TCW 219 - Diablo 1

[Intro music -- Airplane Mode]

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey, and I hope that you stay a while and listen to us.

[Deckard Cain] Sray a while and listen!

We will be having our special guest for the first time on the podcast, Deckard Cain.

You need to identify this video game, Deckard. I got lots of them from a dungeon.

It's really a game that's worthy of its own in-depth look. So we're going to, not just Diablo, because, I mean, as we discussed, about in a Redux episode, it's arguable which one was really the more important, Diablo or Diablo 2, just because Diablo 2 was such a polished rendition of what they originally attempted in Diablo. So we're going to do a two-part look. We're going to do Diablo today. We'll do Diablo 2 and maybe a little more about what happened to the Blizzard North guys after that, when they accidentally almost invented the loot shooter, but didn't quite make it, in the next episode. And then after that, it'll probably be the livestream episodes, I suppose.

Iguana, founded by Jeff Spangenberg, was an absolutely brand new company in Santa Clara, California, very near where David Brevik was living at the time, that was founded in order to do contract programming for major publishers on console games, which was a very, very in-demand line of business at the end of the 8-bit era, the beginning of the 16-bit era. You had a ton of little publishers that wanted to cash in on this market, both American and foreign, mostly Japanese, but not only Japanese, as we'll see in a little bit in this very story. These companies would often, you know, put together a little money, get some fun licenses with the money, and then would need to actually contract out to people that knew how to make games to actually make the game. So this was a real golden age for independent contract developers. In the United States, in Japan, in the United Kingdom, like all over the world, there were tons of these contract developers. Iguana was a form to get in on this whole thing. Brevik, according to him, was basically employee number one. I mean, he just happened to be looking at the exact time the hiring ad went out, and so he was there right on the ground floor. Worked on a conversion of the Sega arcade game High Impact Football to a home version. His work on that was very well received. That was done for Acclaim. They also had contracts with other companies. They entered into a contract with Sunsoft, did the game Arrow the Acrobat for them, kind of a me too, also ran um animal-based platform game. So he was doing good work and making good contacts at Iguana. Meanwhile, as that is going on, the Shafers suffer through the whole Gordo thing. It does end up getting released, but there's just a problem. In addition to all the problems around the fact that they couldn't get money while they were making the game, it gets released right after the Tramels have announced that they are discontinuing the Lynx.

Yes. But of course, it's none of those things at this time. Because for one thing, it's not even in real time.

You know, everything was still at this point mostly either a derivative of Wizardry or Ultima. There were other big series besides those, but all of them still mostly traced their lineage back to those two games, with a few exceptions. Wizardry games were all about really intense character creation, and then tactical battles. So you spend a lot of time just setting up your character, setting up your party. Which, you know, for you and me, we find that interesting. We're D&D players going way back. But for this new public that's being attracted by games like Doom, the Nintendo generation growing up and embracing home computers, or personal computers, I should say. No, that's not what a lot of them are into anymore. The Ultima-style games, some of them could be a little bit crunchy too, but they were bloating in a different direction. And remember when I say all of this, I love these kind of games. So I'm not, like, criticizing Ultima and Wizardry and Might and Magic and all those for being the kind of games they are. I'm just putting them in the context of the new, huge tidal wave of PC game players that are coming into the market at this time, who are not looking at these kind of games nearly as fondly. The Ultima-style games have gotten very story-driven. There's all the dialogue trees and there's talking to all the people and there's all of this faux medieval language. And again, it's slow and plodding in the context of games like Wing Commander, Doom, Dune 2, that are starting to take over the market. Does that all kind of make sense?

Well, they were sports fans too, but yeah, the main influence from this, because obviously it's a very different kind of gameplay, the thing that impressed them about NHL 94 is that you got into the game right away. It was kind of what you talked about earlier as well, where with just a few button clicks, they were playing a game of hockey. No muss, no fuss. There are a lot of things you could theoretically customize before the start of a hockey game. Choosing your teams, your venue, your starting lineups, whatever else. But this game just got you in as fast as it possibly could, to where you're actually playing the game itself. This is something that really resonated with David Brevik, and something that, as we said, he found lacking in the RPGs of the time, the Wizardries and the Ultimas and the Mind and Magics of the world. The other game that truly captured their imagination during this time was the classic turn-based strategy game, XCOM.

Yes. Uh for those that don't get that reference, which is not one we would expect you to get, so there are no bonus points, when Jeffrey first got Diablo, and he was the first one of us to get Diablo, he still had a 386 machine. One of the hallmarks of Diablo is that it was in very fancy, high resolution of 640 by 480, ooh, with 256 whopping colors. It was true VGA graphics. Let's just say that maybe the 386 wasn't the best platform for real-time VGA graphics, with lots of objects moving around.

The music has always been iconic. The-

We've talked about most of the things that would go into making the game very successful. The real-time gameplay, the simple interface, the ability to just dive right in after a couple of clicks straight into the game, and just the very slot machine-like loot system. Where every time you kill something, you could get some kind of treasure. And every time that some kind of treasure could be some kind of magical item. And every time it's possible that that magical item may be some kind of amazing upgrade for your character. It's not going to be true most of the time. But you see, psychologically, that doesn't matter. And uh Pat Wyatt, who was at Blizzard South, which it was often colloquially called, the main Irvine office, put it at the time, the thing that was really successful about this game, and the reason slot machines are so successful as well, is this positive reinforcement. Because very rarely does something bad happen. Obviously, when you gamble, you can lose all your money because you're just gambling, but like you never have a negative total in slots. I mean, you can go negative over time because you keep putting money in and you never get a payout. But on any individual spin, the worst that can happen is that nothing happens. It's the same with Diablo. The worst that can happen is that nothing happens. Then occasionally, you know, you'll get a little bit. You'll get a nice potion, you'll get 50 cents at the slot machine, you'll get a little bit of gold, and that's kind of okay, that's fine. But then, very rarely, you hit the jackpot. You get the big money payout from the slot machine. You get the Godly Breastplate of the Whale, or the God of Dammering, [Jeffrey chuckles] I remember some of these things, in a drop in Diablo. The thrill of that is so overwhelming a dopamine hit. That our brains get wired to want to get that hit again so badly that we will keep slogging through the nothing happening in the hopes of getting something else. As Pat Wyett put it, it's the same kind of reason why dogs beg at the table.

One of these early ones was a little service called Kali, which basically was an IPX emulator. So LAN gaming was done through the IPX protocol, and Kali emulated IPX over a TCP IP internet connection so that you could basically have a LAN party involving computers all over the place. It wasn't the only thing of its type, but it was one of the most popular. Most of these, including Kali, had started out as programs to play Doom over the internet because Doom Deathmatch was so insanely popular. But Kali was one of the first ones that was expanding outside of that, and allowing this for other games as well, including Warcraft 2, the latest real-time strategy hit from Blizzard. The programmer at Blizzard by the name of Mike O'Brien saw this and was like, this is the wave of the future. We shouldn't cede this capability to a third party. We should have this capability ourselves for our own games. And furthermore, while we could do what companies like Kali and others do and charge for the use of our program, at some point in the future, just because of the way technology goes, this is the truly visionary thing that O'Brien came up with, because of the way technology improves and things come down in price and things get more efficient, it's inevitable that eventually this kind of internet matchmaking service can be done free of charge. Let's just skip ahead to that right now. Let's not put out a paid service just so that two years later someone can come along and undercut us with a free service. Let's have a free service right now! That's what truly makes Battle.net revolutionary, because yeah, they weren't the first to do online matchmaking or IPX emulation over TCP IP, but they made it free from the get-go. And that was all Mike O'Brien. So Mike O'Brien and another programmer, Jeff Strain, were kind of working on getting this whole Battle.net matchmaking thing together. And it really was mostly a matchmaking service at this point. All of the client data would still be stored locally. It would just be a way for you to share your client data with another person, but your client data would still be on your own computer. That's perhaps not the best idea. It kept it simple.

[Alex as an aside] When you weren't playing it on a 386.

‘It was way, way beyond other games. It broke ground as a genre.’ And it's so true. It was one of the first really big Windows 95 games. It had top resolution and top color depth for games of its type at the time. Looks primitive today, but not at the time. It had the multiplayer component, and it had that core gameplay loop of go in the dungeon, click on the monsters, kill the monsters, click on the loot, find the shinies, improve your stats to go deeper in the dungeon, to click on the monsters, to kill the monsters, to click on the treasure, to acquire the loot, on and on. And it was just a phenomenon. But of course, even that phenomenon would pale in comparison to the far more refined sequel. We'll end our story there for now, and then in our next episode, turn our attention to the all-time classic, Diablo II.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com, where we have links to some of the things that we discuss in this and other episodes. You can check out Alex's video game history blog at videogamehistorian.wordpress.com. Alex's book, They Create Worlds, the story of the people and that shaped the video game industry, Volume 1, can now be ordered through CRC Press and at major online retailers. Email us at feedback at theycreateworlds.com. Please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/theycreateworlds. Please help get the word out by leaving a review on your favorite podcasting service. We now have the podcast available on YouTube. Intro music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward, found at joshwoodward.com/song/airplanemode, used under a Creative Commons attribution license. Outro music is Bacterial Love by Roland Music, found at freemusicarchive.org, used under a Creative Commons attribution license.