We’d never talked to them, Brevik says.
We’d never interacted with them.
At the time, it mattered little to Condor.
The studio had only picked up the spandex-clad beat em up to keep their accounts ticking over.
Our dream wasnt to make these work-for-hire contracts; it was making an original PC game, Brevik says.
So we would go to the Consumer Electronics Show and pitch different game publishers on our ideas.
That year, their big concept was a gothic roguelike.
It already had a name -Diablo- but nobody was biting.
It got rejected many, many times, Brevik says.
We kept hearing that RPGs were dead, which at the time was kind of true.
RPGs were not selling as well as they used to.
They were on the decline so people weren’t really willing to take a risk on funding.
Except, that is, for Silicon & Synapse.
They loved it, Brevik says.
We signed the contract within a couple of weeks and started work.
With virtually no negotiation or preparation time, development could begin in earnest nearly instantly.
We were terrible businessmen and didnt know anything about running a company, Brevik says.
It was really dumb, but it was more about the passion of actually being able to make it.
Delving into procedurally generated dungeons to collect loot and slay monsters was nothing wholly new.
It had a huge influence on the look, Brevik says.
I was not happy about this, says Brevik.
I was adamant that it would ruin everything about the game.
The roguelikes hed enjoyed as a younger man were built around turn-based strategising.
When you got yourself into a situation, it was sweaty palms, Brevik says.
you could’t make those [strategic] decisions in real time.
But the rest of Condor were rather more agreeable.
Almost everybody raised their hands to change into real time, Brevik says.
It was by no means the last suggestion Blizzard would make.
Yet perhaps the most bizarre idea came from Breviks side, when they were inspired by an arcade curio.
We had this fantastic artist that was really into that kind of thing, Brevik says.
It would look not only really unique but also be more realistic than anything else that we could make.
Every step of the whole thing was a total disaster, Brevik says.
So within a couple of weeks we had cancelled that idea and decided to just go with pre-rendered stuff.
Claymation or not, Diablo was an instant hit when it released in December 1996.
We definitely were aiming high.
We were trying to make something new and unique, Brevik says.
But it wasn’t really scary.
We all felt we could do this.
A modern ASCII roguelike?
No, Diablo was something better.
