listed the game’s release date as 1991, while others stated 1993.

* as VP of Development at DTMC: Interview with Matt Householder. All quotes from Matt Householder come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

Chapter 4

* I sat in the front room: Interview with Michio Okamura. All quotes from Michio Okamura come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

* Our big intra-office social events: Interview with Matt Uelmen. All quotes from Matt Uelmen come from interviews conducted during 2009-2013.

* Dave approached me and said, “I’m not going to Austin.”: Interview with David Siller. All quotes from David Siller come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* Dark Dreams, the fifth volume of Arduin Grimoire: Hargrave, Dave. Arduin Grimoire V: Dark Dreams (V). The Dragon Tree Press, 1985.

Chapter 5

* My brother and I talked my dad into: Takahashi, Dean. “Co-Founder Looks at Chaos in Early Stages and Future Challenges.” Los Angeles Times. 13 March 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-13/business/fi-33584_1_video-game-development.

* From the programming side I knew most: Interview, Brian Fargo. All quotes from Brian Fargo come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* Early on, it was easy. Takahashi, Dean. “Co-Founder Looks at Chaos in Early Stages and Future Challenges.” Los Angeles Times. 13 March 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-13/business/fi-33584_1_video-game-development.

* We were sitting side by side: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* “‘OK, so what was your password?’”: Keighley, Geoff. “Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard.” GameSpot. 4 January 2011. http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/p2_02.html.

* Mike’s pals from Triangle: “Notable Alumni.” Triangle Fraternity. 2009. http://www.triangle.org/index.php/Notable-Alumni/Notable-Alumni.html.

* sneaking off to the Ackerman Union: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* When I was growing up: Ibid.

* In the spring of 1990: Abraham, M. “UCLA Engineering Celebrates Accomplishments at Annual Awards Dinner.” UCLA Engineering. 6 November 2006. http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/newsroom/featured-news/archive/2006/november/ucla-engineering-celebrates-accomplishments-at-annual-awards-dinner.

* Six months later: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* I borrowed $15,000: Ibid.

* When Allen graduated in December of 1990: “Interview: Blizzard’s Frank Pearce on Warcraft Milestones.” Joystiq. 10 December 2009. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/12/10/interview-blizzards-frank-pearce-on-warcraft-milestones/.

* a 600-square-feet property: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* You should have heard Allen talk: “Allen: The Early Years.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020222120326/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/allen.shtml.

* Their first project was porting Battle Chess: “Allen: The Early Years.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020222120326/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/allen.shtml.

* a stack of contracts for port jobs: “Blizzard Timeline.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20071012162854/http://blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/timeline.shtml.

* becoming the company’s second employee: Interview, Pat Wyatt. All quotes from Pat Wyatt come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* There was this attitude: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* One of the great things that Allen: Interview, Paul Barton. All quotes from Paul Barton come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* We had a Neo-Geo: Interview, Stu Rose. All quotes from Stu Rose come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* When we were a much younger: Blevins, Tal. “A Decade of Blizzard.” IGN. 1 February 2001. http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/02/a-decade-of-blizzard.

* first American-made game: “Blizzard Timeline.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20071012162854/http://blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/timeline.shtml.

* He instructed everyone to pair up: Interview, Pat Wyatt.

* Vikings started out as a puzzle game: “The Making of The Lost Vikings.” Hardcore Gaming 101. 2 September 2011. http://blog.hardcoregaming101.net/2011/09/making-of-lost-vikings.html.

* I remember our contract with Interplay: “Mike: Growing Up.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020222122401/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/mike.shtml.

* Best Driving Game of 1993: Electronic Gaming Monthly 1994 Video Game Buyer’s Guide. 1994.

* Best Software Developer by Videogames Magazine: “Blizzard Timeline.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20071012162854/http://blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/timeline.shtml.

* I’ve worked with great people: Interview, Feargus Urquhart. All quotes from Feargus Urquhart come from interviews conducted during 2012-2013.

Chapter 6

* The feeling of sitting alone: Blevins, Tal. “A Decade of Blizzard.” IGN. 1 February 2001. http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/02/a-decade-of-blizzard.

* The company sort of grew beyond: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* approached them in summer 1993: Interview with David Siller. All quotes from David Siller come from interviews conducted during 2012-2013.

* rebranded as Chaos Studios in December 1993: “Blizzard Timeline.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/timeline.html.

* One night Bob just said: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* We were a public company: Ibid.

* It gave us the illusion: Magrino, Tom. “D.I.C.E. ‘08: Blizzards talks about blowing up.” GameSpot. 7 February 2008. http://www.gamespot.com/news/dice-08-blizzard-talks-about-blowing-up-6185736.

* $6.75 million: Duttenhaver, Linda. “Davidson & Associates Inc. Acquires Chaos Studios, and Signs Letters of Intent to Acquire Learningways Inc.” Davidson & Associates press release, 28 February 1994. The Free Library. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/DAVIDSON+%26+ASSOCIATES+INC.+ACQUIRES+CHAOS+STUDIOS,+AND+SIGNS+LETTER…-a014841690.

* Brian Fargo received shares worth his 10 percent ownership: Interview, Brian Fargo.

* When we incorporated: Kelly, Kevin. “Interview: Blizzard’s Frank Pearce on Warcraft Milestones.” Joystiq. 10 December 2009. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/12/10/interview-blizzards-frank-pearce-on-warcraft-milestones/.

* What we actually got over the phone: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

* In May 1994, Chaos Studios became Blizzard: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/timeline.html.

* We specifically selected to append: Kelly, Kevin. “Interview: Blizzard’s Frank Pearce on Warcraft Milestones.” Joystiq. 10 December 2009. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/12/10/interview-blizzards-frank-pearce-on-warcraft-milestones/.

* three guys building desks to fifteen developers: “Blizzard Timeline.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20071012162854/http://blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/timeline.shtml.

* We started out trying to make things more realistic: “Samwise: That Blizzard Magic.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020207175825/http:/www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/samwise.shtml.

* The development team was looking for someone: Keighley, Geoff. “Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard.” GameSpot. 4 January 2011. http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/p2_04.html.

Chapter 7

* One was Tyran Conquest, a futuristic action game: Condor, Inc. “Tyran Conquest: The Battle for G-42.” Design document, 1994.

* The second concept was The Crystals of Quexlcoatl: Condor, Inc. “The Crystals of Quexlcoatl.” Design document, 1994.

* The third document described Diablo: “Diablo.” Design document, 1994.

* In 1993, [Strategic Simulations, Inc.] published Dark Sun: Barton, Matt. “The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part III.” Gamasutra. 11 April 2007. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129994/the_history_of_computer_.php?page=5.

* SSI eventually developed more than 30: Crigger, Lara. “Chasing D&D: A History of RPGs.” 1UP. June 2008. http://www.1up.com/features/chasing-history-rpgs?pager.offset=1.

* Dave, Max, and Erich eyed Allen Adham: “Blizzard North: Condor and Diablo.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020222115131/http:/www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/blizznorth.shtml.

* In January 1995, Allen Adham and Pat Wyatt: Ibid.

Chapter 8

* By the end of February 1995: Interview with David Brevik.

* Blizzard would dole out $300,000: Ibid.

* offered a contract for $500,000: Interview with Matt Householder.

* In 1994, I had been advising: Interview with Ken Williams. All quotes from Ken Williams come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* I went in for three days to do this animation test: Interview with Eric Sexton. All quotes from Eric Sexton come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* Dave would challenge me: Interview with Peter Brevik. All quotes from Peter Brevik come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* You couldn’t just test out a little bit: Interview with Robin van der Wel. All quotes from Robin van der Wel come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* For me, working on the M2 game was tough: Interview with Brian Piltin. All quotes from Brian Piltin come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* Everybody did have a say: Interview with Karin Colenzo. All quotes from Karin Colenzo come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

* Our company was saying: Interview with Duane Stinnett. All quotes from Duane Stinnett come from interviews conducted during 2011-2013.

Chapter 9

* We were offering two fans the opportunity: Cavalli, Ernest. “Meet the Real Deckard Cain.” The Escapist. 19 December 2011. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114839-Meet-The-Real-Deckard-Cain.

* I think the sound of the 12-string: Breckon, Nick. “From Tristram to Torchlight: An Interview with Composer Matt Uelmen.” Shacknews. 23 October 2009. http://www.shacknews.com/article/60997/from-tristram-to-torchlight-an.

Chapter 10

* sealed the deal in early March 1996: The Free Library. “Davidson & Associates, Inc. Signs a Definitive Merger Agreement with Condor, Inc.” Davidson & Associates press release, March 6, 1996. The Free Library Website. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/DAVIDSON+%26+ASSOCIATES,+INC.+SIGNS+A+DEFINITIVE+MERGER+AGREEMENT+WITH…-a018059803, accessed on February 12, 2012.

Chapter 11

* With The 3DO Company behind them: Interview with Max Schaefer.

Chapter 12

* Those guys were a little more experienced: Breckon, Nick. “From Tristram to Torchlight: An Interview with Composer Matt Uelmen.” Shacknews. 23 October 2009. http://www.shacknews.com/article/60997/from-tristram-to-torchlight-an.

Chapter 13

* We thought [The Lost Vikings] was basically good enough: Magrino, Tom. “D.I.C.E. ‘08: Blizzards talks about blowing up.” GameSpot. 7 February 2008. http://www.gamespot.com/news/dice-08-blizzard-talks-about-blowing-up-6185736.

* We are a game company, staffed only by gamers: Blevins, Tal. “A Decade of Blizzard.” IGN. 1 February 2001. http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/02/a-decade-of-blizzard.

Side Quests for Chapter 1

* Apple manufactured Monitor III: Simon, Michael. “From Green to Retina: The Complete History of Apple Displays.” Mac Life. January 4, 2011. http://www.maclife.com/article/features/green_retina_complete_history_apple_displays.

Side Quests for Chapter 2

* As with the original Pong: Dillon, Roberto. The Golden Age of Video Games, A.K. Peters, CRC Press, 2011.

* A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp: Donovan, Tristan. Replay: The History of Video Games, Great Britain: Yellow Ant, 2010.

* There are several rumours: “The Amazing Commodore PET.” Last updated on February 16, 2004. http://www.commodore.ca/products/pet/commodore_pet.htm.

* “for masses, not the classes.”: Cha, Bonnie. “Commodore Founder Jack Tramiel Dies at *.” CNet. 9 April 2012. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57411467-235/commodore-founder-jack-tramiel-dies-at-*/.

* The PET was an important early computer: McCracken, Harry. “Improbable PC Pioneer: Commodore’s Jack Tramiel, 1928-2012.” TIME Tech. April 9, 2012. http://techland.time.com/2012/04/09/improbable-pc-pioneer-commodores-jack-tramiel-1928-2011/.

* TTL purchased Atari’s consumer division: Kent, Steven. The Ultimate History of Video Games, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

* Tramiel came up with a plan: Goldberg, Martin. “History of Atari.” Eurogamer via GamesIndustry International. March 4, 2008.

Side Quests for Chapter 3

* Lynx games looked better: Ciolek, Todd. “Saving the System II: More Failed Consoles that Went Wrong Instead of Right.” 1UP. December 15, 2011. http://www.1up.com/features/saving-the-system-ii-more-failed-consoles.

* The Game Boy retailed for: Edwards, Benj. “Happy 20th b-day, Game Boy: here are 6 reasons why you’re #1.” Ars Technica. 21 April 2009. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/04/game-boy-20th-anniversary/.

Side Quests for Chapter 5

* If I could get on the phone: Takahashi, Dean. “Co-Founder Looks at Chaos in Early Stages and Future Challenges.” Los Angeles Times. 13 March 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-03-13/business/fi-33584_1_video-game-development.

Side Quests for Chapter 6

* the race track scrolled and rotated: Parish, Jeremy (editor). “1UP.com’s Essential 50: 29. Super Mario Kart.” 1UP.com.

* The following Monday Allen called me: “20 Year Anniversary.” Blizzard Entertainment. 16 February 2011. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/b20/videos.html#blizzard-retrospective.

Side Quests for Chapter 7

* presented it to MicroProse: Edge Staff. “The Making of: X-COM Enemy Unknown.” Edge. February 17, 2013. http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-x-com-enemy-unknown.

* the growing popularity of The X-Files: Ibid.

Side Quests for Chapter 8

* Spearheaded by EA co-founder Trip Hawkins: Narcisse, Evan. “Top 10 Failed Gaming Consoles.” TIME Tech. 4 November 2010. http://techland.time.com/2010/11/04/top-10-failed-gaming-consoles/.

* One downside of this scheme: “The Video Game Critic’s Console Reviews: 3DO (1993 - 1994).” The Video Game Critic. Accessed on June 14, 2013. http://videogamecritic.com/3doinfo.htm.

Bonus Round: Condor’s Lost Games

* A brutal intergalactic war: Condor, Inc. “Tyran Conquest: The Battle for G-42.” Design document, 1994.

* The player will navigate their spacecraft: Ibid.

* Between missions there will be: Ibid.

* Though its existence has been: Condor, Inc. “The Crystals of Quexlcoatl.” Design document, 1994.

* Seven giant levels: Ibid.

* approximately fourteen months: Condor, Inc. “Tyran Conquest: The Battle for G-42.” Design document, 1994.

* approximately twelve months: Condor, Inc. “The Crystals of Quexlcoatl.” Design document, 1994.

Bonus Round: “Rock Balls” - The Making of WarCraft II

* It wasn’t the numbers were sold: “Frank: Warcraft!” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020222122116/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/frank.shtml.

* We definitely make games that we want to play: “Samwise: That Blizzard Magic.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020207175825/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/samwise.shtml.

* I was singing in a few bands: Brodnitz, Dan. “An Interview with Blizzard’s Chris Metzen, Part 1.” About Creativity. 21 April 2008. http://about-creativity.com/2008/04/an-interview-with-chris-metzen-part-1.php.

* By the time we began WarCraft II: Ibid.

* I think the cartoony look definitely works: “Samwise: That Blizzard Magic.” Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20020207175825/http://www.blizzard.com/blizz-anniversary/samwise.shtml.

* Even more important to WarCraft II’s success: Bates, Jason. “PC Retroview: WarCraft II.” IGN. 31 January 2002. http://www.ign.com/articles/2002/01/31/pc-retroview-warcraft-ii.

* Cool is one word for it: Keighley, Geoff. “Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard.” GameSpot. 4 January 2011. http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/p2_07.html.

* Once you had learned the nuances and intricacies: Colayco, Bob. “GameSpot Presents: The Greatest Games of All Time - WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness.” 3 April 2013. http://uk.gamespot.com/features/the-greatest-games-of-all-time-warcraft-ii-tides-of-darkness-6144203/.

* In WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, I always took umbrage: Keating, Tim. “Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness.” Strategy Plus, Inc. 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/20030130180010/www.cdmag.com/articles/004/046/warcraft_2_review.html.

Bonus Round: Cartridge Chronicles

* I invented a board called the “Sluggo III”: Bruce, Jonathan. “GEnie RTC Transcript: Bill Heineman.” Google comp.sys.apple2 forum. 28 January 1992. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.sys.apple2/zGNWWMTnz7s.

About the Author

David L. Craddock lives with his wife and business partner, Amie Kline-Craddock, in Canton, Ohio. He writes short and long fiction, nonfiction, and grocery lists. His young adult fantasy novel, Heritage, will be published by Tyche Books in summer 2014. Follow him at davidlcraddock.com, facebook.com/davidlcraddock, and @davidlcraddock on Twitter.

About Digital Monument Press, LLC

Monumental Games,

Monumental Stories

Digital Monument Press, LLC, (dba DM Press) is a publisher devoted to the video-game industry: the people, the culture, and the games that have made a footprint in interactive entertainment. Follow DM Press at dm-press.com, facebook.com/dmpressbooks, and @DM_Press on Twitter.

Books by DM Press

* Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire - Book I (2013)