Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main Blizzard office.
The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.
Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.
He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.
I spent thousands of hours playing Diablo 2 through middle school-graduate school, developing bots, etc.; it's where I really got interested in computers and reverse engineering. My dad locked the disk in our family's safe at one point to prevent me from playing, and I've had hundreds of cd-keys banned from Battle.net. I'm sure many people out there are the same, but it's hard to overstate how much that one game influenced my life. Awesome to see that it was made by such a great guy.
It's so nice for me to read this and be able to relate. I probably wouldn't be working as a software developer today if I hadn't spent those countless hours as a kid hacking the game, setting up (d2jsp) bots, fiddling to run multiple instances on the same computer, scripting together bot detection evasion patterns etc etc.
Recently installed it again during lockdown after not playing for a good 10 years. Still has some 20k+ people online at times. Really solid game.
This post portem is gold. I recall seeing it before and realizing how sometimes gold really is just a few brushes of dust and dirt away, but you need to be diligent in testing out new ideas for the sake of seeing a product in different versions. Its an exciting process
I’m pretty sure NetHack works that way (Perhaps the whole genre all the way back to the original Rogue, but nethack is the one that I’ve personally played)
The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely.
Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold.
He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago.
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc