Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels
Author: David L. Craddock
Date: 2019-12-10T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Digital Monument Press, LLC

Praise for Stay Awhile and Listen

A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the storied history and development of Diablo and the early days of Blizzard Entertainment. –Dr. Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare

Stay Awhile and Listen shows that there was a potent mixture of talent, opportunity, and personality that drove the meteoric rise of Blizzard Entertainment from its earliest days. –Julian Gollop, creator of X-COM: UFO Defense

David Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen masterfully retells the tale of the game development Camelot created by the founders of Blizzard Entertainment. David's book offers a rare glimpse into the mystery of how such a company is built, and tells the story in a playful style worthy of the playful products Blizzard is known for. -Richard "Lord British" Garriott, creator of Ultima

Stay Awhile and Listen is a rare and intriguing look into the people and experiences behind some of my favorite video games of all time. –Randy Pitchford, co-founder of Gearbox Software

For gamers that also happen to have a love of technology and a passion for computers and programming, the book works double-duty—not only recounting the stories of late-night inspiration gaming sessions, but of the struggles of day-to-day development tasks. For others, it provides insight and perspective into an industry that can be as mysterious as the catacombs below Tristram. –Bakuenryu! gaming blog

Stay Awhile and Listen weaves the words of the creators of Diablo into a compelling narrative and opens a window into the strange and wild world of the games biz. Reading this tale reminded me why I decided to leave the games business, and why I had to get back in. –Glenn Wichman, co-creator of Rogue

As the company that ushered American gamers into the age of the Internet, Blizzard has a history worth knowing. –Steven Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games

If you are a fan of any of the incredible works Blizzard has published, this series is a must-have. –GamingTrend.com

Stay Awhile and Listen flows almost like a documentary film. During the narrative parts, it's easy to imagine a group of young developers hunched in front of faintly glowing screens. During the quotations, you can picture the older and wiser industry veterans sitting in front of a camera and explaining those early days with smiles on their faces. –Slashdot.org

David Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen is able to enchant any reader with its short and clearly written passages, genuine and involving storytelling, and an abundance of facts and information straight from the source. –DiabloFans.com

Stay Awhile and Listen is an entertaining, detail-packed, and well written book that reads like a really fun novel. The writing is breezy and draws a reader in, like a bunch of friends sitting around and listening to a good story. –Writer's Digest Self-Published e-Book Awards

Stay Awhile and Listen tells how passion, maxed-out credit cards, and sleepless nights spawned a gaming phenomenon and unearths the game design secrets that made Diablo an enduring classic. –Tristan Donovan, author of Replay: The History of Video Games

Craddock takes his time introducing each person, and by the time he explains their contribution, I felt like I knew them as human beings, not as developers—what they were like as kids, where they came from, and what their aspirations were. –Venture Beat

Framing a fast-paced narrative around personal anecdotes shared by the developers responsible for shaping the foundation of the WarCraft and Diablo franchises, David L. Craddock establishes a fireside chat-type atmosphere to tell a tale as engaging as it is informative. –Lorne Lanning, co-creator of the Oddworld series

Not only does Stay Awhile and Listen give us insight into one of the industry's biggest juggernauts, it also sheds light on the harsh reality of game development in a way that feels like a novel rather than a quote filled biography. –Video Game Writers

Stay Awhile and Listen succeeds in evoking the sense of excitement, possibility and camaraderie game developers enjoyed in the game industry's early years. –Awesome Out of 10

Craddock presents his prose in the form of freely flowing text interwoven with quotes from a plethora of people related to Condor Games and Blizzard Entertainment. Readers gain insight into the thought processes that were going through the developers' heads. -Gamnesia.com

Stay Awhile and Listen:
Book II –
Heaven, Hell,
and
Secret Cow Levels
By David L. Craddock

Copyright

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

Text copyright © 2019 David L. Craddock

Editing services provided by Andrew W. Magrath and Amie C. E. Kline

Cover copyright © Lili Ibrahim

All images copyright © their respective owners

Most of the items and products in this book, including characters depicted on the cover, may be covered by various copyrights, trademarks, and logotypes. Their use herein is for identification purposes only. All rights are reserved by their respective owners.

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.
ASIN: B07ZQQRWS9
Digital Monument Press, LLC
www.dmpressbooks.com

Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Inside Out
Chapter 2: Wild West
Chapter 3: Kicking and Screaming
Chapter 4: Bases
Chapter 5: Orcs in Space
Chapter 6: Cowboy Development
Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear

Chapter 8: A Business-Like Approach to Showers

Chapter 9: Lay of the Land
Chapter 10: Full Disclosure
Chapter 11: Shifts
Chapter 12: Settling In
Chapter 13: In Dave We Trust
Chapter 14: Solidarity
Chapter 15: Ghosts and Ashes
Chapter 16: Blood and Fire
Chapter 17: Vantage Points
Chapter 18: Hell Unleashed
Chapter 19: Battles and Battle.net
Chapter 20: Separate Ways
Chapter 21: The Seventy-Percenters
Chapter 22: X Factors
Chapter 23: Shadows on the Wall
Chapter 24: Axes and Cyclones
Chapter 25: Bluffing
Chapter 26: The Bosses
Chapter 27: The End of Everything
Epilogue
Side Quests
Acknowledgments
Notes and Citations
About the Author

To Amie Christine

My pretty moon, my partner, my heart, my flip.

Thank you for everything.

To Ben Boos (2011) and Alan Ackerman (2018)

"My duty here is done."

About the Author

David L. Craddock lives with his wife, Amie Kline–Craddock, in Canton, Ohio. He is the author of several books including the bestselling Stay Awhile and Listen trilogy, Arcade Perfect, and the critically acclaimed Gairden Chronicles series of epic fantasy novels for young adults. Follow David online at davidlcraddock.com, facebook.com/davidlcraddock, and @davidlcraddock on Twitter. Stay up-to-date on David’s latest releases by signing up for his newsletter.

If you enjoy Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II, please consider leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

Introduction: Wait Awhile and Listen

BLIZZARD NORTH AND Blizzard Entertainment published Diablo in late 1996 or early 1997, depending on when boxed copies landed on store shelves in your area. Nearly four-and-a-half years later, Diablo II followed suit. Eleven years and eleven months after that, Diablo III appeared.

Considering my source material, six years between releases in the Stay Awhile and Listen series isn't too bad.

There are several reasons for the wait between Stay Awhile 1 and 2. First and foremost: I needed a break. I've been researching this series since 2007, and conducting interviews since 2008. I'm still not finished. Stay Awhile and Listen started as a single book the size of which would have necessitated razing every last rainforest on earth. A trilogy allowed me to release a book in a somewhat-timely fashion. I think the break between books did me good, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Second: I needed to take stock. Stay Awhile 1 was an experiment. I set out to combine a novelistic style with block quotes. The block-quote format came at the expense of developing a strong narrative voice, a tool I could have used to better frame events and to add context. Stay Awhile 2's formatting is traditional: paragraphs and quotes, all inline, like the sort you'd find in a novel.

Third: I accumulated so much fascinating and entertaining material in my interviews that, rather than stuff it into the main body of the book and bloat the narrative, I cordoned off Stay Awhile 1's bonus content. For Stay Awhile 2, I toyed with the idea of cutting Side Quests and Bonus Rounds, and weaving all material—or as much of it as possible—into the book where appropriate. After careful consideration (read: severe remonstration from my editor), I've decided to keep Side Quests. Bonus Rounds were left on the cutting-room floor because they were complete chapters, and Stay Awhile 2 is long enough without adding extra chapters. You can bounce back and forth between the main book and Side Quests, or save them for later.

The final reason for Stay Awhile 2's long absence was the content itself. My wife was the first to suggest splitting Stay Awhile into a trilogy. After some feet-dragging, I found that her suggestion resonated with me thematically. Each of the first three Diablo games illustrates an era in the history of Blizzard, and in the games industry. Diablo was developed in the Wild West. Diablo II was made when law was creeping into that wilderness: processes, experience, and corporate greed. Diablo III… well. That's a discussion for another time and another book.

Diablo II is the centerpiece of this book, and remains one of the greatest games ever made. Its development was a Herculean effort, the effects of which are still being felt by everyone who worked on it—for better, and for worse. It's one of my favorite games, and I've been waiting a long time to tell the full story of how it was made.

Stay Awhile and Listen is written based on research and interviews conducted in-person from 2009-2011, and over Skype and email from 2011-2019 (and beyond). Recreating a story from so many sources is an exercise prone to inconsistency, especially considering that many events took place decades ago. All quotes come straight from my interviews. In some cases, I've recreated scenes using information gleaned from my interviews, my research, and in some cases, my best judgment.

The views expressed in this book are those of the individuals who provided them, and do not reflect the opinion of the author or his partners.

Ready?

Stay awhile, and read.

David L. Craddock

28 October 2019

Chapter 1: Inside Out

Role-playing games are dead. That was the conventional wisdom in the gaming community in 1996. The great computer RPG troika—Ultima, Might & Magic, and Wizardry—were played out. Everything else was just feeble, third-rate swords-and-sorcery knockoffs, woefully out-of-date compared to the hot strategy and action titles of the day. And then came Diablo.

-Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame

Click. That was it. "Oh, look, I'm online and can start a game." It was awesome.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

Even though we'd made a lot of money on WarCraft II, you're only as good as your last game.

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

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on December 27, 1996, David Brevik and Max and Erich Schaefer asked Blizzard North's team to join them in the office kitchen. Fifteen developers dragged themselves from their desks, dropping into chairs or hoisting themselves onto countertops. They regarded the studio's three co-founders, known around the office as the bosses, through bleary eyes.

Dave cleared his throat and spoke up. Diablo had gone gold, industry jargon that means a game's content is complete and ready to be shipped off for mass production and distribution.

In his hand, Max held aloft a gold disc containing hundreds of art files, sound clips, and lines of code. On its face, written with a Sharpie, was the word Diablo.

Gone gold. Dave's words had the effect of one of Diablo's elixirs of life. Developers broke out into grins and let out cheers. Max opened the fridge and withdrew bottles of bubbly. Karin Colenzo, Blizzard North's office manager, rummaged through cupboards and produced paper cups. As the bosses poured and cups were passed around, the beleaguered team basked in their accomplishment.

Two years. Thousands of hours. Esoteric development tools born of spur-of-the-moment needs and cobbled together from hastily written code. Painted tiles assembled into dungeon layouts according to algorithms that had been painstakingly devised and finetuned. Network protocols that transported players from around the world into the same dungeon at the same time. Two months sleeping under desks, sacrificing time with family and friends to polish their game until it shone with the effulgence of The Grandfather, one of the most powerful swords within Diablo's sixteen levels of hell.

After raising their cups, the group disbanded. They were in desperate need of sleep.

Ken Williams' night was not over yet. The studio's business manager and childhood friend of Max's and Erich's had one more task to complete. Under normal circumstances he may have FedExed Diablo's gold master disc to Blizzard Entertainment. These were not normal circumstance. Diablo had missed the cutoff for availability during the Christmas shopping season, but if the two Blizzards hustled, the game might make it into stores by the end of the month. Ken hopped a plane for Irvine, four hundred miles south of Blizzard North's office in Redwood City. In pre-dawn darkness he hailed a cab to Blizzard Entertainment, placed the disc in the hands of co-founder and president Allen Adham, and flew home.

Allen rushed back inside to a familiar scene. Programmers, artists, and game testers fueled by a steady diet of caffeine and fast food slumped at their desks. They wanted to go home where unwrapped Christmas presents and family waited for them.

First things first. Allen uploaded Diablo on the company server. The appearance of a new—and hopefully final—build of the game available for download gave the team a second wind. They started network sessions and met up in the town of Tristram to buy weapons and spells before entering the cathedral and the first of Diablo's dungeons. As they played, they kept their tired eyes peeled for bugs.

Hours later they echoed Blizzard North's verdict: The game was finished. They were free to go home.

Instead they hunched over their mice and keyboards.

"It was hella fun," said Pat Wyatt, Blizzard's first employee and, after rising through the ranks of programmer and producer on 1994's WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, the company's vice president of research and development. "In fact, that was sort of the metric we used: We'd send off the gold master then say, 'Okay, take a break.' And everybody would go back to their desk and play the game. We knew the game was going to be successful because of that. Here are these people, developers and testers, who have been playing for months and months, and the first time they have a choice of what to do after they get off work is to play the game again."

Blizzard Entertainment's team was confident in Diablo's formula. It was dark and moody, the opposite of WarCraft's cartoony visuals and irreverent humor. Best of all, the barrier of entry was low. To walk to a particular spot in a dungeon, players clicked it. To fight a monster, players clicked it. Anyone who understood how to use a mouse could play.

Killing monsters was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. Most drops were mundane, even undesirable. Oftentimes players killed an enemy and got nothing but experience points to show for it. But there was a chance—slight, but still a chance—that the algorithms ticking away under the hood would roll virtual dice and generate a sword that increased damage by twenty percent, or plated mail that dramatically boosted the player's health points, or a bow that shot bolts of lightning. The right item drop at the right time could mean the difference between a weak, timid character, and a walking tank whose weapons easily cut through the Lord of Terror's toughest minions.

More than addiction to Diablo's slot-machine-like formula kept Blizzard Entertainment's staff plugging away on the game late into the night. Their previous title, 1995's WarCraft II, had sold over one million units—a rare and vaunted milestone in the mid-1990s—and garnered near-unanimous praise from critics. Blizzard Entertainment expected Diablo, a joint production between the two Blizzards, to do the same or better. "This was before Blizzard was BLIZZARD," programmer Jeff Strain explained. Strain had joined the company just in time to help senior engineer Mike O'Brien architect Battle.net, a free multiplayer service that brought Diablo players together in chat rooms and helped them organize games.

"WarCraft was moderately successful," Strain continued. "WarCraft II had been considered a genuine hit. But at that point, it wasn't clear that this was a company that was going to be one of the titans of the industry. There was a lot of nervousness about Diablo, a lot of people in the press who thought it was crazy to try to resurrect the RPG genre."

On December 26, Jeff Strain tested Diablo with his friends and colleagues until long after dawn. The smile he wore was genuine, but behind it lurked a tinge of worry. "There wasn't this grand sense of awesomeness to fall back on," he said. "We were still very much a company that had to go out there and prove that we could make hit games. I remember very clearly, both around the release of Diablo and StarCraft, we were proud of what we made—but was it going to be commercially successful? You hope so. If people like the kind of games we like... But maybe they don't. There was always those hand-wringing four-to-six weeks where we wait to see how it really sold and what the reaction was."

BY JANUARY 2, BLIZZARD NORTH'S team was back at their computers, giddy with excitement and nerves. Their parent company, Davidson & Associates, had boxed and shipped Diablo to stores in record time: Many retailers had begun to stock the game in late December. Other regions received it in the early days of January. Everyone at Blizzard North had a copy. One by one, CD-ROM trays pulled black discs adorned with fiery-red labels into computer towers. Each screen went dark. Deep laughter boomed from speakers as the Lord of Terror appeared alongside a main menu. A few clicks, and the game installed. Another click, and the game's creators stepped into their gothic-fantasy world.

They were not alone.

"We used to stay at work until 10:00, 11:00 at night, not because someone asked us to but because we just loved being there," recalled Kelly Johnson, one of Blizzard North's artists and the mastermind behind Deckard Cain, the old storyteller who hangs out by the fountain in Tristram's town square. "The first night we were able to play on Battle.net, we were all at the office playing. I was playing with guys from New Zealand and Japan. I couldn't believe it."

Through Battle.net, Diablo built bridges across continents. To jump online, all players needed to do was create a character, click a button to connect to Battle.net, and they were whisked into a chat room where other adventurers gathered. From there, players could create or join a game session.

"I think we actually talked about that, Kelly and I, that all the sudden you're just playing with other people," said Max Schaefer. "It was so natural. You didn't think about the fact that you were playing with a dude in Korea and a guy in Israel. It's really a remarkable thing when you think about it: How often are people casually matched up in different parts of the world?" [SQ1]

Battle.net changed everything. Before Blizzard's free service, game updates had to be downloaded from a publisher's website and applied by following a long and often confusing process. Many publishers didn't host patches on their websites, forcing players to go on a scavenger hunt across online bulletin boards. Before Windows 95 and programming interfaces like DirectX, which simplified the process of writing graphics, sound, and input code that was compatible with a wide variety of hardware, PC games had run on DOS, a command-line operating system that required users to type in long and esoteric strings of text to get games up and running.

With Battle.net, game patches downloaded automatically. The simplicity of the service's graphical interface—a chat window bordered by colorful buttons—broke down barriers for players like Michio Okamura, who had only a rudimentary grasp of computers before joining Condor in 1994 and learning his way around art software. "I remember playing a game with people in Japan, people in France. That was amazing," said Michio. "I loved Diablo in single-player. It was still a great, addictive game. But when you were able to play with other people across the world? It was amazing."

"We believed that in order for it to really be embraced and adopted, that accessibility had to be there," Jeff Strain said of Battle.net. "The real catch for Battle.net was that it was inside-out rather than outside-in. You jumped right into the game. You connected players from within the game experience. You did not alt-tab off into a web browser to try to set up your games and have the web browser try to pass off information or something like that. It was a service designed from day-one to be built into the actual games."

For a solid week, Blizzard North's staff lived on Battle.net. They mingled in channels, jumped into games to help players recover lost items, and filled their packs with treasure that fountained up from Diablo's bottomless well of procedurally (or algorithmically) generated loot. As weeks passed and reviews rolled in, a groundswell of praise exceeded their wildest expectations. GameSpot editors confessed in their review that productivity around the office had stopped the moment copies of the game had arrived. Computer Gaming World, one of the industry's most widely read and respected publications, awarded it 4.5 out of 5, and followed that by inducting Diablo into its Hall of Fame some years later.

"We started seeing our game on the cover of magazines and hearing about it. It was like, wow, look at that!" remembered Eric Sexton, an artist who helped design the game's tool that mashed together affixes and determined an item's magical properties, and who proudly took credit for painting the Butcher's Lair in blood, viscera, and corpses.

Glowing reviews in magazines were passed from desk to desk. Many of those reviews led to more tangible evidence of Diablo's popularity. Over the early months of 1997, the bosses put on tuxes and attended ceremonies where they accepted trophies proclaiming Diablo RPG of the year, game of the year, or both. "I remember the first TV show I did," Max Schaefer said. "I was doing a Diablo demo, and the next guy was Greg Zeschuk, one of the co-founders of BioWare. He was demoing a mech game called Shattered Steel. This was before BioWare had done anything significant either. We always talked about that afterward, about how we were on that weird little TV show demoing our unknown games. That was pretty cool."

"We had success, and it makes our time [as a team] more meaningful. But I don't like the attention," admitted Dave Brevik. "I go out to some awards ceremony, and somebody hands me some award, and I don't even know what to say. I'm more embarrassed than anything."

On one occasion, Dave's fluster at being the center of attention caused him to overlook one very important contributor to his success. "I remember I had an award speech that I gave for either Diablo 1 or II, a game-of-the-year thing. We went to this dinner, and I went up and thanked everybody. I had this long list of people that I wanted to thank, and I did, and I came back and sat down, and I thought, Oh, shit. I forgot to thank my wife. Yeah. I didn't live that one down."

"We would get interesting comments from people," reflected Patrick "Pattie" Tougas, one of Blizzard North's artists. "Sometimes we'd get emails from people's wives, saying, 'You're ruining my marriage.' Then we'd get emails from other couples, saying, 'You brought us together.' Kind of mixed emotions. We had some weird stalkers, too. A lot of people from Germany got really strange about Diablo. They were like, 'We want to come out there and move to California and live with you guys and help you make these games better!' And we were like: 'Whoa.'"

"When it first came out and the multiplayer aspect of the game was introduced, and you're playing with people across the country, it was so new and so fresh, it was just an exciting time," said Peter Brevik, Dave's younger brother and a programmer on Diablo.

The excitement Blizzard North's team felt for Diablo was a microcosm of the fervor running through the tech and videogame industries during the 1990s. "It was great to be working in Silicon Valley at that time," Pete continued. "Companies were popping up left and right, and selling for millions of dollars. It was really exciting to see all the energy in that area."

Chapter 2: Wild West

We made the game peer-to-peer. We thought, This could be hacked, but it won't be that big of a deal. Not many people do that.

-Dave Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

We've got the mechanics that everybody loves, random dungeons and all the other things that we did. We've got all that down. Now let's make it better.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

DIABLO'S SUCCESS USHERED in more than framed magazine reviews and awards.

Blizzard North was leasing space in an office park on Baer Island, a section of Redwood City in northern California. Their lease afforded them a small bullpen crammed with desks, ringed by a few adjoining offices. Conference rooms like the one where Dave, Max, and Erich had pitched Diablo to Pat Wyatt and Allen Adham was shared with other tenants.

Flush with cash, the bosses leased the rest of the office floor, and the team spread like creeper vines. Their desks, bought at a used furniture store and hauled back in Max's beat-up VW Vanagon, were shoved into corners and replaced with L-shaped tables better suited to holding multiple monitors, computers, and specialized equipment such as drawing tablets. A smaller conference room was gutted and repurposed as a game room; wall-to-ceiling shelves held discs and cartridges for nearly every gaming system dating back to the Atari 2600. Just outside the game room was a lounge stocked with TVs, game consoles, pinball cabinets, foosball and ping-pong tables, and beanbag chairs.

Developers spent the early weeks of 1997 decompressing. Early birds breezed into the office around ten. Lunch hours were long and luxurious. Laughter, conversation, and the frantic clicking of mouse buttons as the guys partnered with other players on Battle.net filled the office. Most developers went home around five, six at the latest.

Pranks were a natural extension of Blizzard North's work-hard-play-hard culture. On April 1, the bosses once again summoned everyone into the kitchen. Dave waited for quiet and dropped another bombshell announcement. "For a great April Fool's joke after Diablo, I told everybody that we had to stop working, and we were all going to move down south for a couple months and work on StarCraft."

The bosses waited for backlash from the staff. "We thought people would get all anxious and crazy and get mad, but they didn't," said Erich Schaefer. "They were just like, 'Okay, we knew this was coming.' It wasn't coming. There was no talk about that at all."

"They believed me because many people from Blizzard South had done that for Diablo," Dave added. [SQ1]

Some of the guys used their downtime to train for their season of roller hockey. Scrimmages were held in the parking lot to get ready for the upcoming season. Dave, Pattie Tougas, Max, Pete Brevik, Rick Seis, and the rest of the team traded in their green-and-white Condor jerseys for white jerseys trimmed with black and red, emblazoned with Blizzard North and the Lord of Terror's horned head and gaping maw.

The hockey season ended sooner for some players. "One time Dave Brevik wrecked his knee playing hockey," Pattie Tougas said. "I forget who we were playing, but somebody fell on his leg and he actually tore his ACL or MCL—I don't remember which one."

"I tore my MCL on a penalty someone committed on me," Dave clarified. "So just to rub salt in the wound, I had surgery, rehabbed it, came back. Second game back, somebody rolled up and strained my MCL on my other leg. I was like, 'Okay... I don't do this for a living,'" he continued with a laugh. "I played selectively after that, but that ended my consistent hockey career."

Although sympathetic, the staff got some mileage out of Dave's injury. "They did the arthroscopic surgery with a camera, and when he came back, he brought the video in, and the whole company watched Dave's surgery," Tougas said. "He was in a lot of pain."

He paused. "I think we won that game, though."

When they weren't glued to Diablo or playing hockey, the team caravanned to movie theaters and arcades. On some nights everyone hung out until midnight or later to blast each other to bits in Quake.

Dave, Max, and Erich never attempted to rein in the fun and games. Their team had earned the downtime, and decompressing had been a vital component of Blizzard North's culture since the studio's founding. Early hires such as Michio Okamura and Rick Seis appreciated the value in relaxing after completing a project.

"We got plenty of time off after Diablo because we weren't sure what we were going to do. We were trying to recuperate," explained Michio.

Two years ago, Michio Okamura had traded his dream of being an artist for a job at a Japanese corporation to support his family. That was when Blizzard North, then known as Condor, had printed a job advertisement in a local newspaper: ARTIST WANTED. Michio had taken a chance by responding to the ad, vowing that if this gig didn't work out, he'd box up his art supplies for good. Now he was living his dream. The money wasn't as good, and there had been moments when he and his peers had had to race to the bank to deposit checks before they could bounce, but he was creatively satisfied.

"Basically, we were trying to get our creative juices flowing again, so we took a break for a little while," he added.

"We earned it," agreed Rick Seis of the team's downtime. Rick Seis had traded health insurance as a programmer at Delta Dental for a job at Condor. His interview had culminated in a bout of NHL '94 on Sega Genesis against Dave Brevik. The bosses called to offer him the job that same night. Taking it would mean a $10,000 drop in salary, but Rick never hesitated.

Rick, Michio, and the rest of the staff had never shipped a game before joining Condor. Their passion had fueled the project, and now they were tasting the fruits of their labor.

"We worked our asses off for Diablo, at the end," Rick continued.

BETWEEN SCRIMMAGES IN THE PARKING lot and all-night gaming sessions, the bosses kicked around ideas for what to do next. The most obvious choice was the least attractive.

"The going assumption was that it wasn't going to be Diablo II," Max Schaefer said. "Then we stood around looking at each other with blank looks on our faces."

Pat Wyatt and the other managers at Blizzard Entertainment—referred to by North's staff as Blizzard South—had long since reached a consensus. "It was definitely our goal that they do Diablo II."

As usual, Blizzard North's bosses pushed back. "Blizzard South said, 'We want you to do Diablo II,' and we told them to F off," Dave said. "I mean, we did and we didn't. We said, 'We're going to do what we want to do,' and they said, 'Well, you really should do Diablo II.'"

"A lot of it was the heat of the moment," Max remembered of their strong response to Blizzard South's suggestion. "Whenever you finish a game, you don't ever want to look at anything like it again. It's super exhausting and you've been working on it for so long."

South's managers understood North's reluctance. They had come to a similar crossroads after finishing the first WarCraft: exhausted, hesitant to follow up with a sequel when creating the original had left them physically and mentally broken for weeks. Still, no amount of fatigue changed what they had viewed as a foregone conclusion. "We thought WarCraft was such a great game, and yet there were so many ideas we had that we hadn't done yet that were awesome, and that we wanted to do," Pat said. "The quality of sequels can be so much higher than the quality of an original because you're starting from a known world and a known toolset. You're not inventing everything; you're getting to fix all the things that were wrong, then add new stuff."

Dave, Max, and Erich had no trouble grasping the rationale behind Blizzard South's insistence. Building and releasing Diablo had taught them the fundamental difference between developing a game for PC and a game for consoles. They had no desire to jump into another PC game. "We were expecting to ship Diablo and then be done," Dave explained. "We'd done console games before Diablo, and when a console game was on the cartridge, it was done. Coming from that world into our first PC game, which we had to support and patch—it felt like a never-ending project. It was like beating the flu only to get the sniffles for a few weeks. In order to be excited about a new project, you have to be over the last project."

Allen Adham asked what the guys had in mind. Their pitch caught him off-guard: A sports division. Allen seemed cautiously open to the idea. Blizzard North could develop an arcade-style sports game like Blood Bowl: heavy on action, light on rules and realism. Dave set him straight. For years he'd dreamed of making a football game that let players create an avatar and live out a career from high school all the way through a Hall of Fame induction. Along the way, players would earn points to invest in attributes and overcome setbacks like rehabbing injuries.

The bosses explained that Blizzard North could divide and conquer. Some developers would craft a football game in the sports division of the company while the rest of the team laid groundwork for Diablo II. They had split their resources in a similar fashion once before, when Max and a handful of developers had worked on a 3D football game for 3DO's ill-fated M2 console, a contract that had paid the bills while Erich and Dave had spearheaded Diablo.

Allen disagreed. Blizzard North was too small to tackle multiple projects. Over several conversations, Allen slipped into what his team at Blizzard South referred to as his "velvet hammer" persona: Chip-chip-chipping away at resolve until the other party finally did what he wanted. Blizzard North should strike while the iron was hot and develop a sequel right away, he opined. Dave, Max, and Erich resisted. They were helping Blizzard South patch bugs and balance gameplay, and needed to be free and clear of Diablo for a little while before they leapt head-first into another grueling development cycle.

By mid-February, the bosses were coming around. Dave, a self-professed workaholic who had stayed at the office around the clock during Diablo's development, was growing restless. He wasn't the only one. As hype around Diablo grew, the enthusiasm from fans became intoxicating. Conversations about what they could do in a sequel broke out around the office.

"We started thinking about things like, We should add running so moving around town isn't as slow," Dave recalled.

"With the Diablo design document, it was just a pitch of the idea, so it had a little more atmosphere to it, a little more sales hype built into the design doc," Erich explained. "In the Diablo II design document, it was basically two or three pages of wish list items, the things we'd thought of toward the end of Diablo that we wanted to do."

The staff also expressed interest in building out Diablo's world. The first game had been vertically oriented, with players starting in the town of Tristram and descending into deeper and darker levels. A sequel could host multiple towns, dozens of battlefields, and more monsters, gear, weapons, and spells.

"I didn't want to do something unless I felt we were really moving forward," Dave said. "I didn't want to make an expansion that was really just the same game again. I wanted a new game with real differences in gameplay and the direction. We'd written down a bunch of ideas that weren't going to make it in Diablo, started examining that list and thinking about making it client-server, and it started to get exciting."

Another, more troubling motivator pushed the team to their tipping point.

Most players enjoyed Diablo as a cooperative experience. They met online and partied up to slay demons, trade loot, and swap war stories in the game's chat rooms, known as channels. Before long, players who had dispensed with the Lord of Terror for the umpteenth time grew bored or mischievous, and discovered another way to play: clicking a button depicting crossed swords in Diablo's multiplayer interface turned players hostile, letting them attack other adventurers as well as monsters.

Hostile play was known as PVP, or player-versus-player. Many PVP players treated encounters as consensual duels. Before entering a game, or while shopping in town, players wishing to duel would arrange to fight each other down in the dungeons. Slain heroes dropped ears marked with their name, and expert duelers took more pride in collecting ears than in rare items dropped by monsters.

Other players were less honorable. They trawled Battle.net's channels, on the prowl for players requesting support down in the dark. Experienced players would offer to lend a hand, fight by their side, and then—at a crucial moment in the midst of a chaotic battle—they would turn hostile and attack, cutting and stabbing until their victims let out a scream and fell to the ground in a shower of weapons and trinkets. Betrayed players could only watch, helpless, as their killers looted their hard-earned swag and disappeared, perhaps never to be seen again.

Players who attacked their peers became known as player-killers, or PK-ers. PK-ing was sanctioned, but proved divisive within the community, as well as within Blizzard North. "Diablo's such a great game because it involved things that aren't done as frequently now, like being able to enter someone's game and player-killing them," said Kelly Johnson, an artist who'd landed a job at Blizzard North by impressing Max Schaefer with a hand-drawn illustration of Superman on a cocktail napkin. "It was like the wild, wild west: You enter someone's game and kill them. No restrictions. Some people thought that was too hostile, but I loved it."

"Today, people go online all the time and are more familiar with that, but back then it was a foreign concept," Dave reasoned. "Going online and getting killed was so scarring. Those players are still feeling a little bit apprehensive. You've got to be very careful about it. PVP's a touchy thing. There's a lot of people that don't want any part of it."

"There were huge fights back in the day about player-killing, and a lot of fights pointed to how bad Ultima Online was about that," Erich explained. "But my argument was, I was always for the lawlessness and more freedom for the players, for griefing, and for the bad guys."

Michio Okamura was adamantly against PK-ing, citing past experiences. "When Ultima Online first launched, I was so excited about that game."

Developed by Origin Systems and captained by Ultima creator Richard "Lord British" Garriott, Ultima Online was set in a fantasy world where players could go on quests, slay monsters, explore wilderness and towns, and fight other players. The game was persistent, meaning things kept happening in the game even when players were logged off. Soon after UO's launch, PVP and PK-ing became pervasive. "I started playing, and people started PK-ing me. It got to a point where you'd pretty much walk out of town and get killed. You couldn't do anything. People stood outside the gate into town and waited for you to come out so they could kill you."

The two Blizzards had done their best to protect players who preferred to kill monsters instead of each other. Weapons and spells were deactivated in Tristram so players could shop and manage their inventories in peace. If an ally turned hostile, players who chose to abstain could open a town portal and flee to the sanctuary of Tristram.

Diablo's fans proved more industrious than anticipated. BoBaFeTT Trainer, one of the earliest hacks, let players load their characters and inflate their stats to superhuman levels. Other trainers allowed players to go as far as modifying weapon values such as damage and durability to create items capable of killing anything and anyone in a single hit.

Dave wasn't surprised players had figured out how to cheat the game. He was a hacker himself. Tinkering with programs was a common pastime among programmers. Besides, if people wanted to rob themselves of the fun of playing Diablo legitimately—fighting for every inch of ground, reveling in new discoveries, earning awesome gear—that was up to them.

What he didn't count on was hackers sharing their handiwork with the world. Trainers like BoBaFeTT spread across the Internet like weeds. As more players used them, Battle.net went from a friendly place where players could meet, to the game's seedy underbelly. Other cheats were subtler, such as a bug in Diablo's code that let players duplicate any item, including gold, trivializing the game's reward loop of fighting and looting monsters. One particularly nasty exploit let players kill other heroes in Tristram.

Within months, Battle.net became a town under curfew. Cautious players locked game sessions by setting passwords that they only handed out to friends, or to no one. Public games had become places for hackers to pillage and plunder.

Two issues were responsible for Diablo's rampant cheating. The first was the game's peer-to-peer architecture. Characters were stored on each player's computer, known as the client. All a hacker had to do was point trainers to Diablo's save-game files on their hard drives. The second issue was Diablo's codebase. Blizzard North's team had written Diablo the way they had written console games such as Justice League Task Force: By any means necessary, often working frantically to meet milestone deadlines so they could get paid. As long as a game built for Sega Genesis ran on one Genesis, it would run on all of them. Writing clean, efficient code was a goal inversely proportional to hustling to meet deadlines. Before Davidson & Associates acquired Condor, a late payment was the difference between checks clearing or bouncing. Long-term support for console games in the era of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis was not only unnecessary, it was unheard of: There was no online play, so there was no need to consider things like patches that balanced gameplay and fixed bugs.

When development on Diablo had kicked off in the spring of 1995, it had begun as a turn-based game designed for one player. That foundation had never been bulldozed and replaced with one better suited to supporting a multiplayer game. Pat Wyatt realized this when he and a few other programmers from Blizzard South had set up shop in Redwood City over the fall of 1996 to help Blizzard North put a bow on Diablo. Good coding practices dictated procedures such as one programmer checking out code and preventing anyone else from modifying it until it was checked back in. Diablo seemed to be written helter-skelter, with no sense of organization or structure. The longer Pat worked on Diablo's code, the more aghast he was at its state. Variables were global, which meant unauthorized processes could modify them by accident, compromising data in other segments of the game loop.

"The game just did not have any way to enforce any rules at all," Pat said. "It wasn't aware of things like, 'If I'm in town, I shouldn't take damage.' It just assumed of, 'Damage is coming in, so I'll deliver the damage.' No network validation at all."

Blizzard Entertainment's Jeff Strain reached the same conclusion. "There were architectural decisions about how, for example, item data was represented in the game, and how [item] spawning worked—things that, if you were building a multiplayer or online game from the very beginning, you would have made [different] decisions. In fairly short order, it wasn't really feasible to go back and re-architecture."

Dave Brevik had always been his own worst critic. While many praised the game's atmosphere and addictive mechanics, he saw flaws. For every gushing story from players whose first multiplayer experience on Battle.net was positive, he heard only the frustration stemming from the abuses of hackers.

In short order, Dave's primary motivator for creating a sequel was to bury the original game and start fresh. "RPGs are all about what I call the peacock mentality: you've got to show your stuff off, right? You're out there strutting your feathers, so to speak: your uber-gear that everybody recognizes. Those kinds of things are important to the longevity to your game and to RPGs in general online. It's about expressing yourself and individuality and all the things that make RPGs unique. When you ruin that, you ruin that fun for the entire community. After Diablo got hacked, anytime anything happened that was questionable, it was like, 'Oh, you must be hacking.'"

Ultima Online offered a solution. The online-only game utilized a client-server architecture, where players (the clients) communicated through a server running the game. The server acted as a messenger. Clients never interacted directly; they knew only what the server told them.

Blizzard North's bosses immediately saw the benefits of structuring Diablo II as a client-server game. All salient data, such as characters, would be stored on servers maintained and operated by Blizzard. What players could not access, they could not hack. A single-player mode would be offered to satisfy players who preferred to play off the grid.

By mid-February, aside from pushing out the occasional patch to squash bugs, Blizzard North's developers had written off Diablo. "It started to get cheated to hell, and we were like, 'Okay, there's nothing we can do, here,' and you sort of just tune it out," said Max Schaefer.

Blizzard South's managers agreed with their direction. But the two Blizzards' new parent company was not ready to quit milking the Diablo cash cow just yet.

Chapter 3: Kicking and Screaming

One of the things we always hated at Blizzard was, if you're going to make money, do it by making really good products, not just because there's a business opportunity. That situation occurred here. Our parent company said, "We have this studio that's not doing anything. Why don't they make a Diablo expansion?"

-Pat Wyatt, VP of research and development, Blizzard Entertainment

They said, "It's impossible to add Battle.net support in this small amount of time. You'll never be able to do it." That's why multiplayer is one of the Easter eggs: Because Blizzard South said we couldn't do it. That was us sticking our thumb in their eye.

-Jim Edwards, programmer, Synergistic Software

As far as I know, the only outside development that ever worked in Blizzard history was Blizzard North. Every other outside studio has had its projects cancelled or released against Blizzard's will.

-Matt Householder, producer, Blizzard North

FOR BUSINESS OWNERS, the dawn of affordable personal computers in the 1970s ushered in an era of exponentially greater productivity. Word processors and spreadsheets ran on machines small enough to fit on office desks and inexpensive enough for even small businesses' budgets.

For Dungeons & Dragons players, computers represented something grander. Dungeon Masters could offload tedious and error-prone tasks such as rolling dice and calculating attacks and movement. Additionally, they could exploit the PC's processing power to construct elaborate campaigns using algorithms that generated new settings every time users sat down to play.

Robert "Bob" Clardy was one such avid consumer. Eager to capitalize on the PC's potential, Bob pooled money with his wife, Ann, to co-found Synergistic Software. Their first game was Dungeon Campaign for the Apple II, published in December 1978 on a cassette tape. In the early 1980s, following the popularity of Rogue, the term "roguelike" became a label for a type of RPG featuring turn-based gameplay, procedurally generated levels and items, and perma-death, the inability to reload and continue after dying. But Clardy's Dungeon Campaign predated Rogue by three years, making it one of the first commercial "roguelikes" to appear in stores, trailing just behind Beneath Apple Manor by Don Worth. [SQ1]

Synergistic built its reputation step by step, game by game. Each RPG it published during the 1980s sold well enough to keep the Clardys above water. They staffed up gradually, hiring on artists, programmers, and designers. "In the early days of starting a computer gaming business, each of us that began a new venture faced risks and temptations of expansion," said Bob Clardy. "Some got venture capital, were unable to deliver instant wealth to their investors, and got shut down or sold. Others, like Synergistic, went it alone and never got large or secure enough to last the long haul."

To fund homegrown games, Synergistic took on contract jobs for titles such as Beverly Hillbillies and Homey D' Clown. They didn't turn any heads, but they paid the bills. They also expanded Bob's rolodex. Publishers satisfied with Synergistic's work invited him to pitch designs that led to in-house projects such as Spirit of Excalibur, an RPG where players fight to unite Britain under King Arthur. One publisher always open to entertaining Bob's pitches was Ken Williams (no relation to Blizzard North's Kenny Williams), co-founder of King's Quest developer and mega-publisher Sierra On-Line.

"It was after working with Sierra as a sub-contractor for a few years that Ken broached the idea of taking us over entirely," Bob said.

The acquisition worked out for both parties. Under Sierra's ownership, Synergistic would no longer have to scramble for contracts to make games the team had no interest in making. "The major selling point was that I really enjoyed working with Ken personally," Bob added.

In February of 1996, Comp-U-Card International (CUC), a company known for shopping services such as mail-order clubs that offered retail goods at steep discounts, acquired Sierra On-Line and Davidson & Associates, along with every company under their ownership, for more than $1.8 billion. In early 1997, Bob Clardy and the heads of other studios now owned by CUC gathered in Las Vegas to discuss upcoming projects and how best to allocate their resources. "Each of these companies was being run by type-A [personality] entrepreneurs who had built their firms from nothing and become successful enough to attract the attention of holding companies," said Bob. "There were some large egos and strong opinions about which projects should happen and who would be in charge."

Scott Lynch, a public accountant at Sierra who was promoted to the studio's chief after co-founder Ken Williams joined CUC's executive division, had his eye on one of the hottest prospects on offer. Blizzard North's Diablo was brand-new and already a smash hit, but its developers had opted to move on to a sequel. To CUC's executives, abandoning Diablo was leaving money on the table. Churning out an expansion disc loaded with more levels and items should be a breeze, they reasoned, since the game's codebase and pipeline already existed. Sales would more than make up for any production costs. Since Blizzard North had moved on, another developer in the CUC family could carry the torch.

Synergistic had just finished Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance, a real-time strategy/RPG hybrid couched in Arthurian legend, so Lynch passed the torch to Bob Clardy's team. Bob saw the logic in Sierra farming out work to another studio if Diablo's creators had their hands full. Fulfilling publisher contracts was part of running a small company and being a team player. "Bob got us all into a room," remembered Donald Tsang, a designer at Synergistic, "and said something to the effect of, 'They want us to make a Diablo expansion in six weeks. Can we do it?' We all said yes."

"We were pleased, as we all loved Diablo and respected the folks who had created it," Bob added. "Unfortunately, we were officially a part of Sierra, so it was actually Sierra that got the job and Scott Lynch was the person in charge of it. Scott was not at any of the meetings and never really figured out who wanted what, nor was he familiar with our work, nor did he ever visit to learn anything. He heard what he asked about, and he asked little."

Some parties recalled the two Blizzards being told that an external studio would be developing an expansion set for Diablo. Others remembered CUC executives flying under the radar to green-light an expansion. "The head of Blizzard South, Allen Adham, went on vacation," said Jim Edwards, a programmer at Synergistic. "The parent company took that moment to say, 'Okay, we have to find somebody to make a Diablo expansion pack.' And basically, the expansion had to be done before that guy came back from vacation, because he was dead set against an expansion."

Leaders from the two Blizzards did not take kindly to having their intellectual property treated like a timeshare condo. "When we were more or less forced to do the Hellfire expansion, it was over our protests, kicking and screaming all the way," said Pat Wyatt. "Even though Diablo was Blizzard North's baby, both North and South fought against doing Hellfire because it had become everyone's baby. We felt the quality would be destroyed by having someone external work on it."

To their thinking, Blizzard Entertainment's team had reason to resist outside help. In 1995, they had contracted Cyberlore Studios to develop Beyond the Dark Portal, an expansion for WarCraft II. Letting another developer handle the work had seemed like a win-win: All Cyberlore had to do was whip up multiplayer maps and a single-player campaign that continued the base game's story while Blizzard's internal team devoted its full attention to StarCraft, their next real-time strategy game. During a milestone check-in with Cyberlore, however, Blizzard's managers had deemed the work subpar. They had cancelled the contract, finished Beyond the Dark Portal themselves, and resolved that only in-house teams were capable of nurturing Blizzard properties to an acceptable level of quality.

The two Blizzards' protests fell on deaf ears. CUC was determined to move ahead with an expansion for Diablo, and Synergistic would handle development. Blizzard North's three bosses agreed to help Synergistic when and where they could, under one condition. "Other people in the company, people higher up than us, loved the profitability of Diablo and wanted more," explained Dave Brevik. "So we said, 'As long as we can executive-produce it and get final approval on everything, then I guess we're all right with that. We'll give them all the tools to help them get it done.'"

Erich Schaefer remembered being less upset at sharing custody of the original Diablo than his peers at Blizzard North or South. "I kind of thought, Oh, that's cool. People are making more content for my game. I didn't worry about the quality level. At times I would argue it didn't matter what the quality level was. There were times when we had movie deals in the works, and I was always saying, 'Just make a movie! I don't care if it's a good movie. How could it be? I just want a movie based on Diablo.' I was usually for those kinds of things, and I think Blizzard South was much more hesitant, frankly."

Blizzard North's bosses tapped Matt Householder, a senior producer who had worked with Condor before joining full-time, to act as the liaison on Hellfire, the title of Synergistic's expansion. "My duties were to review and approve or disapprove the work of Synergistic Software and Sierra Online in designing the expansion set, developing its content—art, quest dialog, sound, and voice work—and testing the game," explained Householder, who coordinated with Synergistic via email and phone.

In the early spring of 1997, Householder flew designer Donald Tsang, programmer Jim Edwards, and other Hellfire developers to Redwood City for a meet and greet. Afterwards, the visitors filed into a conference room and learned their ground rules. "Everybody there was incredibly helpful and nice. We had no problems with them," said Jim Edwards. "The only issue they had was, 'We're already starting to talk about what we're doing in Diablo II.' They gave us a whole list of things and said, 'Please don't do this spell, this quest, this theme,' those kinds of things. We were fine with that."

Synergistic's guidelines, set by Householder and co-founder Max Schaefer, were explicit. They had permission to create one new character class; eight dungeon levels; a couple of music tracks; and a smattering of items and spells. To get Synergistic off on the right foot, Blizzard North turned over portions of Diablo's code, a list of suggestions for quality-of-life improvements they had run out of time to implement themselves, and unused audio that could be mined from Diablo's CD-ROM. They even coached Synergistic's programmers and artists on how to create characters and tiles for levels, while stressing that they must steer clear of certain content.

"Since Blizzard North had already begun planning and some design for Diablo II, of course, we needed to ensure that Hellfire wouldn't overlap or conflict," Householder said. "For example, the Barbarian would be one of the new player classes in Diablo II, so we directed Sierra and Synergistic to exclude that class from Hellfire."

Only one restriction, insisted upon by both Blizzards, aggravated Synergistic. "From the beginning of the project, Blizzard insisted no multiplayer. Period," recalled Donald Tsang.

"The decision by Blizzard was, no, they can't use our multiplayer," Pat Wyatt said. "They'd have to rebalance the whole game and it would affect people's impressions of Battle.net if Hellfire is poorly balanced. We didn't have time to balance it ourselves, and they don't have the capability to balance it because they'd never done multiplayer games. So just make it a single-player thing."

Hellfire's developers immediately saw a major problem with Blizzard's mandate. Donald Tsang, a Diablo fan, had spent most of his time playing the game online. There were more difficulty levels to choose from, and more possibilities for character advancement than in the single-player mode.

Shipping their expansion without online connectivity would leave Synergistic open to criticism for omitting one of the original game's biggest selling points.

BACK IN SEATTLE, HELLFIRE'S DEVELOPERS weighed their options. CUC had extended the initial deadline to four months, a better schedule, but still tight.

They prioritized features and fixes that could be made quickly. One must-have addition: No character in Diablo could run. Everybody, monsters and bosses and player-characters, moved at a brisk walk. The game's walking speed made errands such as returning to town to repair weapons and stock up on potions tedious. Synergistic picked up the pace by introducing Jog, an option that doubles the player's movement speed in Tristram.

"We thought of Jog and contacted Blizzard North to see if they would approve it," said Donald Tsang, one of Hellfire's designers. "And they said, 'How did you do that? We had been trying to do that, but we couldn't figure out how to do that without having a special jog animation.' And we said, 'We just skipped every other frame of the [walk] animation.' They said, 'Oh. That's really clever.'"

The developers sanded down other rough edges in the core Diablo experience. In the original game, wounded players receive ministrations by clicking on Pepin the Healer and then choosing the healing option in his list of services. Hellfire's coders massaged the process so clicking on Pepin heals players automatically, an improvement that aligned with Blizzard North's manifesto of cutting down on needless mouse clicks. Blizzard North carried the implementation over to Diablo II.

"They were actually the ones that suggested [mechanical] improvements: the jogging-in-town thing, and the auto-heal when you visit Pepin," Donald recalled of Blizzard North. "Those were two of the things that were on their list. I completely credit them with those."

Operating under Blizzard North's mandate that they could create a single new hero class, Hellfire's team came up with the Monk. Tan, diminutive, and bald, the Monk defies the convention of escalation in RPGs. A rule of thumb in the genre is that players start humbly, wearing simple armor and fighting with a basic weapon such as a club or short sword, and upgrade to bigger and better gear as they fight monsters and gain experience. Hellfire's Monk is at his best when he fights barehanded or with a staff, which increases his chances of blocking attacks, and his defense rating gets a bigger bump from lighter armor such as leather vests.

Finding a place to insert eight new levels proved trickier. The last thing Synergistic wanted to do was break up Diablo's pacing. Instead, they positioned the expansion's new story content as optional quests. "I wanted to make Tristram seem like a town that just had really bad luck," explained Jim Edwards. "Whatever weird things were going to happen to somebody would happen in this town. We came up with this whole idea of this alchemist guy who's playing around with weird chemicals. He spills some on the ground and it turns the plants into intelligent creatures, and creates this whole hive mentality [among the creatures in the area]."

At a certain juncture, players meet Lester the Farmer, a non-player character created by Synergistic, who gives them a rune to destroy a tumor-like growth blocking access to his crops in Tristram's southern region. Popping the growth reveals a gaping hole that leads down into the Festering Nest, a slimy pit infested with insectoid demons.

The Nest's four levels are painted in shades of green and yellow, adding visual flair to the base game's stretch of gloomy dungeons and caves. "I don't think anybody would find that a lovely spot for a vacation," Jim said, laughing. "But it's green, it's glistening, it's moist, it shines. It keeps the creepy factor, but it generates that factor in a way that says, 'You know what? We can do creepy in a way that doesn't look like a Doom rip-off.'"

After defeating a boss at the bottom of the Hive, players collect a map that guides them to a new tomb in Tristram's graveyard off to one side of the cathedral. Entering, they find themselves inside Hellfire's four Crypt levels, rooms and corridors carved from blue stone and fiery artifacts. Many of the enemies that roam the Crypt and Hive levels are more complex than the base game's foes. The Gravedigger, a grotesquely deformed zombie armed with a shovel, digs at corpses to regenerate its health. Liches gain magical immunities on higher difficulty levels, threatening players who rely solely on one type of damage such as lightning or fire. Na-Krul, Hellfire's final boss, can be weakened ahead of his encounter by clicking three tomes near his cage in a particular order.

One of Hellfire's most convenient trappings is the Cornerstone of the World, a small chamber on the first floor of the Crypt. The Cornerstone functions like a bank vault. Players can drop items on the floor of the chamber, then load another character and retrieve their gear. Before the Cornerstone, the only way for a solo player to share gear between his or her characters was to start a session on Battle.net with the character in possession of an item, throw the item on the ground, then quickly log in with another character and join the same session to scoop it up. That approach was risky: A game session could expire if the player failed to reconnect fast enough, or other players might enter the session and steal the item.

Even so, the Cornerstone wasn't perfect. It could only be used to transfer items between single-player characters. To trade online, Hellfire players had to take advantage of an exploit that Synergistic designed in overt defiance of the two Blizzards' marching orders.

SYNERGISTIC FINISHED HELLFIRE AHEAD OF schedule and submitted their content on CD-ROM via FedEx to the two Blizzards for approval. According to Synergistic's developers, Blizzard North was easier to please than Blizzard Entertainment, whose artists took umbrage with what Hellfire's team perceived as quibbling issues such as an off-color pixel in one corner of the screen that needed to be changed to match the others.

"There was a nonzero tendency to err on the side of completely anal," recalled Donald. "Basically, they were so used to having number-one games on the market for months at a time that they said, 'You don't have a deadline for releasing this. In general, the game is ready when it's ready.' We'd never heard that before from a game company because, well, we were probably two months ahead of schedule in finishing this, but then this approval process came along. It poured cold water over us when we thought we were done."

Bob Clardy remembered being more understanding of the Blizzards' shared position. "Both studios did their own play-testing and both were picky," he said. "South was actually pickier. But I do not believe either of them was in the least unreasonable. They each have a reputation for high-quality games. Both like to do a lot of play testing. Diablo was their baby and not ours."

Blizzard North's leaders tended to speak up when Hellfire clashed with Diablo's gothic setting and dark-fantasy tone. "That was a sticky situation where we all wanted the game to be successful," said Dave Brevik. "I think the Synergistic team did a pretty good job. There were just certain requests we made, and they were summarily ignored. The one instance I remember the most is this teddy bear quest. A girl lost her teddy bear or something, and I didn't want the quest in the game. It ended up being in the game. They guaranteed it would be removed, but in the end, it wasn't."

The quest to rescue a lost teddy bear was one of many pieces of content that stemmed from unexpected downtime. Every time Synergistic submitted a build of Hellfire for approval, the Blizzards took their time approving. Rather than sit on their hands, Hellfire's developers stayed busy creating more content, of the mindset that a more robust package would translate to positive feedback from Diablo fans.

Much of the content they added could not be accessed through conventional means, such as receiving a quest from an NPC. Instead the developers required players to unlock extra content by creating a secret text file and populating it with keywords. Some Easter eggs, like a level brimming with demonic cows, were baked in early during development. The idea was to include a cow quest that poked fun at a popular rumor. "I was the voice of the cow," said Jim Edwards. "Blizzard North was aware of that for a long time. Even if you know what they ended up doing with the cow quest in Diablo II, ours was not at all the same. Ours was designed 100 percent to be a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Internet rumor about the secret cow quest in Diablo. Making a nod to that could not have happened in Diablo II. An add-on to Diablo has a much bigger impact of, 'No, really, there's now a secret cow quest in Diablo!' But if you say, 'There's a secret cow quest in Diablo II,' it comes off even more like, 'Yeah, we know about this gag.' With our game, it became more like we unlocked it."

Other secrets were more controversial. By creating the secret text file, players could type in commands to unearth two hidden hero classes: The Bard, able to brandish two weapons at once; and the Barbarian, who was granted a damage bonus for holding a two-handed weapon in one hand. Both characters were leftovers from early in Hellfire's development, before Synergistic's designers had decided on the Monk as their single, sanctioned hero. Both the Bard and Barbarian had been scrapped so early on that neither featured unique artwork. The Bard was a recycled Rogue model from Diablo, and the Barbarian, a carbon copy of the game's Warrior.

"I was at the time also looking at the wielding code and I figured out that it would be pretty easy to allow a single class to wield weapons in both hands," explained Donald. "I had no idea whether it was balanced or not, but basically, since it was going to be a completely experimental, extra, no-balance-is-required character. It was just for fun."

When the two Blizzards caught wind of unauthorized changes, they asked Synergistic and Sierra to remove them. "[Our parent company] was adamant that Hellfire would ship, but they also pressured us to appease Blizzard South as much as possible," said Jim. "One of the things we were supposed to do was get rid of all the Easter eggs. Obviously, we didn't, although we did hide them pretty well."

"Toward the end of Hellfire's development, Synergistic had added a Barbarian player class," Householder said. "I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I remember discovering it and Blizzard demanding it be removed. The next test version didn't have it, and once all the other issues were addressed, Blizzard approved Hellfire for production."

A miscommunication may have led to the Barbarian character sticking around in Hellfire's code. "I think, although I cannot be sure, there was a version problem between what we had sent on CD and what was actually in our code repository," Donald said. "The Barbarian wasn't in the list of stuff they saw before it released. It was on one of our machines just to play around with. And I can't remember if it was basically, we were so pissed off that they were being so insistent on not [including] networked multiplayer that we just put another character in."

Hellfire shipped to stores in November 1997, ten months after Diablo's release and several months past Synergistic's initial due date. Industrious players quickly uncovered its trove of Easter eggs, and instructions on how to create the text file needed to unlock the additional content—including the teddy bear quest and unfinished heroes—made the rounds online. One hidden gem was a multiplayer mode that allowed players to party up if they connected their PCs to the same local network. It was no Battle.net, but it was the next best thing.

The expansion's developers had programmed the network-multiplayer option out of spite, and out of a desire to give their product the highest possible odds of success. "As it shipped, Hellfire would not support multiplayer at all, which we, the programmers, considered unreasonable," said Donald. "That was one of the reasons the whole Easter egg thing came about. Because we tried it ourselves and LAN multiplayer worked fine. So, of course, that was the first thing we enabled in the text file."

The Synergistic team believed they had operated within the parameters set by the two Blizzards. They had been forbidden from linking Hellfire to Battle.net, but assumed that other multiplayer protocols, such as modem and local networks, were fair game. The problem was that they had cracked Blizzard's most precious file, storm.dll. "The source code was basically in C, and we were given everything but the source to the DLL," said Donald. "Specifically, we didn't have any assets to storm.dll. We were told we would not have access to that, don't ask."

"Basically, they did the typical engineer thing," added Jim Edwards, "which is, if you're talking to a non-engineer, you can say bullshit, and no one knows to call you on it. The programmer who wrote storm.dll was hard at work [on StarCraft]. We could not ask him questions, we could not recompile storm.dll. It was full of their secret sauce, proprietary information, so don't ask. They would only say no. Bob got us a copy of the source code. We looked at it and said, 'Yeah, we can do this. This will be easy.'"

Short for dynamic linking library, a DLL file contains source code that runs behind a curtain, its workings known only to the engineers who created it and others assigned to maintain it. Written by lead Battle.net architect Mike O'Brien, storm.dll was packaged into every Blizzard title released from 1996 through 2004—Diablo 1 and II, StarCraft, and WarCraft II and III—and boasted updates and optimizations to Blizzard's unique and secretive methods of managing memory, compressing data, and implementing network play.

Higher-ups at both Blizzards discovered Hellfire's multiplayer functionality at the same time as the rest of the game's community. "Once it became public knowledge on the fan forums, Blizzard, as you might imagine, tore Sierra and Synergistic a proverbial new one," Householder said.

"There was some kind of hack they injected into the game which allowed multiplayer," said Pat Wyatt. "It was like, 'Don't mess with our game. We're forced to work with you guys, so go and make something that doesn't suck, if you can. Otherwise, just don't mess with it. Don't make multiplayer.' We tried to put them in a box. There was a huge long-running battle between the studio that did Hellfire, and Allen [Adham] and David Brevik. Many of us got to hear about it. It would come up all the time in meetings. It was just this rolling disaster."

"We tried talking back and forth, Synergistic and Blizzard," Dave Brevik added. "Those conversations were pretty heated. I was pretty young and cocky, so I'm sure they weren't easy conversations, especially because the head of Synergistic had been in the industry much longer than I had, so maybe I wasn't as respectful as I should have been."

"I would say they were not pleasant interactions," Max Schaefer said. "They were really some of the more uncomfortable meetings I've had in my life, going and telling them they couldn't do some of the things they were doing because it wasn't even remotely appropriate for the game. The rank-and-file guys I'm sure we had much more pleasant interactions with, but the upper management was very resistant to our input, and very hostile and confrontational."

"We found out that Blizzard was not pleased because Bob Clardy came to talk to all of us with a frown on his face saying, 'Blizzard is not pleased,'" Donald explained. "He was in on it, on the Easter eggs. He took full responsibility for it, which was rather cool of him. He basically was of the opinion that if they couldn't take the joke, screw them."

Bob owned up to giving consent, but asserted that Sierra head Scott Lynch was at least partially responsible for the upheaval that followed. "We worked closely with Blizzard North regarding game code, editors, and how to get art and features into Diablo. But Blizzard South handled publication preferences, and it was our producer at Sierra that had those conversations. We sometimes got filtered summaries, but usually we heard little or nothing. He certainly did not communicate the presence of Easter-egg features to Blizzard South until after Hellfire was released. This was not some sinister conspiracy, but rather poor communications because too many intermediaries were involved."

According to Bob, Hellfire was far and away Synergistic's most financially successful project. The cachet of the Diablo name, coupled with the smart changes Synergistic made to the core Diablo experience, carried it to a fair critical reception. While editors at Computer Gaming World lauded the additional monsters, music, and levels—and named it a finalist for their "Best Add-On" award the following year—they predictably expressed confusion at the lack of support for Battle.net. GameSpot's editors voiced similar concerns, gleeful at the inclusion of new items and gameplay enhancements, but recommending that players interested in online play give Hellfire a pass.

In addition to being its most commercially successful project, Hellfire was Synergistic's last. "As soon as the game was released and they found out about some of the Easter eggs, somebody from Blizzard—I don't remember who it was—said, 'None of you will ever work in this industry again,'" Donald recalled.

While some heads may have rolled due to conflicts over Hellfire, Bob Clardy presented a different take on the fate of Synergistic Software. Due to factors including poor management from Sierra's parent company, CUC, that had led to the departure of key personnel including co-founder Ken Williams, and a major corporate scandal perpetrated by CUC executives, Synergistic and three other divisions of Sierra were closed and nearly 200 employees were laid off on February 22, 1999, a day that became known as Chainsaw Monday. "Just about every principal from all the studios quit or moved to some other firm in the next few years as none of us could stand working for Cendant," he explained, referring to the conglomerate formed as the result of a merger between CUC and Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS) in 1997. "They were a company that valued franchises, but not people. The assets they wanted were the game titles; they couldn't care less about the people who created them. So, we all went looking for pastures that were more receptive to the value of people that can create something."

"When they finally agreed to take things out, they didn't follow through, and the situation got pretty ugly," Dave Brevik admitted. "There were lost jobs. It was not a fun time for anybody. It was frustrating for us that Diablo was our IP and they did whatever they wanted to [it]. In the end, we didn't have final say or creative control. And at the same time, it was sad because those guys at Synergistic were really passionate about it. It's just that we never saw eye to eye. It just didn't go right."

"I think fault for Hellfire lies on both sides," Matt Householder said. "I think Blizzard as a whole was and is extremely picky. When we asked Synergistic to do something, it wasn't a suggestion. It was a mandate. I think that message was never really delivered as sincerely as it needed to be. I think there was lots of pressure, deadlines, and it felt like too little, too late, and maybe Bob Clardy needed to just get the project done so he could move on to something else."

"Realistically, we probably should have done the expansion," said Michio Okamura. "At the end of Diablo we were a solid team. It was pretty much like, 'Here's an idea,' and boom—it's in there, we're testing things out, making it. That was one of those things that made me realize that in game development, the priority is getting the product done. But secondary to that and just as important is having a solid team. A team has to create that product. That is a worthwhile investment."

Chapter 4: Bases

It was months of us hanging out, playing video games. We still came into work, but we weren't really working. Every couple weeks Dave Brevik would say, "I want to try out some new thing,' so we experimented with some new technology."

-Eric Sexton, artist and designer, Blizzard North

This is going to sound funny, but I've never played as many video games in my life than when I worked at Blizzard North. Never.

-Kris Renkewitz, artist, Blizzard North

I don't think that resentment ever really went away. Some of the old-timers who were there from the very beginning, who helped build the company--[resentment] is going to be there, every time something happens.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

IN FEBRUARY 1997, nearly two months since Diablo hit shelves, Blizzard North's developers started to emerge from their post-release hibernation.

"The time off [after Diablo] really wasn't that long," Michio Okamura said. "It's just that to the artists, it seemed kind of long because they finished their work first."

Artists sketched monsters and spitballed ideas for levels. Matt Uelmen, Blizzard North's composer, conducted experiments in his noise room, a storage-closet-turned-laboratory where he strummed guitars and recorded samples. He had spent the past two months experimenting in Gigasampler, a software suite that lets musicians record samples of instruments. Using Gigasampler, he could arrange a virtual orchestra and blend sounds any way he saw fit. When Uelmen wasn't concocting aural delights, he studied music. One of his goals for Diablo II was to compose a dynamic score that ebbed and flowed as players moved from place to place.

Stieg Hedlund was one of the first to shake off his fatigue and get back to work. "I can definitely see how the majority of the team may have perceived [that time period] as a lull, but a lot of stuff was going on in the context of the core team," he said. "The core team was Erich, Max, Dave, Matt Householder, Jesse McReynolds, and me, pulling in some art resources for tests from time to time."

One of Blizzard North's newer hires, Stieg had almost been one of its first. Back in 1995 he had answered a job ad posted by Condor, Inc. Stieg had showed up for his interview to find boxes stacked along the walls and beat-up chairs and desks scattered around a cramped office. While Dave, Max, and Erich seemed nice, their project, a one-on-one fighter called Justice League Task Force for Sega Genesis, had been unappealing. Stieg was an artist, exactly what Condor needed, but was looking to branch into design. "What it really came down to was healthcare," he confirmed. "They hadn't gotten around to it, and weren't really sure what they would do about it, and since my wife was in grad school at the time, I needed a job that could provide that."

Following a tenure at Sega Technical Institute, Stieg dropped in on the bosses and was impressed by how Diablo was shaping up. Dave, Max, and Erich made him another offer, and he joined the team in mid-summer of 1996. Diablo was just about finished, so he put it through its paces: checking bugs found in old versions against new code to make sure a fix had been applied, filling in blanks such as taking pre-existing animation frames to create idle poses for characters while they stood around in town waiting for players to give them a command. "When I first saw Diablo, it crystallized a lot of what I thought [about roleplaying games]. I dug that it took a lot of its cues from Doom and Quake rather than the D&D-based stuff I'd become sour on. I thought Diablo needed some polish, but it was a game that would be at least popular [enough] to warrant a sequel, where I could explore even more of the things I was interested in."

Almost immediately after returning to the office in early 1997, Stieg got the ball rolling on Diablo II, dividing his time between high-level concepts such as overhauling playable characters, and technical processes such as managing data. Dave and the other coders had learned the C programming language as they built Diablo, sparing little thought to structuring data. That data was hardcoded, meaning embedded somewhere in the code and difficult for anyone who wasn't a programmer to modify.

Stieg introduced the bosses to a more efficient method of organizing and manipulating data. "I knew I wanted that data moved into Excel spreadsheets that I could change quickly and write into the game."

Spreadsheets dramatically streamlined data manipulation. Any member of the team could pull up a spreadsheet and plug in values to set player attributes such as strength and health, stretch or shrink dimensions of level sizes, dial in the odds of spawning a certain monster or item in a given region, and tweak a monster's life points and damage.

Erich took to spreadsheets immediately, a cerebral style of design and number crunching he likened to sudoku. "There's got to be some weird part of my brain that just likes to organize numbers. I enjoy working on spreadsheets. What I really like to do is compare numbers, write little macros or formulas that can test all the data I have in there."

Between cultivating spreadsheets and experimenting with artwork or audio, Blizzard North's developers binged on games to unwind, and to keep their fingers on the industry's pulse. On the subject of graphics, studios around them seemed to be unanimous: 2D was out, 3D was in. Blizzard North's brain trust disagreed. Games like Moto Racer on Sony's PlayStation console pumped out polygons, but at a low number that gave the game a blocky, muddy appearance. Most of North's artists preferred sprites, two-dimensional images made out of tiny pixels.

Every now and then, Dave Brevik emerged from his office with a request: he needed this type of character, that type of background. Nothing complex, just something thrown together so he could test a piece of code. An artist or two would respond and hand off the work to Dave, who disappeared back into his office. He left his door open, an invitation to anyone who felt like riffing off ideas. One experiment showed promise. Jon Morin, a fresh-faced programmer who had joined up near the end of Diablo's development, teamed up with Dave and experienced coder Doron Gartner to design an engine. Their tech ran on voxels, a 3D, cube-shaped pixel. Each voxel holds a single color, so they look like Legos. Excited to contribute, Jon rolled up his sleeves and dug in.

Matt Householder also got back into the swing of things quickly following Diablo's release. When he wasn't putting out fires between Synergistic Software and the two Blizzards, he pored over resumes. Even though the particulars of Diablo II were still hazy beyond the vague direction of "Like Diablo, but bigger," Householder knew that a bigger game called for a bigger team, particularly on the art side of production. He had an eye for recruiting after years of contracting studios, and deemed Kris Renkewitz a perfect fit.

Kris got his start as an artist penciling iconic comic-book heroes such as Iron Man and members of the Justice League. On a whim, he picked up a copy of Next Generation magazine and answered a job ad for a videogame artist at Eidos Interactive. When Eidos expressed interest, Kris relocated to the studio's San Francisco office. After thirteen months bouncing around projects, Kris was cut in a round of layoffs. He was hired back on, but his boss made a clerical error: Kris had already been given, and cashed, a severance check. Stuck in limbo, Kris was receptive when Ion Storm, a studio founded in Texas by Doom and Quake co-creator John Romero, courted him and promised a $70,000 salary. When Electronic Arts came knocking, Kris got EA to match Ion Storm's bid. In no hurry to pick and choose, he caught up on games he'd missed working overtime at Eidos. A friend recommended Diablo, and Kris was hooked within minutes of his first click.

A few days after his resume ended up in Matt Householder's hands, Kris was seated across a conference table from Max and Erich Schaefer. He asked them what he would be doing at Blizzard. They told him he could do whatever he wanted. Nonplussed, he pressed for specifics.

"The big thing for me is they wanted me to be the cinematic guy. I saw this opportunity to go into this film spot at this company and get my film legs, CG film legs, and move to the next phase in my career, and these guys were going to allow me to get there. I think what they wanted to do is get away from using Blizzard South as much as possible. They wanted to feel isolated in a positive way. They probably thought, Why should they do our cinematics when we can handle them here?"

Kris weighed his options. Accepting Ion Storm's offer would mean relocating to Texas. Electronic Arts was already one of the industry's most influential publishers, but he didn't care for the vibe there. Employees dressed in t-shirts and jeans, but all the money and prestige came with glass ceilings at every level of the strictly enforced corporate structure. Blizzard North was offering $50,000, significantly less than Ion Storm and Electronic Arts. Yet the office reminded Kris of Eidos. Small. Organic. Off the cuff. The opportunity to get his feet wet directing animated movies outweighed the pay cut.

On his first day of work in late February 1997, Kris immediately wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his career. "When I got there, I was like, What the fuck's going on, here? Nobody was working on anything. Max and Dave probably had the best Ultima Online characters in the history of Ultima Online. Those guys played it fucking religiously: every day, all day long."

As the staff grew more comfortable with Kris, they brought him up to speed on their company's history.

How Blizzard North had been called Condor, and had started as a three-man operation.

How new hires had piled into Max's beat-up Vanagon, picked out a used desk from the local office supply store down the road, and trundled it back to the office, where the newbie had sat down on the floor and assembled it piece by piece.

How the bosses served as the filter through which all final decisions passed, but gave their team free reign to propose and fight for any idea.

How everyone, including the bosses, was still in a state of amazement over what they had accomplished together. Diablo was huge and getting bigger. Sales and data aggregator PC Data listed the game as the best-selling PC title over January and February 1997. By April, over half a million customers had installed Diablo; approximately 400,000 of those had played on Battle.net.

How over time, a hairline fracture had threaded its way down the middle of that egalitarian culture. The source of that fracture, as well as the source of the camaraderie that was ebbing away, was Diablo. "We saw sales, and it was like, 'Yay, sales are good!'" said Rick Seis. "But you're so close, you can't see what's going on. It wasn't until we started to see articles later on. They bring up Rogue and Moria, and all these old games, and now Diablo. It's the action-RPG, the ARPG. We got to make a moniker for a particular type of game. That's when you realize how powerful [the Diablo name] is in the industry, versus just great sales." One afternoon in 1998, a flatbed truck rumbled into the lot. Dave Brevik invited the team outside to watch as the truck backed up to the door and a brand-new, gleaming Ferrari rolled out of the back. Dave hopped behind the wheel, flashing his winning smile while some of his friends took pictures. Though he did not know it at the time, many of the grins they directed at him had been painted on.

"You don't have your Ferrari delivered to work," said Jon Morin, programmer. "Why don't you just flaunt in our faces that you have way more money than we do, and we all worked on the same game together?"

On another occasion, Dave hosted a barbecue in his mansion. Erich, a travel-holic, booked jaunts across Europe that took him away from the office for a week or two at a time, though most of his trips in 1997 took place during the cooldown period following Diablo. Max developed a keen interest in investing and never missed an opportunity to talk about the stock market.

"We were happy for them, but they started to kind of flaunt it," explained Kelly Johnson, artist. "That's what we didn't like. I remember Dave came to work in this new red sports car. He was like, 'Come look at my new car!' and we'd go, 'Wow, yeah, that's bad! That's a cool-ass car!' Then he got a second car, and we were still, 'Yeah!' Then by the third car, it was like, 'Wait a minute. What about us? When do we get to have a new something?'"

"There was a lot of bitterness when that first hit because you would see them get this or that and it didn't quite feel like a team that everybody had sacrificed for," Pete Brevik said. "Because of the area and seeing all the money that was out there, it became disheartening after a while. It got ridiculous with what you would see daily."

Blizzard North's parking lot was one of many hosting flashy rides. In 1997, the dot-com bubble was swelling. Corporations and conglomerates like CUC traded millions in stocks for half-baked ideas that only existed on paper, or in the minds of entrepreneurs dreaming of becoming the next overnight millionaires. Webvan, founded in 1996, promised to deliver groceries to customers' doorsteps within half an hour of checking out online. Pets.com sprouted up in 1998 and raised $300 million in venture capital based on a system that let users shop for supplies on its website and have them delivered to their doorstep. The company was featured in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and again during the 2000 Super Bowl, an ad that cost the company $1.2 million and garnered excitement thanks mostly to its sock-puppet mascot.

Many companies announced initial public offerings, or IPOs—making stock options of a formerly private company available for purchase to the public. Some IPOS brought in hundreds of millions based on the promise of goods and services that never materialized. Unlike many pie-in-the-sky companies, Blizzard North's success could be measured according to a tangible product. Kris's new colleagues boasted that Michio Okamura had created four out of every five monsters that haunted Diablo's dungeons.

Michio never made such assertions. Modest and quiet, he simply wanted what a growing number of employees at Blizzard North wanted: fair treatment. "We came up with the game, it broke records when it came out. So everybody was telling us that we should all be rich. That's the problem, too. I think we listened to too many people saying, 'You guys should be rich.' It's kind of hard to ignore everybody telling you that. We'd talk to people, and they'd say, 'You must be rich! You must be a millionaire!' No. Not even close."

Michio and Rick liked to joke over which of them was Condor's true first employee: Rick had been hired before Michio, but Michio had been able to start sooner. His long tenure, and the culture he and other Condor veterans had built over years, made Rick one of the bosses' staunchest supporters. He believed that because Dave, Max, and Erich had founded Condor, they deserved the largest slice of the pie.

Others disagreed. As the rift widened, developers slipped through. Ben Haas and Doron Gartner struck out on their own and made Throne of Darkness, an action-RPG where players controlled four samurai able to wield various weapons and abilities. Eric Sexton left Blizzard North, though he would return in 1998. "I hold those guys in high regard. They were my stepping stone into the games industry. At the same time, they made a lot of promises. They promised we'd all be driving Porsches by the time we were thirty. Well, they were the only ones driving Porches. They had multiple hundred-thousand-dollar cars. Meanwhile, Michio and I were still driving our beat-up old cars."

"Everything was still very much running in start-up mode, despite the success of Diablo," said Stieg Hedlund. "This slowly started to get better: healthcare plans, 401(k) programs and things of that sort started to trickle in."

Kris sympathized with his teammates, but he was in a completely different frame of mind. He was young, hungry, and free of the baggage that weighed down Blizzard North's more disgruntled veterans. He was ready to make his mark. Prior to the departures of Pattie Tougas and Ben Haas, Kris enlisted them to the studio's nascent cinematics team. The guys swapped ideas for their first project, a brief trailer that would be used to announce Diablo II to the world and set the mood for the upcoming sequel. Taking up pencils and sketchpads, they drafted storyboards outlining a crawl through Tristram's graveyard. The video would pan upward to show the town's cathedral engulfed in flames, imagery that presaged the Lord of Terror's return.

Bringing their cinematic to life on the screen was far more complicated. Kris wanted to use 3D Studio Max to create detail-heavy models and animations, but the other guys weren't familiar with it. Dave, Max, and Erich opened Blizzard North's coffers and footed the bill for Pattie, Ben, and Kelly Johnson to take courses.

"At the time there were only a few schools offering courses in 3D software and none were in the Bay Area, but Autodesk set up some courses to be taught locally since they were also a Bay Area company," Kelly said. "Essentially we first learned the software on our own using 3D Studio versions 3 and 4. I loved learning animation. I would do it on the commute home on Caltrain, I would do it at home in the evenings and on weekends. I was like a kid in a candy shop."

Kelly proved an eager student. During work on Diablo, he had stepped up and learned how to model, texture, and animate characters, all without any formal training or experience prior to joining Condor. Ben Boos, another recent hire and a Diablo fan, joined the budding cinematics division. Ben had met Kenny Williams at a job fair at San Francisco. Kenny had leafed through Ben's portfolio and was blown away by the young artist's attention to detail on every medieval weapon, monster, and suit of armor he painted, and invited him to interview at the studio.

"I recall that I was asked by Erich Schaefer to go into the conference room to draw for ten minutes or so," Ben recalled. "I almost died on the spot, but I still remember trying to doodle to save my life. I think, in retrospect, Erich was just testing me to see how I reacted to pressure. I say this, because I'm pretty sure I spazzed out trying to draw on command. I didn't really have any technical experience and told them so, and they said, 'Well, you can learn that stuff; we can show you. But art styles we can't teach you. Welcome to the fold."

Off in their own world, Kris, Pattie, Kelly, and Ben Boos tackled their pet project with fervor. Harnessing the greater processing power of 3D Studio Max, they wove a slow, dream-like sequence of shots depicting skeletons cutting down knights. With each shot, the camera pulled in closer to Tristram's cathedral. Ben animated an inferno that raged through the church and surged through the cross-shaped windows. "It was great, because we were kind of crunching ahead of the rest," Ben said. "While everyone else was sort of gearing up, we were trying to meet some early milestones. So we were pulling some weekends, and it was just great. A little bit of beer, sometimes we'd barbecue. It was phenomenal, kind of a baby crunch, which helped prepare me for what came later."

By early August, the time had come to consult the experts. Matt Samia, Duane Stinnett, and the other gurus down at Blizzard South had made cinematics for WarCraft, WarCraft II, and Diablo, and each production had sparkled brighter than the last. Getting some feedback from their compatriots down south couldn't hurt. North's team copied their materials to a disc and flew down to Irvine.

As the plane alighted on the runway, butterflies squirmed in their bellies. Blizzard North's team had interacted directly with South only a few times: when Pat Wyatt and others had relocated to Redwood City to wrap up Diablo, and in June at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show in Atlanta, when both teams had scouted competing products and met up to attend parties with other developers. Still, they had heard rants from the three bosses about the back-and-forth battles between Blizzard North and South during Diablo's development: arguments over the best way to implement spell-casting systems, over whether the game should be real-time or turn-based, and over its difficulty. Such arguments often broke out between creative and impassioned parties who believed their way was the right way. The only way. Those arguments also engendered fierce loyalty. As eager as Kris, Pattie, Kelly, and Ben were to meet and greet other Blizzard developers, they wondered if they were about to set foot in enemy territory.

To their relief, the rank-and-file developers at Blizzard South were gracious hosts. They were just like their friends up north, ordinary guys who came to work in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals, and loved making games. They shook hands with Matt Samia, Stu Rose, Harley Huggins, and a few other members of South's cinematics department, which was also in nascent stages.

Harley and the others had been working on their own Diablo II trailer: Planning could be as loose at Blizzard Entertainment as at North. More of a teaser than a trailer, Entertainment wanted a way to announce to the world that Diablo II was in development without showing anything concrete. A storm raged as a rickety wagon trundled up a steep mountain path. Inside the wagon, a hooded man looked into the camera to reveal an ashen complexion. The final shot of the teaser was of a large, red jewel, the Soulstone the player-character had stabbed into his forehead at the end of Diablo, lying abandoned on the muddy path.

Admittedly, the guys from Blizzard South were surprised that another cinematics team was working on Diablo II content, since South had handled all cinematics in Diablo. "Then, all the sudden, somebody said, 'By the way, Blizzard North just said they're starting their own cinematics team, and they don't need you guys anymore.' We were like, what?" said Harley. "Finally, we said, 'What are they working on?' They sent down this trailer, this announcement trailer, and it was pretty bad."

Behind their pasted-on grins, Blizzard South's crew offered constructive criticism. They wanted to add a few cuts to smooth out the trailer, and work alongside the North guys to record audio. "We went down there with some raw material, and Matt Samia, the big cheese in the cinematics department, sat at his desk," Ben Boos recounted. "I still remember him throwing his big leather boots up on the desk and putting Tom Waits on the player, and pouring Wild Turkey in his office. He sat there, swilled his drink, looked over our stuff, and then he went to work. That's when I started to realize, Oh crap—what are we doing? They had such a good handle on cinematics."

"At first we were apprehensive: 'What are they doing to our stuff?'" Kris added. "On day two, we all got along: 'Oh, cool. We're all chipping in and figuring out how to make something cooler.' It all worked out in the end. We all got along rather well. At least we thought we did. I don't know what they were thinking."

The artists from Blizzard South were cordial and constructive in their feedback, but felt North's work ethic left a great deal to be desired. As Huggins remembered the visit, Blizzard North's guys nodded along and then split for the beach at the earliest opportunity.

"We didn't see them for, like, three days. We worked on the audio. They came back at the end, we showed it to them, they said, 'Okay, fine,' and they left."

Kris and Ben Boos remembered events differently. They had their share of fun, true, but Blizzard South's developers partook as well. One evening, a few of the South guys took them out for a night on the town. They hopped from bar to bar, shooting pool, buying each other rounds of drinks, and butchering songs on karaoke machines. On their way back to the hotel, Ben, Kelly, and Pattie cut loose Blizzard North-style.

"I was getting up to a max of about sixty and Pattie was still laughing and telling me to go faster," Kelly said. "Then Ben Boos climbed up on the roof. At this point we sort of lost our minds because these guys are on the roof laughing and egging me on to go faster so I just floored it. I did this for about four lights."

After a week, North's trailer received its finishing touches. The North crew said their goodbyes and headed for the door. On their way out, Allen Adham pulled them aside and offered them jobs. They could give notice at Blizzard North, and move down south to work with the cinematics team. Before they left, Allen asked them to keep the conversation private from Dave, Max, and Erich.

"We all got back on the plane and were like, 'What should we do?'" Kris said.

"They offered us all a job right there on the spot," Ben Boos said. "So here I'm this youngin' newly on the team, and suddenly I'm being asked to do this. It was a strange moment. I turned them down, and I never regretted that. I think all told, I turned down four offers to go down there over the years."

Word of the offer spread through Blizzard Entertainment. Most developers weren't surprised at the managers' attempt to poach. "You can look at the number of titles Blizzard has cancelled to get an idea of how picky they are," said Jeffrey Vaughn, an artist at Entertainment. "It wasn't uncommon for Blizzard to look at a potential developer, decide there wasn't quite enough there to justify a partnership, poach someone they liked, and move on."

By the time Kris, Ben, Pattie, and Kelly pulled into Blizzard North's parking lot, they had made up their minds. "I felt that was too shady," Kris said. "I felt it was going to screw over Erich, Max, and Dave. It didn't feel like Blizzard South was asking us for the better of the whole company. It felt very selfish. I really liked Max and Erich. They're really nice guys, and I was having a good time working at their company."

"I was mighty tempted by their offer, but I was very, very loyal to my guys, the big three up north," Ben agreed.

That September, their teaser trailer debuted at the European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) and set the gaming community on fire. Thousands of Diablo fans still nursing sore clicking fingers took to Internet forums to speculate over the dungeons they would get to explore, the monsters they would get to kill, and the treasures they would get to covet. Kris Renkewitz basked in the glow of the trailer's reception. He had made the right choice. Dave, Max, and Erich gave them the freedom to take the ball and run with it, and he and his team had just scored a slam dunk.

Weeks later, the bosses at both Blizzards conferred. Afterwards, North's managers passed along word to Kris and the rest of their cinematics team that in-game movies would be handled by South's more experienced crew.

"They really wanted to do that, and in the end we decided it really wasn't cost effective," Dave said. "I think there were a lot of politics involved, too. Blizzard South wanted to do it, they already had invested in this group [cinematics] team, and I don't know if they believed in our talent as much as theirs. It was hard to argue with the level of quality of the Blizzard cinematics at that point. They did a fantastic job."

Bosses from both Blizzards also decided to abandon the voxel-based graphics engine they were building for Diablo II. Jon Morin and Dave had continued to bang away at it after Doron left, but progress was slow. None of them had experience writing engines. Between spitting out voxels for terrain and more voxels to render characters, their graphics tests chugged at between two to four frames per second, making it a veritable slideshow.

Dave remembered pulling the plug on his embryonic engine himself. "I think [it] really started to fall apart when we started to do things like, we wanted an equipment system that allowed us to change different parts of your sprite," he said.

"The thing is, that's really all voxels are good for: terrain," Jon Morin added. "If you wanted detail, voxels just didn't have it. Also, they were kind of expensive in terms of processing power. You put one thing on screen and everything became jerky-jerky. Imagine if you had the whole screen full of those. Everybody would need 3D [graphics] cards. At the time, not everybody was getting those because they were expensive."

Blizzard South's managers remembered events differently. During a studio visit, Pat Wyatt and Mike O'Brien took note of the engine's virtually nonexistent progress.

"We went back and said, 'This sucks. They're never going to finish this. It looks bad and it's slow, and they'll just never be able to finish at this rate,'" Pat remembered. "We told Allen to can it and he did. So, they may feel like [they made the decision], but it was all based on that visit from me and Mike."

"They may have said something," Dave rejoined, "but I think in the end, it was that we couldn't really prove that doing voxels... I mean, it was kind of on us to make sure that this would work, and we just weren't getting the quality that we wanted."

Allen called Dave and recommended Blizzard North return to what its team knew best: 2D games heavy on addictive gameplay and light on technical requirements. Dave, Max, and Erich agreed.

The two Blizzards also saw eye-to-eye on another decision. Other than assisting with play-testing and expanding Battle.net, which was operated down in Irvine, Blizzard South would leave Blizzard North's team to handle Diablo II on their own. That was fine with the bosses and their crew.

"We had to prove that to ourselves: 'We're just as Blizzard as you guys,'" said Kelly Johnson. "That's how we were going into Diablo II: We're now Blizzard, we have our own successful franchise, and we can build on it. We're not the little brother. We're equal partners. It's not Blizzard and Blizzard North; it's Blizzard South and Blizzard North."

"They closed themselves off, and we said, 'You guys have to do this. We don't want to have to bail [you] out again,'" said Pat Wyatt. "So it was much more up to them to be able to sort out all their issues."

Chapter 5: Orcs in Space

You could be yourself at the company. We were acting like old married couples.

-Stu Rose, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

StarCraft was very much envisioned as a slam-dunk project. Not that there were A and B teams, but we thought, We don't have to put all our best people on this. Blizzard would put a bunch of people on it that can carry this through the next generation, and everybody else can go work on other stuff.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of research and development, Blizzard Entertainment

Development cultures tend to be very insular. The more the development team is proud and passionate about what they're making, the more difficult it is to work easily with external teams who might have had input.

-Jeff Strain, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

IN LATE 1994, WarCraft: Orcs & Humans caught the eye of a growing number of players interested in playing armchair general. In the burgeoning genre of real-time strategy (RTS) games, players built up fortifications and trained troops to raze the opponent's base. One of the aspects that set WarCraft apart was its fantasy theme: Players trained squads of human soldiers in gleaming mail, or swarms of orcs with yellowed tusks and axes stained with blood. WarCraft's shining attraction was multiplayer over modems or on local networks, giving players opportunities to pit their strategies and reflexes against one another.

If the first game made a few ripples, 1995's WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was a tsunami. Graphics and sound effects were crisper. The Orc and Human factions sported new troops ranging from dwarven gryphon riders and dragons to two-headed ogres and lithe elvan archers. Blizzard Entertainment doubled the game's capacity for multiplayer by opening matches up to eight players. Combined with fast and intuitive gameplay, WarCraft II became the first Blizzard title to sell one million units just under one year of its release. In the era of multimedia-heavy titles such as The 7th Guest and Myst, adventures that were more like interactive movies than video games, Blizzard's RTS phenomenon reached the top of bestseller charts.

To Blizzard Entertainment co-founder and president Allen Adham, WarCraft II's success represented a huge leap forward on the path he had envisioned for the company back in 1991: Another brick in the empire he aspired to build. To Chris Metzen, a rising designer and writer, WarCraft II "rocked balls," a coarse yet evocative descriptor, and a mission statement of sorts. For a game to "rock balls," it had to be bold, epic, and awesome.

WarCraft II had raised and set the bar. Blizzard's next game had to do as well or better. "If you bring in the same amount of money every year, you're worthless, for the software business, anyway," Pat Wyatt explained. "You have to bring in more. So we needed to split into multiple teams and start doing more games because we were under this incredible demand to grow."

By the time WarCraft II hit the million-seller marker, Condor, Inc. was working on Diablo, with Blizzard Entertainment helping fund the game as publisher. Meanwhile, Allen and his team discussed what type of game they should make next. Bob Davidson, president of Blizzard's parent company Davidson & Associates, urged Allen to release a game by the end of 1996 to keep up momentum. Sticking to real-time strategy, a genre the team had popularized and helped to define, made sense. WarCraft II's engine could be used as a foundation on which a small team of developers could build another game, while a second team laid groundwork—concept art, story ideas, brainstorming gameplay systems—for a brand-new property.

Pat echoed Allen's thinking. "It can't just be that everything flows down to a small group of people to do everything because they become bottlenecks. They have only so much time to do things. So you have to have a strong leadership culture that fosters people taking on leadership roles, and that's really challenging for companies that are small: To grow and release control from the top folks." If Blizzard could develop several games in parallel, the bottleneck would be broken, and, in so doing, the company could foster more leaders to take charge of future projects.

On the real-time strategy side, Allen and the others discussed themes. Everyone at Blizzard from managers to staff were self-professed geeks who devoured fiction and tabletop games set in fantasy and sci-fi settings. The most obvious choice was to dive into WarCraft III, but the team was suffering burnout from over two years of designing orcs and humans. Since WarCraft covered high-fantasy staples, their new RTS should take to the stars. It would be called StarCraft, a title that made clear its lineage to WarCraft's technological underpinnings: same type of game, same graphics, but with unique factions and battlefields.

One of the programmers on StarCraft was Bob Fitch, who had bounced between Shattered Nations—a turn-based strategy game Bob was designing with veteran Blizzard artist Stu Rose and PR spokesperson Bill Roper—until his expertise in programming AI (artificial intelligence) was needed on WarCraft II. The plan was for him to bounce between Shattered Nations and StarCraft as needed.

For a while, Bob was able to focus almost completely on Shattered Nations thanks to the work he'd done on WarCraft II's engine. Having a technological framework in place was like having a do-it-yourself design kit with all the pieces and parts StarCraft's team needed to build another RTS—and in record time. With the technology established, all the team had to do was plug in new factions and assets such as sound effects and artwork.

Blizzard's developers designed three factions for StarCraft. The Terran were exiled human criminals who piloted gargantuan battleships, mech-like battle suits, and space-age technology such as cloaking devices that let assassins slip past enemy fortifications to call down nuclear strikes. The Protoss, an advanced race of aliens, wore golden armor and wielded blades forged from psychic energy. Rounding out the trio were the Nightmarish Invaders, swarms of insect-like beings that attacked in large numbers and infested foreign species to absorb their DNA.

StarCraft's three races represented an opportunity to sand down WarCraft's rough edges. Despite its record-breaking sales, the game's Orc and Human factions reflected one another in most ways. The Human Footman took the same amount of damage from attacks as the Grunt, his Orcish counterpart. Conversely, the rippling muscles and massive axe of the Grunt did as much damage as the Footman's short sword. Even the units that were meant to be more dissimilar were largely the same. The Orc Death Knight's Death and Decay spell chewed through units and buildings, the exact functionality of the Human Mage's Blizzard incantation.

Aside from a few extreme examples—many fans consider Orcs superior due to the power of the Ogre Magi's Bloodlust spell, which increases a unit's movement and attack speed—any strategy that works for one race can be applied to the other. "Asynchronous balance was a big point," said Jeffrey Vaughn, an artist at Blizzard, of design plans for StarCraft. "Instead of two mirrored sides, you had three totally different ones. It was very important, and also seen as a considerable design challenge. We wanted each side to feel unique, while also making sure a player wouldn't be totally confused if they switched races."

Artwork went a long way in defining StarCraft's three factions. Artists painted the Nightmarish Invaders in greens, reds, and blues. Pustules and tentacles glistened as if coated in slime. The Overlord was an airborne Invader whose vestigial legs dangled like limp vines as it glided around spitting acid. Units and buildings were brightly colored. Instead of plains, forests, and oceans, battles were waged across star fields and planets coated in purple terrain. Even user-interface (UI) elements such as a mini-map depicting units and buildings as colored squares had been lifted from Blizzard's blockbuster.

Ron Millar, StarCraft's lead designer, had a wish list of features still to be implemented. Terran soldiers should be able to cloak. Nightmarish Invaders would burrow into the ground and pop up to ambush enemies. Another idea was the Protoss Carrier, a massive ship that deploys smaller ships called Interceptors that burst from the Carrier's hull, pepper enemy units with missiles, and then dart back inside the Carrier to reload for the next volley.

Bob Fitch suddenly found himself under enormous pressure. WarCraft II's engine had not been engineered with advanced concepts such as cloaking and the Carrier's units-within-units design in mind. Blizzard prepared to demo StarCraft at the annual E3 in May 1996, where the game would be featured alongside Diablo at the Blizzard booth. Normally, Blizzard's developers looked forward to E3. Many company traditions dated back to the days when the team had been too scrappy to splurge on lavish hotels, so they had crowded into cheap hotel rooms in shady neighborhoods where they carried steak knives in case they were mugged. They would demo their game for twelve hours on the show floor, then go bar hopping until dawn. The next morning, bleary-eyed and hungover, they would debate who among them was sober enough to head back to their booth and host another day of demonstrations.

A second tradition, instituted after the WarCraft games became mega hits, was to dress in blue jeans and black t-shirts sporting the icy-blue Blizzard Entertainment logo and cruised the show floor in packs, like varsity jocks cruising the halls of their high school. The Blizzard logo drew eyes like iron filings to a magnet. As they basked in the attention they drew from peers, they assessed products and, more often than not, label them with the antithesis of Chris Metzen's "rock balls" credo.

"We didn't disparage our competitors in public," Pat Wyatt explained, "but we'd walk around the show, and if we found something that really sucked and someone asked us, 'Hey, what do you think?' we'd say, 'Oh, yeah. Your game's really, um... neat.' Neat was a code phrase for 'It sucks balls.'"

Happening upon an impressive game sparked the Blizzard gang's curiosity. They would cluster around a booth and speak in game-dev jargon: Mode 7, memory register, parallax scrolling. They were studying, like magicians intent on learning how a trick was performed so it could be dissected, remade, and added to their repertoire.

Bob and the rest of StarCraft's team pushed hard and brought a demo to E3 '96. This time, when they cruised the show floor, the games—the competition—inspired dread.

When WarCraft had released in 1994, it had been one of a scant few RTS games in stores. Now, real-time strategy was all the rage. Dominion Storm, in development at Ion Storm—co-founded by Doom and Quake co-creator John Romero—showcased giant robots charging and stomping across sprawling deserts, and an isometric perspective similar to Diablo that let players scope out fine details on their units. It looked spectacular, and, the team had to admit, was poised to blow StarCraft out of its purple-hued water.

Throughout the first day, Blizzard Entertainment's developers wilted under an onslaught of criticism from attendees, who dismissed StarCraft as "WarCraft goes purple." Press labeled the game "Orcs in space," a barb indicating that fans saw right through Blizzard's thinly veiled attempt to, in essence, give WarCraft II a sci-fi coat of paint and cash in on their reputation.

The criticism and competition hit like a bucket of ice-cold water. Others thought it karma.

"StarCraft was sort of a product line extension rather than being its own full-fledged beast," Pat Wyatt said. "Later on, we realized, 'This product's just going to suck. We need to have all our effort put into it.' And so everything about it was rebooted: the team that was working on it, the leadership, the design, the artwork—everything was changed."

Allen was accustomed to making tough calls. Before WarCraft's release, he and his team were unified in the decision to delay the game until it matched their vision for it, even if that meant missing the Christmas shopping season. He had even tabled his efforts to divide Blizzard into multiple teams by scrapping Shattered Nations and moving Stu Rose, Bill Roper, and Bob Fitch onto StarCraft full-time.

Stu saw the wisdom in Allen's decision, even though losing the chance to shepherd a brand-new property to fruition stung. "It got down to the point where we said, 'We don't have enough manpower for both projects,' and Shattered Nations just wasn't Blizzard," he admitted. "It was a turn-based game and it really didn't fit with cool, fast-paced, and fun. We just dropped it like a hot potato."

"I think our success was really progressive. I don't think that StarCraft really cemented Blizzard," Pat added. "It was this over-time awareness that not just anything should be released under our name. There were lots of games that were cancelled: WarCraft Adventures, Shattered Nations, Pax Imperia II—those were all fairly far along, and others didn't even make it off the drawing board."

BEFORE BLIZZARD'S DEVELOPERS COULD DEVOTE their attention to reimagining StarCraft, Blizzard North sent out an S.O.S. in the summer of 1996. "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," Pat Wyatt said.

According to Diablo's lore, mercenaries and adventurers caught wind of treasures below Tristram and ventured into the cathedral to kill demons and loot their tombs. One by one they entered. None returned. Like its fiction, Diablo siphoned Blizzard Entertainment's programmers away from StarCraft one at a time. "When we had signed the contract to do Diablo for $300,000 or whatever it was, that money didn't last long at all," Dave Brevik explained. "We didn't know how long it would take us. As it grew, it became clear that we needed to become part of Blizzard so they could fund it properly."

Pat Wyatt and Colin Murray, two of Blizzard Entertainment's best engineers, relocated to Redwood City and lived out of a hotel near Blizzard North to reduce travel time. They were there to tidy up the game's code, an amalgam of assembly language and C—a language Dave Brevik and the other programmers were learning on the fly—and implement the Battle.net service, engineered back in Irvine by Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain.

"Pat was mainly working on the integration in the Diablo code to make it multiplayer in general," said Dave Brevik. "He came up and said, 'Oh my God, this thing's not ready to be multiplayer. You've kind of blown this.' So, Pat and I made a bunch of changes. He was mainly working on a lot of [multiplayer]. I was still working on the game itself."

By the fall of 1996, Bob Fitch was the only programmer working on StarCraft. By Christmas, even he was pulled onto Diablo. "There was a sense of, 'Well, they're Blizzard North. We're all comrades in arms. Let's get this done,'" said Stu. "There was a certain sense of pride in putting games out, and we had to make Diablo the best game possible. It had to be the perfect game because it was a Blizzard game."

"I mocked up the first versions of the minimap, and some other in-game UI," said Jeffrey Vaughn. "I helped to clean up some of the game sprites, put together countless screenshots and mockups. All of the game art on the Diablo box is mine, each screenshot being a composite of multiple screenshots to try and maximize the drama. I also handled the website [blizzard.com] during the Diablo and StarCraft days, and coordinated the public beta tests."

"I started on StarCraft in probably April of 1996," Jeff Strain said. "I worked on it for about three months and then it was all-hands-on-deck for Diablo. So I spent all fall working on Battle.net infrastructure, and then all the Christmas holiday doing low-level debugging [on Diablo]. It was pretty harrowing, to be honest. The pressure to ship that thing was enormous. The Battle.net infrastructure was done, it was beautiful, it was polished. But we had to get those bug counts down to the point where it was a stable release."

Pat Wyatt didn't mind rolling up his sleeves to assist North on Diablo. What did bother him was that not everyone at Blizzard North seemed interested in devoting themselves to the project.

"It was very frustrating because Dave Brevik was a hard worker and would be there all hours of the day and night. We'd pretty much work the same hours, about fifteen to sixteen hours a day, but everybody else would go home at five or six o'clock. Their work ethic was just awful compared to the willingness of the people at South to work hard. I think that really emphasized the difference in culture between the two studios and caused a lot of tension."

Blizzard North's developers admitted they kept different hours than Blizzard South. To them, that boiled down to a difference in culture, not laziness. The team in Irvine worked constantly and steadily; North's developers preferred working in bursts, hitting milestones hard for a couple of weeks and then pulling back, chipping away at a project in between hanging out and playing games until they were ready to ramp back up. True to that modus operandi, they began crunching on Diablo in October 1996, after which time Pat Wyatt and Collin Murray had returned home to southern California.

Members of both management teams viewed clashes, stylistic or otherwise, as cream rising to the top. "Sometimes there were conference calls between six of us and eight of them or whatever, and maybe they'd get kind of hairy," Erich Schaefer remembered of Diablo's development. "But our discussions always had to do with legitimate things to talk about. No one was ever trying to stir up trouble. Before we even fought with Blizzard South over things, Dave and I would fight about it. I'd think I was always right, and Dave thought he was right. Between Dave and me, we'd come up with a damn good solution. So when we heard something else from those guys down south, who were just as egotistical and dedicated... Yeah."

"Nothing really came down to a straight authority battle," Max Schaefer agreed. "I really think we solved things through debate and consensus. Which was Allen's style, anyway. He would never say, 'Do this because I said so.' He would weigh in on things, we would argue, and sometimes we would switch to his point of view, and sometimes we wouldn't."

Most verdicts came down to Dave Brevik or Allen Adham. Each leader was viewed by his team as the visionary for his studio's projects. The difference was everyone at Blizzard Entertainment believed they were ultimately in charge. Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime had co-founded their company first, and had been the ones to convince Davidson & Associates to acquire Condor. Even Dave Brevik considered the relationship as parent-child, with Entertainment in the role of parent. As the parent company, the guys down south had access to marketing, public relations, and, in the role of publisher on Diablo, more authority—but only in some cases.

The North team believed there was a line in the sand, and Dave guarded it as vociferously as Max and Erich. "Diablo was definitely very much a Blizzard North project. Blizzard South made some important [contributions]: coming up with story, the cinematics, making the manual, Battle.net, and stuff like that. But we were the ones that made the actual game."

Pat Wyatt gave credit to North's team for their creativity. "On the one hand, I'm frustrated with a lot of things that happened at Blizzard North. But on the other hand, we did incredible things together. Blizzard South would never have come up with Diablo, and Diablo revolutionized the game industry in many, many ways and still has a huge impact. I'm really happy to have worked with those guys."

But Pat also viewed the studio's hierarchy through Entertainment's lens, in part due to his role as vice president of research and development, a position nearly equal to that of Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime. Dave, Max, and Erich were in charge of Blizzard North, he agreed, but only to a point.

"There was never any official structure that showed any relation except Dave Brevik reports to Allen. But there were no other reporting lines anywhere else in the company. Everybody at Blizzard North reported up through Dave Brevik, and everybody at HQ reported up through Allen Adham."

Returning to Irvine after his stay in Redwood City, Pat, utterly exhausted, spoke with Allen and Mike. This would happen again, he predicted. Blizzard North would wander or slack off, at least from the perspective of HQ, and would need to be managed to deliver a game on a reasonable timetable. He suggested Allen and Mike think about closing Blizzard North and relocating the team—the ones he considered good workers—down to Irvine.

Every now and then, Mike Morhaime or Allen Adham would broach the subject of relocating Blizzard North's team to southern California. Every time, North's bosses shut those conversations down.

"They brought it up almost solely for monetary reasons, saying, 'Look, the rent is so much cheaper here. We should share these resources,'" remembered Erich Schaefer. "But we didn't want to move. I didn't want to live in L.A. We never even really considered it."

As Blizzard South saw things, North may not have had a say in such a decision. "Conceptually, sure, it could have been done," Pat said. "EA closes studios all the time and relocates people, just like they did for Westwood Studios [in 2003]. We could have done the same thing. Now, what would Blizzard North's response have been to that? I'm sure they would have put up the biggest fuss known to mankind, and Bob Davidson would have had to arbitrate that fight. Whether he would have said yay or nay? That's the question. And it's funny because years later, that's exactly what happened. But at the time I remember being very burnt out and pissed off, and I did propose that we do that. Some people agreed, some people disagreed. But it was such a radical solution that I'm not even sure that it was the right thing to do."

FOLLOWING DIABLO'S LAUNCH IN LATE 1996, Blizzard Entertainment's team caught up on sleep and rebuilt personal relationships they'd had to leave by the wayside. That was part of the culture at Blizzard. "My first day at Blizzard, they took me to lunch, and the first thing they asked was if I had a girlfriend," remembered David Pursley, artist. "I said no. They said, 'Good, because you wouldn't for very long.' Everybody loses their girlfriends within the first week or two of working there because of the hours."

By early March, everyone had reconvened and was intent on overhauling StarCraft. "You had a whole bunch of developers who hadn't been able to make their own game for six months," Stu Rose said. "We were hungry to do something."

Chapter 6: Cowboy Development

I think Blizzard went through a transition where it was no longer feasible, just in terms of the size of the team, to have everybody sitting in a room together, contributing equally to design.

-Jeff Strain, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

The best meetings took place spontaneously in a hallway between two people passing each other. They'd start talking and suddenly a big decision was made that resulted in an entire shift in game structure. I've never worked in another company like that.

-Duane Stinnett, cinematics director, Blizzard Entertainment

I used to say it was like an old Our Gang short. The kids say, "Let's put on a show! We can use my uncle's barn, your dad has a cape, and your mom has a dress." That's what it was like: Seat-of-your-pants creativity.

-Harley Huggins, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

DUANE STINNETT AND Matt Samia couldn't explain why the thought of a hero shoving the Lord of Terror's Soulstone into his own forehead struck them as funny. It just did.

Diablo's shocking finale had come to them unbidden. Neither Blizzard North's developers nor lead Diablo scribe Chris Metzen had any idea how the game should end, so Duane and Matt, both aspiring filmmakers, had taken it upon themselves to cook something up. A hero who had fought his way to the depths of hell and killed the devil itself, only to wind up impaling himself with the gem that contained its essence in a futile attempt to keep the Lord of Terror from rising again? It was an ending as macabrely funny as it was gory and excessive.

No one had appointed Duane or Matt to devise the cinematic ending of Diablo. They'd had free time, so they'd done it. Moreover, the cinematics in Diablo and the WarCraft games had been short and vague because they'd had to be. Their stories had been written at the eleventh hour, when the two Blizzards had had to shoehorn in some explanation and motivation for why their characters were killing each other. Artists interested in cinematics had had little to work with, so they had come up with videos intended to convey tone rather than explicit story details. Once the cinematics for a game were finished, the artists had returned to their regular tasks such as animating characters and painting tiles.

Likewise, there was no formal story in place for StarCraft. All anyone knew for the first year of the game's development was that three races would fight on futuristic backdrops such as space stations and alien planets. With little else to go on, any artists interested in rendering cinematics would once again have to make videos from a 40,000-foot view. In the summer of 1997, Duane and Matt put their collective foot down.

"We just finally said, 'Look, we need a dedicated team to do this,'" recalled Duane Stinnett.

Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime saw little value in forming a team dedicated to cinematics. At Blizzard, videos were short-and-sweet spectacles designed to keep players invested in gameplay. Duane and Matt persisted.

"I think they saw the marketing value in cinematics," Duane continued. "People buy games not because of the way sprites look, but because they buy into the whole atmosphere. Games back then just looked like shit, ninety percent of the games out there. There were a couple of studios out there, Westwood Studios with Command & Conquer, pumping out some impressive cinematics work. We kind of wanted to get to where they were. [Matt and I] started pushing it harder and harder."

Once Allen and Mike relented, Duane and Matt invited artists to post up with them on the other side of the office. Stu Rose and Joeyray Hall, who had a wealth of experience working with 3D models, joined up, as did Trevor Jacobs and Scott Abeyta. That fall, Duane reached out to Harley Huggins, who became the first artist outside of Blizzard hired specifically to join the nascent cinematics team.

"I had been really into games, and my other [hobbies] were movies and special effects, especially Ray Harryhausen movies," Harley said. "Then Star Wars came out and blew my mind and everybody else's mind." [SQ1]

Harley had got his big break when he and his business partner were hired to handle production work for half a dozen shots on the 1997 action flick Starship Troopers. Between shots, they developed graphics plug-ins, add-ons that let artists create effects such as flames and swirls of magic, for their own use in 3D Studio.

"Through that, I ended up meeting some of the guys at Blizzard. They bought some of our plugins. I was doing tech support, showing them how to use these things. The guy I was talking to was Duane Stinnett. One day he said, 'Hey, we actually want to hire a few more people here. If there's anyone you could recommend, that'd be great.' I thought about it for about five seconds, and said, 'Yeah, I can recommend myself.'"

Duane Stinnett gave Harley the grand tour, escorting him through bullpens crowded with action figures, computer-game boxes, and posters showing movie stars, comic-book characters, and scantily clad women. Afterwards, Duane walked Harley outside and asked what he thought of the office. Harley told Duane flat-out that he wanted to work at Blizzard. As soon as Harley got back home, Duane called and made him an offer. He accepted, but after he signed off, he realized he wasn't clear on what, exactly, the offer entailed.

"I didn't know it at the time, but I was the first person to work on cinematics [specifically]. I didn't know that until, about two weeks in, I was hanging out with someone, and he said, 'Oh, you're the new cinematics guy.' I said, 'What's that?' and he said, 'They hired you to start the cinematics team.'"

On his first day, Harley squeezed into a cramped room. There had been no available cubicles or offices near the other artists, so he worked on the first floor where contract programmers were porting Blizzard's games from Windows PCs to the Apple Macintosh. His workspace was less than ideal. The large windows running along one wall magnified sunlight. Artists despised light; it interfered with the coloring on their screens. To make matters worse, the window let in too much heat. By noon, sweat was pouring down his face. Harley toughed it out until late summer when Blizzard relocated to a new campus spanning several buildings. Artists and programmers occupied one building, while the audio and cinematics teams set up shop on the top floor three buildings down.

Settling into a room facing away from the sun, Harley got started on his first task, working alongside Duane Stinnett. Duane pulled up Heat, an action film starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Val Kilmer, and jumped to a shootout that took place in the middle of a street in Los Angeles. "Duane said, 'We want to do something like this.' He'd grabbed some different shots and cut it together, so we sat talking about that and how he could make it work."

Duane's vision was to produce a short movie showing a squad of Terran Marines creeping through a derelict space vessel. The Nightmarish Invaders—by then renamed the Zerg—would pick off soldiers one by one until they emerged from the shadows. A firefight would break out, leading to the ship exploding into fragments that spun out into the blackness of space.

The video, dubbed "Marines in the hall," was emblematic of Blizzard's freewheeling design process. Two artists who happened to pass each other in the hallway would banter. Back at their computers, they started working on their idea for a cutscene. Years later, Blizzard Entertainment and other studios would adopt a production method known as compositing, the process of adding 3D components to each individual frame of animation as needed to avoid littering the screen with polygons and slowing the user's computer to a crawl. In 1997, the fledging cinematics team at Blizzard knew of no such process.

"If you watch the cinematics from StarCraft, everything you see on the screen is from the same scene," Harley said. "Computers couldn't handle it. I think 3D graphics cards had just come out, and they weren't that fast. It took a long time to render those frames." Their solution was to tap into a feature of 3D Studio that let a group of computers on the same network render a frame of animation. Rendering a single frame took between fifteen and twenty minutes, per computer. "I'd done some compositing on Starship Troopers, but most of it was done in Photoshop. I think, in the ending cinematic for the Zerg campaign, some of the frames were taking an hour a frame [to render]. When you've got 300 frames, it takes a long time to see whether things are working or not."

StarCraft's story had yet to solidify by the fall of '97, so Harley and the other artists focused on creating videos that conveyed a sense of scale. StarCraft's action unfolded from an isometric view. In-game units such as the Terran Marine, clad in bulky armor, and the Zerg Hydralisk, a brown, serpentine alien that slithered upright along the ground and shot needle spines from its upper carapace plate, were sprites as small as fingernails. But in cinematics, Marines towered seven, eight feet tall. Terran Battlecruisers and Protoss Carriers as big as yachts swam through the sky and cast shadows over forces battling on the ground.

After finishing a cinematic, the artists would show it to StarCraft's lead developers and let them figure out where it fit in the game's progression.

"We gave the player a reward every few levels with a movie," Duane said. "To me, it was one of those things where it was kind of a conflict of interest because as a quote-on-quote 'filmmaker,' I wanted to make these little movies; but as a player, I would hit Escape as soon as the movie came on because I wanted to keep playing the game. We just wanted to make movies that were cool enough that people would watch them, so we wanted to keep them short: fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds. We made them to give some character and life to the game world instead of looking at these little ten-pixel-tall sprites running around the screen."

Programmers and artists who swung by the department marveled at seeing their fingernail-sized characters blown up to epic proportions. Some even offered suggestions for what they'd like to see in the cinematics, such as a Terran Battleship getting swarmed by the Zerg's bat-like Mutalisks. "A lot of details that are now considered canon, such as parts and pieces on StarCraft units, we made up," Harley explained. "They were just little sprites in the game, so we had to make things up. Like how the Marines have things stenciled on their armor—we made all of that up because we thought it was cool. Then designers ended up creating characters based on some of the stuff we put on their armor."

In rare instances, Chris Metzen or James Phinney, lead designer of the rebooted StarCraft project, would give direction for crucial story bits such as what to show in the cinematic that capped off each of the game's three campaigns. The final mission had players controlling Terran and Protoss forces in a last-ditch effort to defeat the Zerg Overmind, a mountain-sized brain that controlled every member of its species. Metzen pitched the idea of a cinematic showing a Protoss Carrier, piloted by one of the main characters, flying directly into the Overmind, the ship's hull piercing its gargantuan mass like a sword.

By Christmas, the cinematics team was exhausted, but charged. They had just put the final touches on StarCraft's ending. While only a few of the dozen or so cinematics they had made ran longer than one minute, they had succeeded in creating videos that not only carried the weight of conveying the scale and scope of the game's world, but that were engaging in their own right.

"That was the coolest thing, to have such a free hand in all of that. Nobody cared. They trusted us," Harley said. "There weren't all these rules and egos. It was just, 'Make stuff cool,' and you did, and people had fun. It was magical, especially during StarCraft."

SPONTANEOUS DEVELOPMENT WAS hardly unique to Blizzard's growing cinematics team. Some developers even coined a term to describe it: "I like to say that Blizzard did something called cowboy development," said Frank Trevor Gilson, a tester on StarCraft who worked his way up the ranks to become an associate producer. "You just start working on things that you think you want, and you iterate, iterate, and iterate, show it to as many people as you can, as soon as you can, getting feedback, changing, updating fixing—all these cycles."

Cowboy development was responsible for many of StarCraft's breakthrough design decisions, such as giving Terran buildings the ability to fly around the map. "The whole idea of Terran buildings picking up off the ground was just me playing around with artwork at the time," Stu Rose said. "Sam Didier and I were in the office, and I said, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great if Terran buildings could lift off and go to different locations?' We ran over to Pat's [Wyatt] office and said, 'Pat, we've got this idea. Do you want to try it?' And he'd say, 'Oh, yeah. Implement it.' Then we'd go running to Allen and go, 'Allen, look! Can we put this in the game?'"

Blizzard Entertainment's staff was growing. Across development and production, the studio employed over one hundred forty developers. Mike and Allen gradually felt the need to introduce more structure and procedure to keep projects from spiraling out of control, and to maintain ownership over every byte and pixel.

Part of the additional structure was to assure quality control. QA (quality assurance) testers such as Chris Arretche occupied prime real estate in Blizzard's main building, just one floor removed from programmers and artists toiling away on StarCraft. "Getting into the games industry as a QA guy is pretty common; it's kind of your foot-in-the-door job. And then where you go from there is up to you and opportunity. I remember going through those trials by fire: sleeping under your desk in fifteen-minute power naps, being up for three days straight trying to test a game under a deadline."

Every morning, QA testers hashed out a plan to pound on the game's latest prototype: root out bugs, test new units, look for game imbalances such as one faction having too great an advantage over the other, stress-test Battle.net by piling on accounts until servers collapsed under the weight.

Other QA jobs were less glamorous. When a unit died and a bug or glitch occurred, testers had to kill that unit twenty, fifty, even one hundred times to recreate the exact circumstances of the malfunction so it could be isolated and weeded out. End-user license agreements, the contracts between Blizzard and consumers, had to be inspected for proper grammar, typos, and tight wording that left no room for interpretation. The QA team didn't mind. "Starship Troopers was hitting theaters around that time, and it was perfect because it was like Terran versus Zerg," Arretche said. "So during development we just had that in our head. We'd play that awesome music because we didn't have music in yet for the game, so QA would play that music as we were building our custom maps. It was a good time, a very good time down at Blizzard South."

Another of Allen's structural changes was formalizing hierarchies within projects. James Phinney was a programmer who had cut his teeth on Blizzard's Justice League Task Force and WarCraft II. Following StarCraft's poor showing at E3 1996, James, considered by many of his peers to be even better at designing gameplay than he was at coding for it, was named lead designer.

"One of the things we really tried to do going forward was push to the greatest degree possible game logic into scripts [that] designers could directly maintain and start taking it out of the hands of programmers," said Jeff Strain, programmer. "We really wanted to shift more to a mentality where programmers are working on core technology, and gameplay mechanics were something we could expose through sophisticated tools and also script things through designers."

As a designer, James became the equivalent of an architect. He drafted design plans and handed them over to programmers, the construction crew in charge of deploying them. James's drafting tool was StarEdit, a robust map editor engineered by Jeff Strain. StarEdit simplified laying out a map. Select a type of terrain—dirt, grass, space platforms, ashen rock—and then click the mouse to place it. From there, level designers could place elements such as resources for players to harvest, alien fauna roaming around the map, and invisible tripwires that trigger in-game events such as dialogue and the sudden appearance of allies or hostiles.

While designers built maps, programmers were able to roll up their sleeves and focus on their areas of expertise. "If you look at StarCraft, there were no tools for AI," Jeff Strain said. "Bob Fitch, who was the AI programmer on that, fortunately had a very good design sense and was able to write a pretty robust and effective AI for single-player games in StarCraft by leveraging his design sense and programming skills, but also working very closely in concert with guys like James Phinney."

James worked in concert with programmers and artists. He also took cues from Chris Metzen, who pitched suggestions for units and gameplay but spent most of his time on narrative; defining a wide array of parameters for mission objectives, building a world, establishing characters, and surprising players with twists and turns.

"If you look at Arcturus Mengsk," said Pat Wyatt, "when you watch the cinematics—which is where a lot of the exposition happens—there's this whole thing where humanity intercedes, it looks like we're turning a new corner, oh, and now we're going into a totalitarian state. I didn't see that one coming. He wrote some fascinating story hooks."

Chris and James were part of the strike team, another structural initiative. The strike team had been born out of necessity. Back when Blizzard was known as Silicon & Synapse, holding impromptu meetings between five, ten, fifteen of Blizzard's cowboys had been easy. As the company grew, there simply wasn't room at the table for everyone. "We would have strike team meetings, and people would come together in a smaller group with appointed representatives of their disciplines, making quick decisions, and then go disseminate to their teams," said Jeff Strain.

The original strike team had been a brain trust assembled to help Blizzard North build and balance Diablo, then evolved to become an institution on every Blizzard project. Meeting in the main conference room, Allen, Mike, Pat Wyatt, Sammy Didier, Bob Fitch, Chris Metzen, Rob Pardo—a QA tester promoted to the role of producer—James Phinney, and Mike O'Brien opened the floor to topics ranging from programming concerns and artistic direction to market trends and RTS games being developed by competitors. One topic that had come up at Diablo's meetings had been the game's reward schedule: how long it took for players to gain experience points they used to level up, when new quests should be offered, and most importantly, how often monsters should drop procedurally generated loot. Too infrequently, and players would grow bored or frustrated. Too often, and rewards would become meaningless.

"There were lots of different things that had to happen to get Diablo shipped," said Pat Wyatt. "Obviously the design, art, coding, and music. But there was also the box, installation, and the user experience. Game design has come a long way in terms of the amount of thought people put into it and psychological research that's been done to justify the way games are designed. But at that time, that wasn't done so much, so the way we handled it was having lots of people providing feedback."

Allen and Mike formed the strike team to streamline decision making, not to preclude anyone from chiming in—both a change from the company's early culture, and a continuation of it. Anyone at Blizzard, no matter their role on a team, was invited to pitch suggestions. The strike team didn't change that. Now, however, rank-and-file employees had to convince an entire jury of leads who were in charge of making final decisions.

"The strike team was often a hostile experience," said Gage Galinger, a programmer on StarCraft. "I mean, strike team meetings ended with people storming out, yelling. It was really a battle of wills."

The strike team could be persuaded. Through extensive play testing, Gage and artist Roman Kenney developed a strategy for the Protoss called the Shuttle drop: load a gang of heavy-hitters into a Shuttle transport ship, then fly behind an opponent's base and offload the fighters near worker units harvesting the minerals and gas that paid for buildings, units, and upgrades. The fighters would make short work of the workers, cutting off the enemy's production line. Gage and Roman had a problem with the tactic. In an early build of the game, Shuttles dumped out their cargo all at once. The sneakiest Protoss players could flood an enemy base in seconds using only a single shuttle carrying five Zealots, a foot soldier clad in golden armor and the first offensive unit available to Protoss players. Players on the receiving end of a Shuttle drop had no time to mount a defense.

When other developers expressed doubt regarding the tactic's efficacy, Gage and Roman put their argument to the test by challenging two players from QA to a match. QA testers were considered the best StarCraft players in the company. If you could beat a tester, you won the argument Their job was to play the game all day, every day, looking for bugs and hunting down imbalances. Within minutes, Gage and Roman stuffed two Shuttles with Zealots and dropped them into a rival base. The testers watched in astonishment as Zealots slaughtered their workers. Soon after, they convinced the strike team that Shuttles should unload units one at a time, with a short delay between each unloaded unit.

"They would have meetings in their central meeting room and sort of hash out and bang out a certain system in the game, certain missions," said Robert Huebner, programmer. "It really depended on who was around, but they were very hands-on managers when it came to the game itself."

"'Kill your babies' was an expression coined during development that meant, 'No matter how much you love your idea, you have to be willing to abandon it and do something else if it's better,'" said Jeffrey Vaughn, artist.

Producers had existed at Blizzard since the original WarCraft, but had played a different role. Pat Wyatt had been the only programmer on WarCraft for several months, making him the de facto curator for ideas. During Diablo, Bill Roper and Allen Adham had shared the role of producer, checking in with Blizzard North to keep tabs on their progress.

Yet both WarCraft projects and Diablo had been inchoate and chaotic. Producers had pulled double duty, juggling the demands of other positions such as programmer or artist. StarCraft presented an opportunity to more clearly demarcate responsibilities and roles. During StarCraft. Producers, for instance, devoted all of their energy on managing production. Programmers programmed. Artists made art. Designers designed.

Almost overnight, the QA department became a training ground for producers. While programmers and artists tended to view projects through the lens of their disciplines, QA testers gained an understanding of how each discipline operated because of the wide range of bugs and features they had to analyze. Furthermore, spending more time than anyone else playing—and breaking—games sharpened their knowledge of what worked and what didn't. Over time, QA testers naturally stepped up to producer roles. Rob Pardo was hired as a designer, but spent several months in QA first so he could gain a high-level view of production. He grew into one of Blizzard's most prolific designers, leading projects such as 2004's World of WarCraft and 2010's StarCraft II.

Blizzard didn't become a tight ship overnight. Producers and leads such as Rob Pardo, Pat Wyatt, and Jeff Strain were viewed by some as exceptions to the rule. "I don't think Blizzard had a culture that fostered people to step up," Pat said. "It was more like opportunities would arise. I never had any formal management training or anything. It was very need-based. Sam Didier became the art director because he was a great artist, not because he had great management skills. Over time he had to learn and develop those things."

Stu Rose understood the need for producers. As an artist, he was more valuable in the trenches, helping to shape the look and feel of Blizzard's games. The drawback was losing his voice as a decision maker, a position he had earned as one of the company's earliest cowboys. "They tended to advance people from QA up to management positions at Blizzard HQ. From a development point of view, it really didn't help your ego to be working there for a long time, and then have the guy that came in a few years earlier as a guy off the street, suddenly in a higher position than you, calling the shots."

"The strike team had its pros and cons," Jeff Strain admitted. "It was effective and efficient, but it would also often engender ill will among people who had previously always had their feet at the table and now felt like they were just recipients of information. You have to make those kinds of decisions, but it is painful to transition a culture rather than building your culture around that from the beginning."

"Later on, we were cut out [from decision-making], and we would find out later," said David Pursley, artist. "That's when I was getting disenchanted."

StarCraft's frenzied development afforded Blizzard's management no time to catch their breath and take stock. "Everybody was just busy," Jeff Strain continued. "The problem was we were working really hard, and we didn't have time to say, 'Let's take stock of things and figure out what other people have done to solve these problems.'"

Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear

The way we were always able to get so many cinematics done, and the [quality] of how they looked, was due to two things. One: Games were always delayed, which gave us more time. Two: We worked ourselves to death.

-Harley Huggins, artist, Blizzard Entertainment

It's easy to hear these kinds of stories and think there was a lot of ego at Blizzard. I really don't think there was. There wasn't ego at Blizzard. There was just extreme passion with a lack of social graces.

-Gage Galinger, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

When Diablo shipped, everybody went back to working on StarCraft. Everybody` said, "All right, we can ship this thing, we're only three months away." Then, "Okay, now we're only two months away." StarCraft was "only two months away" for fourteen months.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of research and development, Blizzard Entertainment

DESPITE THE BEST efforts of Blizzard Entertainment's managers to incorporate strike teams and producers, such changes, while well-intentioned, had been grafted onto the company. Structure and process were wet cement poured over a foundation of passion and perfectionism.

Some leftovers from StarCraft's "Orcs in Space" direction had value. Components of WarCraft II's engine made the jump, but Bob Fitch, its chief architect, expanded on them. Over two months in early 1997, he wrote code allowing for advanced capabilities such as cloaked units, the ability to burrow underground, and units nested within units such as the Protoss Carrier's fleet of Interceptors.

Bob's retooling brought about sweeping technical and creative changes. In WarCraft II, terrain had been made up of square-shaped tiles individually painted by artists and stitched together by programmers. Diablo had used diamond-shaped tiles, which Bob applied to StarCraft. Diamond-shaped tiles could be viewed at an isometric angle, and artists could show three sides to units instead of two.

Meanwhile, designers and artists revised the game's mechanics and audiovisuals. "After we had a CES screening of a version of StarCraft that looked like WarCraft—very cartoony, primary colors—Allen came to me and said, 'Hey, can you make this look like that WarCraft II test that you did?'" recalled Duane Stinnett, co-lead artist alongside Sam Didier in addition to heading up the burgeoning cinematics team alongside Matt Samia. "StarCraft's look became what WarCraft II's look was supposed to be: More realistic and more gritty."

Changes ranged from superficial to subtle. Decreeing "Nightmarish Invaders" too generic a name, the designers rebranded StarCraft's insectoid aliens the Zurg, until they realized "Zurg" was the name of an evil alien race in Disney's and Pixar's upcoming Toy Story animated movie. They modified it slightly to Zerg. The Terran became more focused on stealth and infantry. The Phoenix, a Terran airship that fired missiles against airborne units and lasers at forces on the ground, was renamed the Wraith and given the ability to cloak. Goliaths, bipedal mechs on the Terran side, had been equipped with a flamethrower, machine gun, and missiles. Designers James Phinney and Chris Metzen dialed back the Goliath's firepower, granting the Goliath missiles to fire at airborne attackers, and giving its flamethrower to the Terran Firebat infantry.

WarCraft II's units had inflicted a range of damage determined by rolls of invisible dice. StarCraft's units always dealt a prescribed amount that players could increase by researching upgrades or exploiting tactical advantages such as attacking from higher ground. Additionally, unit size factored into damage, allowing certain damage types to act as strong counters to units of a certain size. As always, balance was paramount. A pack of Vultures, Terran hover bikes meant to attack quickly and speed away to safety, could easily rip through High Templar, a small but potent Protoss spellcaster, but would do little damage to a Zerg Ultralisk, a massive melee attacker. The benefit was threefold: Fixed damage values were easier for players to understand, easier for programmers to balance, and allowed for hard counters to certain strategies.

One of the driving goals since the project's origin had been creating three playable races as radically different from one another as they were superbly balanced. StarCraft would be the ultimate game of rock-paper-scissors, but one where scissors could cut through rock if players had upgraded their blades.

The insect-like Zerg no longer constructed buildings, like the Orcs and Humans from WarCraft. Instead their worker units, Drones, transformed into buildings, pulsing like beating hearts as they evolved into their new shape. Damaged Zerg buildings spurted blood, reflecting their biological nature. As an added layer of distinction and tactics, Zerg structures could only be erected on creep, a slimy purple carpet that spread outward from buildings. Each structure expanded the creep, giving players more real estate on which to build.

In a holdover from WarCraft, Terran players raised buildings by assigning a worker unit, an SCV (Space Construction Vehicle), to the task. SCVs could be ordered to halt construction and sent to perform other functions if they were needed elsewhere. Once those were finished, any SCV could be reassigned to finish construction. Similar to Zerg creep, Protoss Probes could only beam in buildings by first placing a Pylon that emitted a field of influence. Destroying pylons disabled their fields, and any buildings dependent on those fields went dark until a Probe worker could summon another Pylon.

All three races had unique methods of repairing damaged structures: One or several Terran SCVs could be assigned to a structure to repair it faster, but severely damaged buildings burned, thereby taking additional damage. The Zerg's organic buildings healed over time. Last, every Protoss building came with shields that recharged, but damage to the structural elements of the building were permanent.

Besides passion and perfectionism, the bedrock of Blizzard Entertainment consisted of one other mineral: Pressure. The pressure for StarCraft to succeed—and by extension, the studio—came from two sources. The first was external. During an interview with Johnny Wilson, then editor-in-chief of defunct magazine Computer Gaming World, Pat Wyatt found himself in the hot seat. "He said, 'You know, in about the timeframe that StarCraft is coming out, there's eighty-plus other RTS games coming out. What makes StarCraft any better than any of the rest of them?'" Wyatt remembered the editor asking. "And it was hard to come up with an answer because it wasn't like we had some cool technological feature that was above and beyond WarCraft II."

Competition had grown fierce in the scant three years since Blizzard had released WarCraft. Besides Ion Storm's upcoming Dominion Storm, Westwood Studios had followed Dune II (the RTS that had inspired Blizzard to create WarCraft) with Command & Conquer, a critically acclaimed strategy title centered on armies in a near-future setting, as well as a prequel, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, an alternate-history-inspired take on World War II. Cavedog Entertainment's Total Annihilation pushed RTS into the third dimension by featuring 3D units and terrain, as well as an ambitious plan to roll out a new unit every week after release. Dark Reign: The Future of War by Auran had two races and would add two more in an expansion pack, eclipsing StarCraft's trio of races and one of the key features Blizzard hoped would separate its game from the growing crop of RTS titles.

Wilson's pointed question, and the reality of the answer, left Pat shaken. He put on a brave face. "There were lots of games, and the only thing we could really say was, 'You know, we've done this before, and the balance in the game is going to be great. All I can tell you is that we just know it's going to be excellent.' But that was about it. It was very easy to imagine someone else coming along and eating us for lunch if we didn't do a great job."

Blizzard's second source of pressure was homemade.

ROB HUEBNER SLID his mouse cursor to the submit button on his screen. His finger lifted to click, hesitated. He scanned his code again. Then again. "One of the definite pressures already at that point—I'm sure it's even worse now—is that, okay, StarCraft has to be really good, otherwise everyone's going to really point to it because we had high expectations and success from all these other titles. I think that was the main impact of having a string of hits. We can't cut corners here because if we do, everyone's going to jump on us. No one wants to be responsible for the first non-hit."

Rob wanted to be absolutely certain his code worked before he checked it in. It may cause a few logic bugs, but those wouldn't be difficult to iron out. The source of his reluctance was a programmer—name withheld—who worked on the first floor of Blizzard's main building. Taciturn and gruff, he reminded Rob of a fairytale troll, dwelling in his cave and only emerging to hunt down programmers feckless enough to submit code that broke StarCraft's latest build. The build was his bridge, and woe to anyone who compromised it.

"He was famous for being a threatening presence," Rob recalled. "If you break the build, he will get you, like the boogeyman. He was a big street hockey player, too, so he was a big guy to begin with. Then his gruff demeanor made him a feared presence. Nobody wanted to break the build. A lot of companies now will have sandboxes and automated tests, but it really wasn't quite that [structured], so you could easily check in something that would take the whole team down for a day or two if you weren't careful."

On his first day of work, Gage Galinger settled into his workspace and pulled up a few sample maps to get a feel for StarCraft's look and flow. One map consisted of a series of space platforms set against a starfield. Pat Wyatt came up behind Gage and assigned his first task. At present, Pat explained, the starfield scrolled by at the same speed as foreground objects such as platforms when players moved the mouse cursor to scroll the screen. The effect was unrealistic. Pat mandated that Gage implement parallax scrolling, a visual technique that gave the illusion of depth by making backgrounds slide by at slower rates than foreground objects.

Gage took a breath. He was a junior programmer, yet Blizzard Entertainment's vice president of research and development expected him to sink or swim just like anyone else. There was a term for the brand of intimidation caused by the infamous build engineer and other programmers at Blizzard, a manifestation of the internal pressure to thrive, and he had just experienced it.

"Pat called it the piranha effect it basically was, if you did anything wrong you can expect the programming team to jump all over it. You were so careful with the code. The code was sacred. If you're going to check something into that code base, it better be fucking spotless."

"It's something that Blizzard shares with Microsoft," Pat added. "Microsoft has a really harsh culture where there are a lot of battles. At Blizzard, it wasn't really political battles, it was more like everybody was hyper-competitive playing Street Fighter, writing code, doing artwork—whatever it was."

The piranha effect was not exclusive to programmers. Artists who proposed absurd ideas or who turned in subpar work were heckled by peers. Any idea that gained traction had to be brought before the strike team, who could tear it to shreds.

Developers likened the piranha effect to hazing at a college fraternity, though most maintained that it never went so far as extreme or meanspirited pranks. "I don't really think I would characterize it as dog-eat-dog because it wasn't really that people were attacking each other," Pat clarified. "It was more [that people could be] incredibly harsh judges of what was going on, so that people who didn't deliver really high-quality results would just get kind of... it would be really painful."

"They mentored you at the same time," added David Pursley, an artist on StarCraft. "If you hadn't seen a movie that they thought you should see, they'd have movie nights for you to catch you up on Aliens, all those types of movies. It definitely made us a closer-knit group."

At times, Blizzard's core values were like oil and water. Spontaneous design and iteration that led to perfectionism warred with the strike team's job of deciding on everything from a game's creative direction and visual style to its technical underpinnings. Developers were determined to make the best games, but managers hired too many employees to properly train them all. As a result, untested engineers who should have been mentored by experienced peers unintentionally bogged down the project.

Senior developers such as Pat Wyatt, Bob Fitch, and Jeff Strain would have made excellent mentors, but they were too vital to the programming team. That led to yet another drawback: Team leads who failed to learn the fundamentals of good leadership because they were too busy performing the primary function of their discipline. "The staff got bigger, and there were more and more people on the core team, people that were influencers and business-makers," Pat said, "but it was the same style throughout—very 'go, go, go, hair on fire, we can figure out how to do everything if we just work harder.'"

Gage Galinger juggled expectations by sticking to a routine. He slept in, got to work by noon, coded straight through until 6:00 the next morning. On the way home he swung through McDonald's for breakfast. After catching four or five hours of sleep, he dragged himself back to the office, perpetually battling exhaustion. Stubborn refusal to cave to expectations motivated him to work harder.

Time became meaningless. Ten-hour workdays stretched to twelve hours, fourteen, sixteen. Weeks bled into weekends. Another effort to splinter Blizzard's growing staff into multiple projects was scuttled when StarCraft's team devoured a smaller group. "As tends to happen at Blizzard, whatever project gets ahead starts to pull people from the other team, and other teams die from attrition and things like that," said Rob Huebner. He had been hired for the enigmatically named Team 2, working on a game codenamed Nomad, only to be consumed by StarCraft. "That's not a bad way to do things. It definitely hurts the project that gets resources stolen away from it, but it's for a good cause, obviously."

The practice of excessive workdays and nonexistent weekends is known within the game industry by many names. Death march and crunch are two of the most prevalent. Some crunches are scheduled. StarCraft's, like the Zerg's creep, started small but continued to seep outward. "What would happen was sort of a combination of ambition and delusion," Pat Wyatt said. "The team would go, 'We're two months away. Well, since it's going to be two months now, let's get in this one new feature.' Then that would snowball and become a couple of features. The scope of the project kept getting larger and larger."

"I remember when I was interviewing with Duane Stinnett, and I said, 'So when is this game going to be out?'" recalled Harley Huggins, an artist on Blizzard's cinematics team. "He said, 'Oh, like, three months.' That was April of '97, and that was the mantra. Anytime someone asked when it will be done, someone would say, 'It will be done in three months.' No one really knew."

Crunching is often self-defeating. Bob Fitch, the game's programming lead, felt obligated to set an example for his team by being the first to arrive and the last to leave. He rarely went home, pulling two- and three-day coding marathons. Near the end of one such sprint, Pat Wyatt read over code Bob had checked in and found a twisted mass of bugs and flawed logic. His friend's overtired brain had mangled it. Pat shooed Bob out the door to get some sleep. Then, equally drained, he directed his attention to cleaning up errors.

Bob and Pat did set an example, but not a good one. Throughout the company, everybody participated in a game of chicken. The first to blink and go home, lost. However, StarCraft's crunch had its advantages. Long hours often led to breakthroughs that may have otherwise been unattainable. "Cinematics crunched nonstop, and it was self-imposed, because we wanted to do more stuff," said Harley. "We wanted to perfect our cinematics. That's why we ended up separating stuff into layers later on. You'd render the whole [cinematic] and go, 'There's something that's flashing' or 'Maybe you could go in and change the frames.' Instead of just saying it was good enough, we'd go in and redo the whole thing. Sometimes that meant not going home. Everybody just did it because they wanted to do it."

"It was the same as the LucasArts Jedi Knight team," Rob Huebner agreed. "It was a self-demand more than an external demand. Maybe at a higher level it was from management and they stealthily made it seem like it came from grassroots, but if so, they succeeded at that. There were still long hours, but to me, a sweatshop is like a producer coming in and mandating these hours, or you hear horror stories about L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi. That definitely wasn't at all like what Blizzard was."

Pat Wyatt remembered battling Bob Fitch over code, even though giving in would have meant one less headache for both of them. "I wanted units to be smarter like they were in WarCraft, and he wanted them to be dumber because he wanted the player to be making the decisions, which provided more tactical advantage to players who were better at manipulating units," said Wyatt. Back and forth they went, each creeping into the code database and undoing the other's preference, creating more work on both sides.

In another instance, StarCraft's path-finding—a unit's ability to navigate from point A to point B—broke down due to a flaw in worker units' AI. Workers were programmed to follow a simple cycle: harvest crystals or gas, walk back to the player's main building, deposit resources, and go back to harvesting. The problem was workers tended to get bunched up between resource patches and headquarters, causing them to weave and shimmy around one another, and stemming the player's flow of resources needed to construct buildings, train combat units, and research upgrades. Stressed out and short on time, Pat hacked out a solution by instructing workers to ignore collision with any other units in their path.

Jeff Strain was in charge of StarEdit, Blizzard's internal map editor that would ship on every StarCraft disc so players could create and share maps over Battle.net. Behind schedule, Jeff carried his laptop everywhere—including the delivery room where his wife gave birth to their child. "I was writing code while she was in labor," he said. "Here it is, twenty years later, and I'm still paying for that. That's her trump card, right? Maybe in another ten years I'll have made it up to her."

Many of StarCraft's most urgent problems boiled down to minor details. Technical artists such as Jeffrey Vaughn were saddled with delicate tasks such as making sure artwork represented how a gameplay feature or AI implementation was supposed to work. "If you have fifty weapons in your game, you need to set up hard points for each weapon so your characters know where to hold them," Vaughn said. "If you have twenty buildings that can be set on fire, you have to tell the buildings where to catch on fire. Glue screens—the front-end UI that 'glues' the game structure together—need to be mocked up before they're handed off to an artist to make pretty, and so on."

For many, the ends were destined to justify the means. "It was this special period right at the end, the hardest of the hardcore," Gage said. "We didn't want to give up. We wanted to keep working on it until the very last minute. Even after we launched, there was definitely a [break period], but several of the guys, me included, were still coming in the same hours because we wanted to see how the game was doing. We'd get on Battle.net and want to know what people were doing."

Despite shared enthusiasm, no developer was immune to the toll of crunch, not even Allen Adham. Even though he was Blizzard's chief visionary, the strike team picked apart every decision and idea, including his. When Blizzard had been smaller, he had made decisions on the fly, the same way Dave Brevik operated at Blizzard North. Now he had to wade through the very processes he had put in place. "Allen would get up in front of everybody, and by the time he finished talking, you were ready to walk out of there and do whatever it took," said Harley Huggins. "He was really good at that. That happened over and over. They'd say, 'If you don't have to go home for Thanksgiving, don't. If you have all you need to celebrate Christmas, don't leave.'

Managers didn't exempt themselves from crunching. Developers toiling away on programming and art teams noticed Allen Adham putting in as many hours as anyone. They also observed the toll it was taking on him. "Allen was good, but I think even his Jedi powers were taxed by the end," said Harley Huggins.

Crunching eroded the health and personal relationships of developers and their families even as it tightened bonds within the studio. Most days at 3:00 a.m., packs of developers moseyed down the street for cheap food at Del Taco. Employees who played on the roller hockey team skated around the parking lot to shoot around. Others crowded around Street Fighter II cabinets and pinball machines. Some nights, Duane Stinnett parked a chair outside Pat Wyatt's office and strummed tunes on his base guitar, providing the perfect backdrop for players sitting cross-legged on the floor amid spreads of Magic: The Gathering cards.

At trade shows, Pat Wyatt gave interviews with an air of confidence that sometimes felt as hacked together as his pathfinding fix. "It's either hubris or fear," he said, describing what developers experience when they walk show floors and scope out competing products. "It all depends on what you're bringing to the show or what you think you have that other people don't have yet. Usually it was fear because there's just lots of other products out there with gigantic marketing budgets. Blizzard was just an up-start company. Even though we'd had success with WarCraft I, WarCraft II, and Diablo, there wasn't anything that was necessarily going to make StarCraft rise to the top compared to other games except what we ourselves put into it. That's a pretty daunting thing to do."

BY LATE MARCH 1998, fourteen months after Blizzard Entertainment began crunching, nothing could stop StarCraft from invading the hard drives of PC players around the world. Nothing except StarCraft itself.

On March 24th, the gold master disc was shipped off to Blizzard's production factory in Utah. Back in Irvine, Bill Roper decided to run one last test cycle. He discovered a game-breaking bug that was present on the gold disc. If left unchecked, it would inevitably harm StarCraft's reputation with critics and consumers.

Programmers pounced on the bug. A new test cycle was initiated. For three days Bill and others alternated between testing the game and sleeping under their desks. On March 27, his birthday, the game went gold again.

StarCraft landed on store shelves on March 31. The fatigue that hung over Blizzard like a fog burned away. Gage Galinger loaded a space station map and scrolled up, down, left, right. His parallax effect, his first trial by fire at Blizzard, had survived the piranhas. He gleaned satisfaction from that, and from the fervor with which players snatched Terran-, Zerg-, and Protoss-themed game boxes off shelves, going on to sell over one and a half million units by the end of the year. Even so, he decided that Blizzard's culture was not the right fit for him.

"That's probably the happiest thing about that time that I recall," Gage said. "Almost everybody is extremely successful today. Many of them went on to start game studios outside of Blizzard; many of them came back to Blizzard. It's just amazing. I just feel really happy to have a shared DNA with that group of people, because I really think that's one of the few hotspots that spawned so much gaming goodness. I'm really happy to have been a part of it. Pat [Wyatt] and I didn't get along when we worked together—he was my boss—but to be honest, I'm really thankful he hired me, because I would be a different guy and I wouldn't be nearly as successful as I am today if I didn't have that experience."

In what would become a tradition for every product release, company leaders fêted StarCraft's launch by ordering champagne in bulk and passing around bottles. Everyone popped their bottle's cork at the same time and doused themselves and neighbors with streams of bubbly. A representative from Blizzard's parent company at the time was incensed when he saw two developers, drunk from the festivities, get into a fist fight. The brawl ensued after a misunderstanding: One guy had stepped on the head of the other, who had been lying on the floor. The representative fired them on the spot, only for Allen Adham to swoop in. No one had the authority to fire anyone on his team, especially not some corporate outsider.

A few months later, following regular support for StarCraft to address bugs and game-breaking glitches, Blizzard treated the team to a wrap party in Las Vegas, another tradition. "Blizzard guys can party like rock stars," said David Pursley. "We drove to Vegas in a giant bus overflowing with beer. I was just barely twenty, so I didn't drink. I didn't know if I was allowed. Everyone released all their tension in Vegas in every way possible."

As the celebration wound down, developers trickled out of the office. "The company would typically provide some extra time off depending on the amount of crunch," said Frank Gilson, game tester. "People would string that together with vacation time and maybe be gone for four weeks."

Years later, Bob Fitch claimed that StarCraft's development, in particular work centered on its engine, was no more draining than any other project. Many of his colleagues disagreed. "This is going to sound kind of weird to people who work eight-hour days, but everybody worked a solid sixteen-hour day, then went home and got eight hours of sleep, and did that over and over and over again until we made a hit," said Pat Wyatt. "It was much more sustainable than working forty-seven-hour days, then getting twelve hours of sleep, then another forty-seven-hour day. But we just did that schedule for a really long period of time. Relationships were destroyed. People got sick, so their health was very fragile. But eventually we managed to get it out the door."

"There's a point where you can get a certain amount of people in a group, and everybody's going to share the feeling that they'll do anything, put as much as they can into the cinematics," explained Harley Huggins. "But at a certain point, you can't hire that many people who show that mindset. You're going to get people who just want to work nine to five."

Jeff Strain, who had caught hell from his wife for working during the birth of their child, was one of many developers taking stock. For all of management's efforts to streamline development, Blizzard's rigorous schedule only seemed to be growing worse.

"A lot of it, in terms of my observations about StarCraft, are coming from the perspective of an employee of the company. Thinking to myself, I don't think I can do this again. I can't put my family through this again. Literally I had a blanket in my office, I'd collapse around 3:00 a.m., sleep for four or five hours, get back up, get a cup of coffee, and keep going. It was very clear for me that I as an employee couldn't go through another cycle like that and would not work through another cycle like that. As much as I loved the games I was making, I knew that wasn't sustainable. It was very clear for me that I as an employee couldn't go through another cycle like that. As much as I loved the games I was making, I knew that wasn't sustainable."

Chapter 8: A Business-Like Approach to Showers

If you could show the initiative and bust your butt and come up with something, hell yeah, it went in.

-Ben Boos, artist, Blizzard North

One of the most awesome things about skill trees is that they show the player how he can grow his avatar—what his avatar is capable of becoming at the highest levels—right from the beginning of the game.

-Stieg Hedlund, designer, Blizzard North

At some point, people started joking, "Oh, no, don't tell me he took a shower this morning." I'd come up to people's desks first thing in the morning, and they'd say, "Oh, no. Okay, I'm ready: What did you think of?"

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

The biggest game company I had seen so far had been Origin. They had their own building with offices on multiple floors, a cafeteria. When you walked inside, there was a receptionist, there were TV monitors, they had a gift store. They looked like they had their act together. Blizzard North was nothing like that.

-Philip "Phil" Shenk, artist, Blizzard North

FROM TRISTRAM'S DUSKY lighting to the bone-wrought walls and ash-covered floors of hell, Diablo reaped critical and commercial success thanks largely to the creative decisions made by its small team.

Every Blizzard North developer's fingerprints could be found on every monster, every spell, every procedurally generated item, every step of the doomed player-character's journey down into darkness. The trials players faced on that journey were arduous, but its mechanics were the exact opposite.

Click to move. Click to attack. Click to pick up items.

Simplicity formed the dark heart of Diablo. That vital organ would be transplanted into Diablo II. Everything else—monsters, environments, heroes, loot—would be rebuilt from the ground up. "There was a list of characters and capabilities that we knew we wanted in the game, so the systems were designed to try to be capable of those features," said Steven Woo, programmer at Blizzard North. "A lot of times the artists, programmers, and designers would have discussions about whatever feature they think needed to be done, and just make it happen."

Diablo's hero classes sat near the top of the team's must-fix list, second only to the rampant cheating that had tarnished the game's online experience. [SQ1]

Over several months, the team settled on five classes. The Amazon was the first. "The character team decided they wanted to work on a hot chick first, and that's what they did," explained David Brevik.

Kris Renkewitz, the Amazon's original artist, sketched a tall, fearsome woman who wore bracers that coiled down her arms; animal-skin boots; and mummy-like wrappings that covered her most intimate parts, leaving most of her body exposed. Her hair was short and spiky, her visage grim and feral.

"I designed the character to be, well, like an amazon. She was a giant chick. Her helmet looked different, her armor looked different, her weapons were weird. It wasn't just a girl with a pony tail and wearing leather," Kris added, referring to the hero's completed form.

Dave, Max, Erich, and Stieg decided a Xena-type appearance was too wild for their tastes. One of Blizzard North's newest artists took a crack at revisions. "You know what it felt like?" reminisced Phil Shenk of his time at Blizzard North. "Like you were making games with the kids who played Dungeons & Dragons in their basement. It felt like we were in the basement with all these cool tools, just making up weird, arcane stuff." [SQ2]

Phil was the rare Blizzard North developer who joined the team with experience designing an action-focused RPG that wasn't Diablo. He'd been a lead designer on a game called Crucible, set in a persistent online world, more like Ultima's structure than Diablo's peer-to-peer tech.

After being hired in the summer of 1997, he entered the hallowed halls where Diablo had been made and needed a beat to digest reality. Water dribbled from dark stains on the ceiling. The carpet below each stain reeked of mildew. Fans circulated the stench as much as they dried puddles. Computers, keyboards, speakers, and drawing tablets had been heaped atop desks so they wouldn't get wet. Stacks of cubicles formed barriers in hallways.

"It looked like a fly-by-night operation, but it was busy. It was bustling. Everybody was active. It was energetic. But it wasn't at all what I'd thought it would be. It didn't come across as a well-oiled machine. It came across as a bunch of guys who'd just bought some office space and were just moving full-steam ahead."

Pulling up the most recent prototype of Diablo II, Phil's enthusiasm gave way to concern. The prototype was barebones, consisting of a tiny dungeon built from gray tiles. The game ran at 640x480. Phil was surprised Blizzard North wasn't pushing to hit 800x600. What really stood out to him was the Amazon. She moved in slow, floaty lurches, as if wading through water, and she was too fearsome for Phil's tastes. Firing up 3D Studio Max, he overhauled the hero into a bombshell: tall, fierce, and powerful, with long golden hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a busty chest and curvaceous figure that filled out her skintight leather armor.

When the rest of the guys extolled his design, Phil breathed a sigh of relief. He had worried that any team capable of designing a game as brilliant as Diablo would reject ideas from the lowest members on the company's totem pole.

Over time, Phil's first impression of Blizzard North's somewhat grungy environment changed. No way could a game as inventive, dark, and quirky as Diablo have been invented in a clean, sterile office. "I figured Diablo was the epitome of conscious art direction: Everything was planned out. Tristram had this sort of strange, gray, stormy color scheme to it. It wasn't day, it wasn't night. And I was thinking, How did they come up with that? It's not night, but it doesn't feel like daytime. It felt kind of like an in-between world. I thought those guys were geniuses. But certainly as I got to know them, I discovered that it all kind of happened by the seat of their pants."

WHILE EACH HERO'S gender was predetermined, players would be able to alter their appearance by equipping armor purchased from vendors or looted from the corpses of monsters. This, too, was a system carried over from Diablo, albeit dramatically overhauled.

In the first game, player-characters were rendered on-screen in light, medium, or heavy armor depending on the equipment they wore. A Warrior in rags looked the same as another Warrior sporting studded leather armor, since both armor types fell into the "light" category. Gear such as helms, swords, and shields were also depicted based on the category of body armor: A short sword appeared chipped and unadorned while held by a character wearing light gear, only to be depicted as more ornate when the player changed into a medium armor class such as chainmail or a heavy type such as plated mail.

The team's decision to limit renditions of player-characters to three visual styles had been the result of resources. When development of Diablo had begun, Condor had operated on a shoestring budget with a small team of untrained (yet) determined artists. They simply could not afford to reflect every individual ring, amulet, sword, axe, club, and piece of armor on the screen.

Diablo II's artistic reservoir ran much deeper than its predecessor's. "We started thinking about how to put together the characters as a paper doll," Kris Renkewitz explained.

"Characters were rendered kind of like G.I. Joe figures," added Robert Steele, one of the game's character artists, "so you could tear them apart: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, torso, then individual hands."

Still disappointed the voxel engine he had been developing with Dave Brevik and Doron Gartner had been a bust, Jon Morin was hungry for ways to contribute. When a rendering system that worked like paper dolls was floated in a meeting, he volunteered.

"I ended up writing the module system that sorted all the pieces, so that when you put on this particular sword and that particular armor, it would look almost exactly like them when portrayed on your character."

Phil Shenk worked alongside Jon, testing the component system and giving feedback. They tested the component system on a monster, an easier testbed than a player-character since the pool of gear for heroes would be much deeper. For the system's first outing, they decked out a Corrupt Rogue, an undead archer based on the Rogue hero from Diablo. "I believe the Corrupt Rogues were the only monsters that were componentized as fully as the [heroes]," said Phil. "They could hold every weapon type, I believe. All the other monsters were more piecemeal just to provide variety. If anything had a weapon, the weapon would be a component. There was a head, a torso, a left arm, a right arm, a left hand, a right hand, legs, shoulder pads."

The system's versatility was staggering. Each hand could hold a different weapon, and any number of components could be mixed and matched. "We would just be animating an arm with or without armor, with a club or without a club, or with a sword and then a different sword," explained Pattie Tougas, a character artist. "You'd animate the whole monster, but you'd just have the arm visible. Then we would export that, and then that would be put in the game and that could be swapped out. You could swap the hero's arm out for the arm with armor, or the arm with the great axe."

The extent of a character's customization depended on need. Fallen, the skittish, goblin-like agitators from Diablo that picked fights only to flee when other monster died, could be armed with various weapons and head pieces, as could Skeletons. Their character models were simple: bone arms for a Skeleton, single-color arms for different types of Fallen. By mixing and matching arms and weapons, the artists could effectively and efficiently create sub-types of each monster: a Fallen with a club, a Fallen with a sword and leather sash, and so on.

On the flip side, the multitude of paper-doll options necessitated a strict order of operations when rendering characters. Because every hero could face sixteen directions, every attack animation for every direction had to be rendered. Monsters, which could only face eight directions, were easier, but only relatively. "We had a tool that helped us sort all the different body parts at every different angle so that, say, frame-5 displayed correctly, and to make sure the left arm wasn't behind the torso," said Anthony Rivero, a character artist. "It was a pain in the ass to do that. You had to make sure all that stuff was sorted in the proper order."

"You'd make these render queues, and there'd be maybe 500 things in a render queue," added Kelly Johnson, character artist. "Just making that render queue took an hour or two." [SQ3]

Armed to the teeth, the Amazon and Diablo II's growing bestiary needed a field of battle. Unlike the original game, derelict chambers and gloomy hallways were complementary rather than primary settings. Instead of a stack of dungeons divided into four themed regions, Diablo II unfolds horizontally across four chapter-like Acts. Each Act boasts expansive, outdoor regions.

Diablo II's first Act intentionally throws returning players out of their comfort zone.

"Tristram's setting in Diablo was what we referred to as the Irish countryside, and in fact, the first act of Diablo II was again going to be set in the Irish countryside," Max Schaefer explained. "We started Diablo II in the wilderness to get you out of Diablo's city-and-dungeon-underneath format. You immediately say, 'This is different' when you start up the game. We're opening up the world, and things work differently, now. It was a clean break from the vertical design of the first game."

In a clear deviation from the first game's dungeons and catacombs, Act One sprawls across meadows and fields. Dirt paths unspool through the grass and lead into caves and crumbling fortresses. Players can enter these interiors to kill monsters for experience or solve quests, but inevitably they'll hit a dead-end and return to the surface to continue exploring. All paths, stones, and tiles of grass were generated procedurally, the process of using algorithms to build levels on the fly rather than building preset level designs, imbuing each session with a sense of mystery.

Backgrounds are made up of tiles snapped together according to algorithms. Painting the tiles that compose verdant pastures called for a tool as versatile as Jon Morin's paper-doll sorter. Max Schaefer headed the environment artists, initially a team of one: Ben Boos. "I think the first work for me was Dave Brevik saying, 'We need grass. We need an outdoor scene. Make grass,'" said Ben, who painted and cut tiles even before he teamed with Kris Renkewitz and Kelly Johnson to form Blizzard North's doomed cinematics team. "And I was like, oh my God, I don't know where to begin. I had no concept of where things tiled or what the tech was. So, I just got to dive in, and I painted and went crazy. I was off and running at that point. It became kind of a blur."

Ben went to Erich Schaefer and asked him for a crash course in trimming tiles, since Erich had been the one to cut up tiles and work with programmers to devise algorithms in the first game. To Ben's dismay, Erich shrugged at his question. His process had been to force backgrounds together until they clicked.

Back at his desk, Ben stumbled through rudimentary software until he hit on a crude methodology. "I set about coming up with a way to actually split my backgrounds into tiles," he said. "Then it was just a matter of making dirt, grass, and paths, rocks, trees, and so forth. I was off and running."

Before long, Ben had amassed a jumble of tiles, like pieces from a 1,000-piece puzzle not yet fitted into an idyllic scene. To assemble scenes according to algorithms, Ben got a helping hand from Tyler Thompson, a programmer hired a few weeks ahead of Phil Shenk. Tyler's first task, given during his job interview, was to survive a ride on the freeway with Dave Brevik.

"He took me on a wild, fast, terrifying ride in his 911 Turbo, I think it was, while asking me challenging questions," Tyler remembered. "He said, 'What do you think about working on a game like Diablo?'"

"I like to test the legs on my sports cars, and I'm a pretty fast driver. And... yeah," Dave Brevik recalled. "It was a white-knuckle experience for him, for sure. I think his pants were a little damp. Test number one: How do you perform under stress?"

Two weeks later, on April 19, 1997, Tyler returned to Blizzard North and took charge of simplifying the process of creating tiles for Ben Boos, who was still shouldering all the weight of environment creation. Prior to Tyler's arrival, Ben had subscribed to Erich Schaefer's loose formula of painting a tile, cutting it out, and placing it in a mosaic of tiles. Diablo II would generate terrain by procedurally choosing tiles and snapping them together. The problem, Ben explained, was the sheer volume of tiles he needed to create: grass, dirt, rocks, and other debris in myriad variations in order to ensure no rendition of Act One's countryside looked exactly like another.

"I said to Tyler, 'Make it like a brush. Let me click a tile type and then let me go paint a path,'" Ben remembered. "Then you'd load one of the variants, and if I clicked grass, it would automatically randomize and pick one. So, I was kind of the only one doing that, and it became such a crazy amount of very patient work. What we did with that crazy little tool is amazing. They deserve a lot of credit. We had very basic tools to work with. They really rocked it. We were rolling our own tools as we went."

Tyler had turned around his tile-cutting tool in record time. His next task was even more Herculean.

DAVE BREVIK'S MORNING routine was crucial to Blizzard North's success. After rolling out of bed, he dragged himself into the shower and cranked the hot water to full blast. Closing his eyes as steam curled up around him, he rested his head against the tiled wall and let his mind wander. After a few minutes, his eyes popped open. He scrubbed and dressed quickly, hopped into his car of choice, and raced to Blizzard North, where he strode through the front doors and into the bullpen, face aglow.

His arrival was met with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. "Even though he was a programmer and I was an artist, Dave Brevik is someone I view as a real talent in the industry," said Eric Sexton. "His unique vision really inspired me. At least two or three times a week, he'd come in, like, 'I was taking a shower, and I had this idea.' And he'd tell you the idea, and you were like, 'That's amazing!' Then he'd sit down and do it, and within a day he'd have this amazing idea up and running."

"It wouldn't always be major," Dave Brevik added. "Sometimes there were things like, we really need some extra tests. I'd stand next to somebody's desk and talk to them about this idea I had in the shower."

One late morning, Tyler found himself in Dave's crosshairs. "He said, 'We're not going to load in between levels anymore. Tyler, you can make that happen.' I said, 'Uh... okay.'"

Dave's latest proclamation was derived from Ultima Online. As much as he liked the game, he never shied away from pointing out its flaws. Excessive load times was one of his more frequent complaints. Staggering in its scope, Ultima Online's world was cordoned off into zones out of necessity. Most players still had dial-up modem connections in 1997, and could only send and receive data so quickly. When players left certain areas, the game briefly paused to load in the next zone. The original Diablo also had to load between levels.

Zoning was slow and cumbersome, Dave Brevik declared. If Diablo II was going to take place in a huge world, players should be able to roam from region to region without any breaks in the action. Tyler got to work on a solution. His approach was to simulate only what players could see on the screen. Terrain beyond the borders of the monitor is rendered when players come within a certain range. Monsters stand idle until they detect players.

There are exceptions. Players can leave fallen trinkets and piles of the gold on the ground, explore and fight elsewhere, and then return to pick up dropped goods. Certain monsters, such as those with ranged attacks, become aware of players sooner than others, enabling them to lob arrows, spells, or other attacks ahead of time. As players move, algorithms sew tiles together quickly so players never detect the stitches connecting each square.

"You can outrun a monster and it would just stop, because we didn't care about it anymore," Tyler explained. "Then what's left behind is cached and made rather small, so we don't have to worry about it. So, levels would be made as you go, and it'd become more and more detailed."

Algorithms weave tiles into quilts of fields and pastures, caves and temples. Dirt trails connect regions like beads on a necklace, so players can find the way forward once they tire of exploring by returning to the beaten path. Areas are divided by barriers that fit the environment, such as low stone walls in meadows or streams, and crossing those barriers leads to the next zone. The name of the new area pops up on the screen, feeding players' sense of discovery and progress. Loading screens only pop up when players travel between Acts, and even then the game's code keeps loading brief.

Perspective Mode, a pseudo-3D display mode available to players with certain 3D graphics cards, was another of Dave's eureka moments. "As we worked on the project, 3D was really becoming a thing. It seemed like everybody was going 3D. I worried that the game would come out and look dated because it wasn't 3D, because 3D graphics had rapidly advanced over the course of the project."

Although the team had settled on building Diablo II as a 2D, pixel-art game in the vein of the original, Dave was determined to tap into the burgeoning graphics card market by including special features. A solution occurred during a shower one morning. Like the original game, Diablo II unfolds on a grid, with one major difference: Each diamond-shaped tile is composed of several smaller diamond tiles. Whereas Diablo only accommodated one actor—objects such as player-characters, monsters, treasure chests, items, and so on—per tile, Diablo II's smaller-tiles-within-tiles approach let actors squeeze together.

That granular approach facilitated Dave's pseudo-3D solution, which he called Perspective Mode. Every mini-tile stored a bit of texture so it would blend in with other mini-tiles: grass, dirt, sand, and so on. Dave's idea was to rotate the texture in every miniature tile just a smidge as players moved around the screen. The game passes those textures to the video card, which paints them onto two polygons and then stretches them vertically and horizontally so they appear larger or smaller depending on the player-character's position.

Rotating and stretching a single texture wouldn't register to most players, but manipulating every texture on the screen produces a 3D-like effect. As players move closer or further away from any given object, the textures stored in polygons scroll by at different speeds, creating a parallaxing effect and giving players the impression that actors are larger or smaller. Objects shimmer slightly, the result of bilinear filtering, a process baked into graphics cards that smooths out textures when objects are rendered larger or smaller than their native resolutions.

"It was doing real, 3D math, and making this grid scale slightly, stretch slightly," Dave explained. "It gave a real sense of depth to the world."

In an impressively short span of time, Perspective Mode was finished and rolled into the latest build of the game. "There were a bunch of things I had to do to make sure walls lined up properly, and the lighting, but I think I wrote that fairly quickly," Dave continued. "I think it only took me a week or two to get it working. People loved the way it looked, and it really was awesome, but the artists weren't super happy they had to go back and chop up things and render them differently. We did feel it was worth it in the end, and added a lot to the game."

Perspective Mode was a relatively quick addition compared to other shower-time epiphanies such as seamless environments. Dave's most impressive idea revolutionized action-RPGs.

One knock against Diablo was that its three heroes were virtually identical. Warriors cast spells slower than the Sorcerer, who swung melee weapons slower than the Warrior. But players who chose a Warrior could still cast spells by boosting his magic attribute, while Sorcerers could still swing swords and fire arrows by upgrading strength and dexterity, for instance.

In effect, the three heroes represented starting points. Some critics and players argued that their choice of hero was meaningless. Blizzard North disagreed. The design of each hero—the Warrior's square jaw and toned physique, the Rogue's slim, dexterous build, the Sorcerer's silver hair and wrinkled, wizened face—made the game accessible, their top priority. Players unfamiliar with RPGs could take one look at each hero's profile and immediately gravitate to one that suited their play style. The Warriors were initially equipped and built to play best as a melee fighter, but if players controlling Warriors decided they wanted to throw fireballs or turn demons to stone down the road, they could boost their Magic stat. This was seen as a fair compromise between the sheer creativity of D&D character creation and the desired accessibility of the design team.

Over time, the game's community pinpointed the Sorcerer as the best choice. His fast cast rate and higher maximum Magic attribute gave him access to the game's most advanced spells, especially Mana Shield, a sorcery that let him use his pool of Mana energy as health. Because players who rolled a Sorcerer were practically guaranteed to have exponentially more Mana than health, Mana Shield made them nearly invincible, robbing the game of much of its tension.

Diablo II's designers decided each hero would have dozens of skills available only to them. The only question was how players should learn skills as they progressed. "I remember the shower where I had the idea," Dave said. "It just dawned on me one day: What if player classes could choose a path through a tree?"

Dave loved games like Master of Orion, which hailed from the 4X strategy genre: Players eXplore environments, eXpand their influence by building new settlements, eXploit resources to fund their colonies, and eXterminate opposition. Master of Orion in particular gave players a deep research tree, a mechanic introduced in the board game Civilization by Francis Tresham, which shares no relation with Sid Meier's Civilization, the computer game widely credited with popularizing research trees in video and PC games.

Skill trees promote organization and accessibility. Buying one upgrade lets players learn a new skill, and unlocks more advanced upgrades further down branches of the tree.

"I came into work and told it to Erich. I think this all was around the [development of] StarCraft," Dave said.

Originally, Dave wanted to hew close to Master of Orion by giving characters a skill tree composed of as many as seventy abilities. The resultant design would have been less a tree and more a tangle of branches that would have been too complicated for players to follow. Stieg Hedlund sanded down the idea's rough edges. "While I was taking a break from Diablo II and working on polishing StarCraft, we [both Blizzards] made a tech-tree poster," Stieg recalled. "It was literally a tree in that it started at the bottom and involved the interdependencies of buildings and units."

Stieg wanted to transplant the concept of tech tree posters into Diablo II's user interface as a way to more clearly communicate what players could do with their character. He went to Dave, Max, and Erich with his layout idea. They settled on thirty skills per hero, divided evenly between three trees. Skills are arranged vertically, with low-level skills at the top giving way to more advanced skills at the middle and trailing down to the cream of the crop at the bottom.

Over months of iteration, the Amazon's skills were ordered into Javelin and Spear, Bow and Crossbow, and Passive and Magic trees.

"'Let's start by making an archer-type character who can maybe also throw spears,'" Dave Brevik recalled of brainstorming the Amazon's trees. "We figured if we're going to have range, maybe she can shoot arrows and use javelins and spears."

The Amazon's Javelin and Spear, and Bow and Crossbow categories are easily understandable. Players interested in building out a character that specialized in ranged attacks, a la Diablo's Rogue, should focus on Bow and Crossbows. The Passive and Magic tree contains an assortment of defensive abilities such as an increased chance of dodging projectiles and melee attacks, and the ability to create a decoy that diverts monsters' attention away from the player.

Skills added layers of tactical play and personality-driven customization to progression. Players level up by killing monsters and completing quests to earn experience points. Every time they gain a level, players receive five stat points—to increase Vitality, Strength, Dexterity, and Energy, the magical force for deploying skills—to distribute as they see fit, as well as a single skill point. How they spend that point is up to them. One or more branches connect some skills to others, communicating to players that they must first invest at least one point in a prerequisite skill to learn a stronger ability later.

Although low-level skills start out weaker than high-level abilities, every skill can be upgraded up to twenty times, allowing virtually any low-level skill to become robust enough to carry players through tougher battles late in the game. Alternatively, players can choose to spend the minimum amount of points on prerequisites and save points for high-level abilities, or distribute points far and wide across one, two, or all of their trees to create hybrid characters proficient in a wide array of techniques. One Amazon player might go deep into the Bow and Crossbow tree to unlock its full potential. While another player might spread a few points across the Passive and Magic category for abilities such as Inner Sight, which lowers enemy defense, but mix in Javelin and Spear spells for melee combat. Yet another may invest in all three trees, not going too deep into any one specialization, but instead creating a generalist character able to swap between an assortment of weapons at a moment's notice.

"I tried to pay off on the fantasy of each of these classes, the things that people would tend to associate with them as archetypes," Stieg explained. "I wanted all the classes to be [able to finish the game solo], but at the same time to have strategies that were effective and ones that weren't. Running into a room full of bad guys with your Necromancer should be a pretty bad idea, as it's contrary to what he's all about, and I endeavored to make sure this was the case in the game."

While Stieg and the three bosses were the first to brainstorm skills, Blizzard North's egalitarian culture permitted anyone to chime in. Erich Schaefer pruned tree layouts, collaborating with Stieg, Dave, and programmers such as Tyler Thompson who, along with Theodore "Ted" Bisson, coded skills. Sometimes a developer would jot down the name of an ability and a suggestion for what it could do. Most notes, such as the direction Tyler received for the Necromancer hero's curse abilities, were vague, leaving plenty of room for interpretation.

"Like, Amplify Damage: it increases how much damage you're going to do," he remembered of one note. "Well, what is that? Is it a percent? Is it for normal damage? All damage? How about damage over time? How does all that work? None of those questions were filled in by a designer. Those were all programmers going, 'Well, this is what seems reasonable to me, so I'm going to do this.'"

Tyler printed out each skill tree once its design was semi-finalized, pinned it to a corkboard near his computer, then inserted colored pins to keep track of which ones he'd worked on. If a skill tree's layout changed, he'd have to start over. The position of a skill in a tree determined its ranking relative to every other skill, necessitating a fresh look at how any given skill worked.

"Designing skill trees was a lot of work but a lot of fun," said Erich Schaefer. "It was maybe the hardest thing to do, design wise, both creating them and balancing. We'd have meetings and decide what kinds of skills we wanted to do. I'd do rough layouts and we'd try some out, and half of them wouldn't be very good. We redid those trees over and over again. It was just brute force."

"We wanted to put cooler stuff toward the bottom, so we'd say, 'Oh, yeah, that uh, that seems like a level-15 spell. Yeah,'" Dave Brevik recalled, laughing. "Skill trees would change and Erich would design trees multiple times over because new ideas would come in, and things would either work or they wouldn't. Eventually we came up with the theme of the different tabs and stuff, and that all kind of solidified. It was a very iterative process."

Phil Shenk agreed. "It was very collaborative. So collaborative that I can't even remember where certain things came from,"

Stieg juggled ideas for skills with tweaking values recorded in spreadsheets. He claimed the Amazon as his favorite character in Diablo II due to her blend of close-quarters and ranged abilities. "A lot of this does come from her being first, feeling how my goal of allowing the different progression paths was starting to work with her. It's also just one of my favorite character types with the mix of ranged and melee combat."

One of the most distinct heroes was the Paladin, the second class conceived. The character model, painted by Michio Okamura and animated by Kelly Johnson, is a dark-skinned man who walks with a noble bearing. He starts in simple clothes but, as players push deeper into the world, the paper-doll system depicts his armor as gleaming mail that transforms him into a holy knight. "The Paladin was based off the idea of counteracting the devil aspect of Diablo," explained Kris Renkewitz. "Basically, without putting a religious bent on it, we put a religious bent on it."

Another Paladin skill tree lets players learn auras, visual effects that grant passive bonuses to players and their allies such as restoring life, causing enemies to harm themselves every time they strike players, and freezing monsters with cold snaps that slow their movement.

Auras were not part of the Paladin's repertoire at first. The character was almost entirely combat-oriented until Dave gleaned inspiration from Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest. He tended to play a Bard, a class able to heal and buff other players by playing music, while Mike Scandizzo, a programmer, teamed up with him as a Druid. "Dave started to like the Bard's songs enough that at one point, when he decided the Paladin was not working out, he said we'd scrap all the skills and take some of the ideas behind the EverQuest Bard," Mike remembered. "But instead of songs, we'd make them auras and apply them to the Paladin class."

The biggest of Dave's ideas tended to be double-edged swords. Weeks or months of work could be tossed out in favor of what he preferred to do instead. "Every morning we'd talk about what we were doing, how the bugs are, what we need to do for that day," Jon Morin remembered. "Then Dave would come in and go, 'I was in the shower this morning and I had this idea.' Whenever we heard that, we'd go, 'Aww...'"

Some programmers remembered Ted Bisson expressing annoyance at all the work that had to be tossed out so the Paladin could be retooled to use auras.

"The Paladin went through major changes," Tyler said. "I think Ted had twenty-something skills that were thrown away before we moved to the aura-based system. That's part of development: You throw stuff out there, and it works or it doesn't."

Ultimately, however, auras passed the Blizzard North test: If a proposal's merit held up after testing, it made the cut. Auras became a defining characteristic of the Paladin. His assortment of combat skills and defensive auras enabled solo players to survive and thrive on their own, while Paladin players were sought after on Battle.net for the benefits their auras granted to parties.

To fully upgrade each of any hero's thirty skills would require 600 skill points. The maximum character-level is 99, meaning players will never receive enough points to master—fully upgrade—all thirty skills. That limitation forces them to make difficult choices: maximize proficiency in a few skills, focus on a half dozen, or potentially spread themselves thin to become competent in all abilities but a master of none. Because each hero's skills are exclusive, all players wind up specializing simply by choosing a class. From there they only specialize further, investing heavily in some skills, spending a single point in others to satisfy requirements for later abilities, and ignoring most of the rest.

Those limitations are not meant to restrain players, but to encourage them to think carefully about upgrades. The thought they put into skill points creates a bond between players and their avatars, and the satisfaction that comes from seeing a character evolve—as well as choosing each and every piece of a character's equipment load—feeds into Dave Brevik's peacock mentality: No two players were likely to spec out the same hero. In fact, a single player could roll several Amazons or Paladins and develop each differently.

In a way, assigning exclusive skills to Diablo II's heroes was more limiting than Diablo's spell books, which could be read and cast by any of the game's three heroes as long as players dumped enough experience points into their Magic stat. Blizzard North's team saw that limitation as a good thing. It fostered agency, asking players to play an active role in evolving their characters.

"They'd pick the Warrior and go in and start casting spells," Dave recalled of Diablo players, "then say, 'This game's just too hard.' And it's like, well, that's because you're not doing the thing you should be doing. So we figured, in Diablo II, let's take the ability for them to screw themselves out of the game by giving them something [more defined]. They would say, 'Oh, I know what a Paladin is supposed to be' or 'I know what a Sorceress is.' They could kind of understand what those classes represented to begin with. Then what they can actually do, and the choices they can make, are interesting and fun."

Chapter 9: Lay of the Land

They said, "Yeah, we're making Diablo II." And I said, "Sign me up."

-David Glenn, artist, Blizzard North

We changed the very nature of combat. The sense of committing to each step and the anticipation of horror disappeared.

-Michio Okamura, artist, Blizzard North

Diablo always felt very limited, not grim, to me. There was no sense of being in a world. You were just in a tiny town and all of the dungeons underneath it.

-Stieg Hedlund, designer, Blizzard North

DIABLO II TOOK shape bit by bit, pixel by pixel. Unlike the process of constructing its dungeons and wilderness regions, the game's development was not algorithmic.

Blizzard North's team worked in fits and starts: the broad outline for a hero one day, visual direction for one of the game's four Acts another, brainstorming and reordering skill trees yet another. Dave, Max, and Erich would plan for the month, or the week, or the day, or the hour. Iteration was the driving force behind the game. Act One's pastures and fields were meant to be big, but if one felt too big, they would give it a haircut, shaving off tiles here and there. If it felt too small, they'd drop tiles back in and take it for a spin to determine how it felt.

There was no concrete plan, only a vision: Like Diablo, but bigger.

Players begin Act One in the Rogue Encampment, a town area like Tristram, but much smaller and ramshackle. From the Rogue Encampment, a bridge leads into the Blood Moor. The area had to make a good first impression. It was the first place where players would get a taste of combat, exploration, looting, leveling up and assigning stat and skill points—in essence, Diablo II's core game loop.

"I wanted players to be able to jump right into the game and start running around and fighting monsters," Stieg Hedlund explained.

The Blood Moor is inhabited by Zombies, Quill Rats, and the Fallen, introducing players to a range of monster types and ways to approach combat. Zombies are slow, dumb, and hit hard. Fallen rely on swarms of quick strikes but are cowardly. Quill Rats shoot barbs that players can see coming, but that can be tricky to dodge unless players possess a skill such as Slow Missiles, an Amazon ability which reduces any projectile's speed.

"This gave the player a good variety of challenges as well as introducing some of the main themes that would occur again and again, with many variations, of course," Stieg continued.

While the Blood Moor contains a thoughtful mixture of monsters, other regions are populated by drawing from a pool of enemies. "Occasionally we would meet with art directors," Erich Schaefer said, "and those guys would compile lists based on what we were asking for. To flesh out an Act and say, 'We need at least six monsters for this outdoor area. What are we going to do?'"

Erich managed the character artists by employing his signature hands-off style. He began most days by drinking coffee and browsing a newspaper. When he finished, he'd amble from cubicle to cubicle, office to office, chatting with artists about their recent creations. "He'd talk about animation, see what you did yesterday, stuff like that," Chris Root recalled. "Eventually that got to be where it was taking all morning to do his rounds, we had so many artists working on multiple teams."

Formal team meetings happened once or twice a week. Occasionally Erich passed out lists of monsters to create, though descriptions tended to be vague so artists could let their imaginations run wild—both in terms of creating art, and in deciding how to create it. Evan Carroll, one of the character team's newer hires, would read over lists, sketch out rough drafts of enemies that appealed to him, and get feedback. "Mine were pretty freeform," Evan said. "I wasn't a particularly good pen-and-pencil artist or draftsman at that point, but I remember everyone was invited to just throw their ideas on the table. And this was for art meetings in particular. That tradition continued throughout the entire development, and through Diablo III, also."

"We'd have a character-team get-together, and it was really democratic," agreed Anthony Rivero, character artist. He recalled a time when Stieg Hedlund had mentioned needing a creature for the swamps. Something that could fly and resembled an insect. "That was pretty much the description I got," Anthony continued. "They called it the mosquito demon, so that's what I concepted."

Of the many characters he created, the Tainted was one of Phil Shenk's favorites. Known within Blizzard North as "the big head," the large, gorilla-like Tainted has a characteristically large head crowned with curved horns. It slashes with claws at close range and, after taking damage, backs off and spits lightning orbs. When players deliver the killing blow, the beast rocks back on its heels, one clawed hand clutching its throat while blood pools at its feet, then collapses. "That was the first monster I did when I came to Blizzard. His death animation was so dramatic," Phil said. "That was fun. I was so fired up when I first got there, and I had access to all these tools. I just wanted to make a monster. I know for me, I just fell in love with the process of making stuff, and put more work into it than I had to."

No monster went from concept to completion without passing Blizzard North's trial by fire.

"We were a very argumentative group. We would constantly play the builds and we'd all talk about them every day," said Max Schaefer. "It wasn't about people sticking to particular responsibilities. It was an open environment as far as giving input. Everyone would key in on something that was bugging them, and we'd debate it."

Once a character had been drawn and animated, its creator would team up with a programmer to discuss implementation. Artists tended to have ideas for how their creations should move and attack. In devising Diablo II's paper-doll character system, Phil Shenk and Jon Morin decided that Corrupt Rogues should sprint onto the screen, startling Diablo players accustomed to the first game's slower pace.

In Diablo II, artists and programmers also had to consider the game's expansive environments. To avoid giving players the upper hand, many monsters have a broad "awake radius"—a distance at which enemies become alert to players' presence—to ensure they take notice of players before players spot them. "You'd be able to walk slowly and see a monster at the edge of the screen, and you could just turn and run off if you didn't want to deal with it," Phil said. "That was one of the concessions, to have the Corrupt Rogues be more aggressive."

The climax of Act One pits players against Andariel, one of Diablo's lieutenants. Towering over players with goat legs, spiky red hair, and tentacle arms ending in claws, Andariel was one of Kris Renkewitz's demonic brain children, and the personification of one of his artistic ideologies. "What I tried to explain to them, and to everybody that came on board after I came up with this design element, is that it wasn't about the bracelets, the shoulder pads, all this stuff," Kris said. "It's about the silhouette the character makes on the game."

Andariel's silhouette is distinctive. Her great height sets her apart from player-sized monsters such as Zombies and the Tainted. As she walks, the claws extending from her back sway and flex like scorpion tails. "The silhouette will drive our game [design] because now she has a different game mechanic than any character that had been in Diablo at that time," Kris continued. "I said we shouldn't make everything so vertical; we should try to make a few things horizontal. We need something fat, something squished, something kind of blobby, something with lots of spikes around it. All these different attributes that add to unique silhouettes."

Phil Shenk did a second pass on Andariel. Where Kris's take was a severe, scary-looking demon, Phil retained some of those elements—hair standing at attention and tapered to a point so it resembled the flame of a match head, clawed arms, hoofs instead of feet—and sexed her up, stripping away clothing and bestowing nipple piercings that connect to a chain dangling from bare breasts.

"Erich had given me a list," Phil remembered, referring to an Excel spreadsheet listing the types of monsters needed throughout the game's four Acts. Small, Medium, and Large were three categories. Spell-casting and Melee were two others. "And then one of the categories was Topless," Phil continued. "They said, 'Yeah, we need a certain number of topless monsters,' because they'd all liked the succubi in Diablo."

Andariel is formidable, dealing heavy damage at close range and spraying poisonous mist in a wide arc when players retreat. She's weak to fire, however, giving players an edge. A key feature of her lair is a pit of blood in the center of the room. Players can goad Andariel into chasing them around the pit, pecking away at her with ranged attacks until she falls. In the game's story, her death lifts the pall hanging over the beleaguered Rogue Encampment, and paves the way for players to hitch a ride in a caravan heading east to Act Two.

Fighting Andariel made for a fitting end to Diablo II's first Act, which drove home many of the core differences between the original game and its sequel. As development wore on, more differences came to the fore.

MAX SCHAEFER WAS energized. While his brother Erich had spearheaded work on Diablo with Dave Brevik, Max had headed up a small team assigned to develop a 3D football game for 3DO's M2 console. Selling Condor to Davidson & Associates had freed them from the necessity of contract jobs, and had given the M2 team the opportunity to dive into Diablo.

When Diablo II rolled around, Max was eager to play a bigger role. The only question was what, exactly, that role should be. "I was the background art director," he said. "I organized all the background artists and we'd sit and talk and debate about how it would all go together, what the levels were going to be about, how they worked, what needed to be fixed, and all that. It became more a job of organizing and managing the team."

Erich, who had presided over background art on Diablo, was willing to let his brother take point on Diablo II's vistas while he managed the character artists. "We can't work on the same thing together because as brothers, we just fight too hard," said Erich.

In the sequel's embryonic phase, Max channeled his degree in environmental design to build small prototypes, sandboxes in which developers could test features. Max and Ben Boos, at that time the only artist working on environments, established a practice that carried on as the team filled out. "We pored through all kinds of history books and architecture books looking for moments in time that had a cool style to try to capture as an environment," Max said. "Doing all of that appealed to me a lot."

Act Two hosted Lut Gholein, an Arabian Nights-style city bordered on all sides by rambling deserts. "One of the things I did right at the beginning of development was to re-read all of the story and lore created in Diablo and consider how it fit together," Stieg Hedlund said. "I created two things based on this: a timeline, and a map. When the Acts were created, I worked with the world team to establish what the different areas would be, what sort of terrain and features each would contain. Once levels started to come online, I would set which types of monsters needed to spawn in each."

Dave Glenn was the chief architect of Lut Gholein and its sandy dunes. Joining Blizzard North in January 1998, Glenn had studied architecture in college before he took a left turn into game development, modeling 3D structures for an early version of SimCity 3000 that Maxis later jettisoned when the team failed to get their proprietary 3D game engine up and running. That was fine with Glenn. By early 1998, he'd landed his job at Blizzard North.

"I met with Matt [Householder], Max, and Kris, and then just kind of a round robin meeting with other people. I remember thinking, Wow, these guys released a game, knocked it out of the park, they're doing really well financially—but they don't really know what they're doing It was just kind of chaotic, a little loosey-goosey, but I thought it was great because it was my first [full-time] game job."

Glenn found plenty of room to flex his creative muscles at Blizzard North. At the time he arrived, Max Schaefer had built a small prototype for Act One's monastery, a dungeon-style environment, and Ben Boos was cranking out tiles. The rest of the game was a blank slate. Glenn dug in working on two Macintosh computers: One to render backgrounds, another to work on something else while the first computer cranked away. His first assignment was designing elaborate fountains that would be placed in the Rogue Monastery, an area explored late in Act One. To build fountains, he first had to construct the room they would be found in, bake in lighting—typically in a single direction so all shadows were consistent—and then render out the room. Glenn also pioneered the use of set pieces, pre-arranged tiles that spawned together to form tapestries, statues, wood carvings, particular corners of rooms—any number of items that Diablo II's algorithms would place as a unit to give levels more visual flair. From there, he moved on to constructing Act One's Rogue Encampment.

Unfortunately, the boons of having two workstations were negated by long render times. Max Schaefer had been using an ancient version of StrataVision, an art program designed for Macs, that could take up to twenty hours to render images. The bigger the image, the longer one computer sat out of commission. After two weeks of ponderous output, Glenn went to Max and asked to make a change. "I spent a few days working late doing side-by-side comparisons. I'd render one thing with Strata and another thing with 3D Studio Max. After two or three days I said, 'Look, I can do this in thirty seconds while Strata takes twenty hours. Why are we doing this?' And they said, 'Okay, yeah, let's all use 3D Max.' Things got done way faster."

Glenn joined meetings with Max Schaefer and Ben Boos, exclaiming over architecture and perusing history books to come up with more scenery and décor for Act Two. Their notions started out rather generic: sand, and sand, and more sand. Regions solidified as more information trickled in. "We'd get the basic layouts, then we'd get the quests," Glenn said, "and as the quests trickled in we'd brainstorm, 'Okay, where could this take place?' Sometimes it was predetermined, sometimes we'd just sit around on a Monday morning and brainstorm. It was a pretty loose structure, which was a lot of fun because you could just come up with something wild and crazy."

The environment team played to their strengths. Glenn had ideas for structures and Ben supported him by painting set pieces of complex objects such as palm trees and oases. Those were mixed with tiles smudged with dirt, mud, or sand.

"Prior to Dave Glenn starting, I was working all by myself, and I won't say I was panicking, but I was hit with a tall order," Ben recalled. "And along comes Dave Glenn with an architectural background, and the timing was beautiful. I was building up the essence of the act, the flat tiles and the palette, and slabs of wall start flying up thanks to Dave. Next thing you know, we have towns and shops and palaces and walkways. It was amazing."

Glenn applied what he'd learned helping to finish Act One's town to construct Lut Gholein: A town should be just large enough to feel alive, yet small enough that vendors, healers, and other essential NPCs were easily accessible. Players should be able to get in, stock up on supplies, and get back to the action. For inspiration, he turned to Mos Eisley, the bustling desert town in 1977's Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and pictures of Volubilis, a city in Morocco erected from mud bricks on a foundation of stone.

Over several weeks, a large inn, stalls covered in canopies, and a palace topped with a dome built from colored tiles came to life on Glenn's computers.

"I went through reference stuff and I found a lot of these medieval Northern African towns: tight, narrow streets with lots of vendors. I built these vendor huts that they didn't do anything, I just wanted the feel of a crowded desert sort of town."

"The palace and the dome were all Dave Glenn," Max added. "I remember I collaborated on some of it and even did a tiny bit of modeling for the city walls and the general look of the palace."

Max and Glenn became friends as well as friendly rivals. On any given day, they went from shouting at each other over politics to going out for lunch. During that span of time, Max also made peace with how the arrival of talented and trained artists reshaped his own role on the team.

"I made some stuff in Act One: some stone walls, the river," Max said. "And in doing that, I just realized, I'm not as good at doing this as these other guys are. It was a humbling time where I realized that my usefulness to the company was not necessarily going to be making artwork. But it was also really kind of exciting and cool to know that our people could make stuff a hell of a lot faster and better than I was doing it. After a while, we were really cranking stuff out. I think for me, the fun was the design and process of figuring out what you were going to do and how it would all go together, [rather] than the actual physical creation of objects."

Max was not the only one to observe a gradual changing of the guard. Michio Okamura had illustrated the bulk of Diablo's characters, including the devil whose name and blood-red visage adorned every game box. While he still turned out dozens of character illustrations on Diablo II, he willingly played a different role on the sequel's character team.

"I wanted to make sure we didn't have a single person forcing their vision on people," Michio explained. "We didn't have official titles at the time, so I wasn't the lead artist, though I was functionally the acting lead artist. I later elected Phil to be the lead artist since he had proven to me that he had the drive, skills, and talent to be the lead artist for the project in my place. I like working collaboratively. We had other artists coming in. Mike Dashow came in, Kris Renkewitz. Instead of me feeling like I had to put everything together then pass it off to other people to finish off, we had this fun collaborative effort. It was like, 'What are you going to do?' and 'Oh, that looks great. You should do that.' For me, one of the things I wanted to do is show that there's a world beyond just the dungeon."

DIABLO II's ARTISTS scaled back on the amount of sand players would have to run across, but not the size of Act Two. "The idea was, let's just make a huge desert and that'd be kind of fun to just go get lost," Glenn said. "We put the whole set together, got lost, and said, 'Well, this isn't any fun. We're lost in the desert.' So, we'd have to scale back. We'd say, 'Okay, let's make the desert kind of big, but not so big that you can't follow the edge and take it to the stairs up a cliff to the next area.'"

Set pieces such as stone carvings, palm trees, and temples only did so much to break up the monotony of staring at boundless expanses of sand. Glenn and the rest of the environment team kept things interesting by coming up with thematic interiors such as an abandoned harem, temples, crypts, and outright weird venues such as the Arcane Sanctuary, a maze of twisting stone walkways suspended over a starry backdrop. Glenn devised the Sanctuary from the Ways, an otherworldly network of tunnels from fantasy author Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time epic. Glenn proposed the starry background be changed to a gigantic, swirling portal that flashed shades of green, but the team ran out of time and moved on to other work.

"Dave Brevik put in the Defender star field as a placeholder and said, 'Until we get something better, we're just going to leave this in here.' And it ended up staying," Glenn said. "We shipped with the fucking Defender star field scrolling through the Arcane Sanctuary."

The Sorceress, Diablo II's third hero class to be created, complemented Act Two's exotic milieus. Much of her look and feel was defined by Mike Dashow, a character artist who started at Blizzard North in February 1998. "Somewhere in the process, Erich said, 'Okay, this guy knows what he's doing; he's doing a good job. Mike, we'd like you to do the Sorceress,'" Dashow remembered.

As was his customary approach, Erich supplied Mike with a few descriptors to get him started. A female magic user, Egyptian in appearance, and wielding mastery of fire, lightning, and cold, the disciplines that would comprise her three skill trees. Mike referenced Phil Shenk's Amazon and took the Sorceress in the opposite direction. Where the Amazon is muscular but lithe, speaking to her speed and agility, the Sorceress is the most lightly armored of the heroes, more apt to pick up a staff topped with a magical crystal than a gigantic sword.

Mike's purview over the Sorceress extended to deciding how she would look wearing light, medium, and heavy armor types, as well as how individual items would appear on her character filtered through the paper-doll system. "You'd know players would mix and match," he explained. "Like, when you pick up the such-and-such, that gives you medium torso, light arms, heavy shoulder pads... It was all this whole system of, at any given point, you're looking at any of three sets of sprites: the medium shoulder pads, the light, the heavy. Ditto with the arms, the legs."

The Sorceress' Fire, Lightning, and Cold skill trees grew branches through the combined efforts of brainstorming and visual effects created by artists and programmers. Phil Shenk took point on animating fire. "I remember I really wanted to have good-looking fire, so I spent a lot of time on the fire that appears on the ground," he said. He created small, medium, and large pyres, looping animations so every tongue of flame crackled and danced in a cycle that appeared organic.

One of his favorite creations was flame that sprouted up on terrain. Firewall, one of the Sorceress's skills and a holdover from the first game, raised a line of flames over the ground. Blaze, a new skill, caused fire to sprout from the ground with every step. Players could effectively paint with fire by casting Blaze and running in patterns. "I think that one was one that we just came up with because it just seemed like a cool idea, to just drop fire behind you," Phil said. "The fire turned out to be a big hit because we could put it anywhere. We could spread it out in a radius or leave it in a line. We got a lot of use out of that."

Skills like Blaze and Firewall informed the Sorceress's approach to combat as well. Players interested in run-and-gun combat could specialize in offensive abilities like Fireball, while players who wanted to hold enemies back could throw down Firewalls or cast Blaze and trick enemies into following their path, dealing damage to foes as they flee.

Frozen Orb, the most powerful of the Sorceress's Cold skills, was one of the game's most difficult abilities to balance. Every cast sends forth a spinning globe of ice that spits ice missiles in every direction before bursting apart in an explosion of shrapnel. Frozen Orb was difficult to test because it was a level-30 skill, meaning players could only unlock it once they reached character-level 30 and invested in the skill's prerequisites.

Every character's skill tree has between one and three level-30 abilities. The trickiest part of testing them was keeping the game stable enough to experiment. Diablo II's code was in constant flux, and each new version rendered characters from previous versions obsolete. Consequently, early-game areas and skills received more attention than late-game content.

"We were busy trying to ship it, so we would make changes, and literally, it might take us two weeks to figure out what elements were affected by balance changes we would make in the game," Tyler said.

Mike Dashow worked with programmer Ted Bisson to implement the Sorceress's skills. He put together artwork for Frozen Orb, pushed the files onto Blizzard North's servers, and gave Ted the go-ahead to write code for the skill. Then he waited. A short while later, Ted walked into his office with a confused look on his face. Mike had replaced all of the skill's ice particles with beach balls.

"There were beach balls inflating and deflating all over the screen," Mike said, laughing as he recalled his prank.

SWIRLING STAR FIELDS. Glaringly bright deserts. Lush pastures. With each tile and new feature, Diablo II's identity revealed itself. It was still an action-RPG, but wrought more from epic fantasy stylings than the first game's motifs. One other new addition spoke to how much Diablo II had changed from the original.

Every encounter in Diablo II has two solutions. Fight, or flight. That choice existed in the first game, as well, but every character moved at a walk. Players had to factor their less-than-harried pacing into their odds of survival, while also minding their surroundings. "One of the great things about Diablo's DRLG [dungeon random level generation] was that there was a very tactical consideration for the layout," said Michio Okamura, character artist. "You had to figure out what kind of situation you were in, get behind a doorway, make sure you weren't in an open hallway or a huge open chamber."

Marching had worked for Diablo's oppressive cells and pits, but walking through Diablo II's vast fields and deserts would grow tedious. In answer, the team introduced running, an action that went under the knife several times. One early implementation let players dash in short bursts, just long enough to get out of harm's way. A later design featured an encumbrance stat to determine how slowly or quickly characters could sprint, with monsters and heroes in lighter armor running faster. The team dropped encumbrance and implemented a stamina bar that depletes as players run. Players receive a few extra stamina points each time they level up, and spending experience points on Vitality increases stamina and life points.

Making stamina a finite resource introduced tactical options. Early in their adventure, when their stats are low, players need to save running for desperate scenarios, or for when they want to dash through a previously explored area to get to the next region. Despite being set in the great outdoors and the addition of fast-paced mechanics such as running, traces of Diablo's bleak, claustrophobic atmosphere remain intact. Lighting changes as day cycles to night. Players run and fight under clear skies one minute, heavy rain the next. "When you played the game at night and could only see a few feet in front of your character—oh my God," said Kelly Johnson, recalling one instance of exploring a pasture in the dead of night as rain hammered down. "You were inching your way into this huge black field, and a monster would suddenly appear five feet away from you."

For some developers, the difference in atmosphere was almost tangible. "There were certain things in Diablo II that were better than in the previous game, but we did recognize that we were losing the first game's scarier elements," Erich admitted. "You could run around in Diablo II and even run away, but in Diablo 1, you had a fair amount of combat that you were going to be forced to complete to exit the level simply because the monsters [walked] faster than you. They could often hit you because you were so slow."

Although players start out with a shallow pool of stamina, they eventually gain so much that, by the end of Act One, walking is no longer necessary.

"Tactically, it became very boring," Michio said. "You could pretty much run through anything. That, I think, was our big failure in Diablo II."

Early on, Diablo II's tonal shift was a subject of constant debate within Blizzard North. Despite his misgivings over running, Michio came to appreciate the sequel's evolution.

"To a certain extent, what we did with Diablo was because of technological and resource limitations," he admitted.

Kelly Johnson favored the first game. "In Diablo, you had to size up your enemies," Kelly Johnson said. "You had to think, 'Okay, am I going to fight this guy here, or should I retreat?' In Diablo II, you could run in, try something, say, 'This isn't working,' and just run back out. There was less thinking involved in Diablo II. It was more about uber-armor, uber-weapons—it's all about the uber-ness. In Diablo, you were more tactical about how you played the game. You knew one wrong step could be lethal."

Erich Schaefer admitted he was still torn on how running changed the feel not only of Diablo II's gameplay, but of its world. "Diablo was scarier and more tactical, but Diablo II had a broader audience," he said.

Objectively, Erich knew the change had been the right move. "People don't necessarily want more tactical battles. There's an audience for that, but I don't think it's necessarily the action-RPG audience. I think Diablo II was more popular due to the openness and the freedom."

"I remember at one point, we had a pretty long discussion about what made Diablo so tense and why that element wasn't in Diablo II," Phil Shenk recalled.

Dave viewed the sequel's tonal shift pragmatically. "The reason that Diablo II doesn't feel as dark and gothic is because it's set outdoors. It is profound how different the gameplay is in this wide-open area versus the corridors of a dungeon. The strategies and gameplay, the motion on the screen, feelings that are evoked when you're playing outdoors versus indoors. It's not quite as dark simply because we're out in the green grass. Also, some of the monsters in Diablo II, there were quite a few that I don't think are as frightening as in Diablo. I think they're pretty neat, but a pack of bugs or a frog or something is just not as scary as the Balrog."

"I think Diablo was a superior game in its gameplay, but I think Diablo II was superior in creating a sense of world," Eric Sexton said. The Blizzard North team's collective desire to branch out in world design could be attributed in part to the games they were playing: sprawling epics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64, and a growing stock of massively multiplayer RPGs such as Ultima Online and EverQuest. "I think Diablo II opened that up so you felt, Yeah, there's a dungeon here and I can go down and fight, but the dungeon is attached to a world. I can run past the dungeon and go elsewhere and feel like if I run far enough, I'll get somewhere else."

"We made a couple efforts to try to bring that feeling back in Diablo II, but they tended to make the game slower," Erich Schaefer went on. "People around the office, as well as Blizzard South and other people playing the game, had either gotten used to Diablo II's newer, faster style of play, or maybe that style was simply more fun than Diablo's. I think we gained more fun somehow in making the game faster, and after going forward a little more, there was no desire from almost anybody to keep experimenting with reverting."

Chapter 10: Full Disclosure

The way that whole situation went down was a little weird, and it turned out to be a big mess. Nobody understood the move at all. I mean, what does this weirdo company associated with coupon books want with videogame companies?

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

My net worth was pretty much all tied up in that same worthless stock as well. It was pretty shocking to have an entire amount become worthless overnight.

-Pat Wyatt, VP of research and development, Blizzard Entertainment

BEFORE SIGNING ON the dotted lines in early 1996, Dave, Max, and Erich looked for downsides to being acquired by Davidson & Associates. They found none. Joining the fold meant getting access to Bob and Jan Davidson's well-oiled production machine that manufactured boxes, manuals, and game media such as CD-ROM, and they would get to continue working alongside Allen Adham and his team down south.

"With the release of WarCraft and WarCraft II, being part of the Blizzard name was a big thing," Dave said. "I wanted to be part of that magic. I was really excited about being called Blizzard, where we were going, being able to make the kind of game we wanted to make—those things were my focus."

Following the acquisition, Dave's day-to-day work at the newly rechristened Blizzard North mirrored his days at Condor, only without the stress of bills and payroll. Davidson & Associates handled the bureaucracy. Dave could focus his energy and creativity on making Diablo, his dream game. Even better, he got along with his equal partners at Blizzard Entertainment. The two Blizzards didn't always see eye to eye on implementation, but in terms of philosophy, drive, and ambition, they were in accord.

Best of all was the Davidsons. To many at the two Blizzards, Bob and Jan weren't two nameless, faceless, corporate entities. "We'd have holiday Christmas parties, and at this time Blizzard was small, maybe fifty people, and [Davidson] was 150, maybe 250 people," remembered Stu Rose, an artist at Blizzard Entertainment. "We'd be in these banquet halls, and Bob would talk to you, know your name. You'd have a conversation, and then I met him a year later at the next holiday party, and it was like he'd walked away for five minutes then picked up the conversation. He remembered everything you'd talked about."

Bob and Jan Davidson were like supportive parents. Their kids were talented and hardworking, so Mom and Dad cut checks so they could keep doing their thing. "Up until then, Condor felt like it was our company," Michio Okamura said of Condor's acquisition. "There was a certain sense of ownership within the company. We were all friends, we worked great together, so we were kind of giving that up, but it was one of those necessary sacrifices. We wanted to be together as a team, as a company; the only way we could do that was by giving up ownership. We'd worked with Blizzard, and those guys were great, so we figured they were the safest bet we had. They vouched for Davidson."

What no one knew was that Bob and Jan were preparing to break up the nuclear family.

"We were not aware of Davidson's potential deal with CUC," explained Kenny Williams, producer and manager of business development at Blizzard North. "Basically, we were made aware of it the week before we closed the [acquisition] deal. Before we closed the deal with them, that merger had been announced."

On February 21, 1996, Comp-U-Card International, Inc., a premier supplier of discount goods and services aimed at consumers, announced its acquisition of Davidson & Associates and Sierra On-Line, Inc., for $1.7 billion. The purchase went through as a pair of stock swaps—a deal where owners of the company to be acquired give up their stock in exchange for shares in the larger, more profitable parent company—one swap for Davidson and its associated companies, and another for Sierra On-Line. In a statement, CUC chief executive Walter Forbes explained his motivation, prognosticating that online services and entertainment would flourish in the coming years. He intended to be king of that hill. Bob Davidson added that he and Jan would assume leadership positions as the largest shareholders in CUC, and had no intention of leaving their company even though they would no longer be steering the ship.

The Davidsons understood CUC's reasoning for acquiring their company as well as Sierra. No other gaming studios were as suited to building and maintaining online experiences. Elsewhere within the company, developers expressed confusion. Leaders at the two Blizzards couldn't decide which bombshell announcement shocked them more. That the Davidsons would be giving up control, or that their new owners hailed not from the technology sector or gaming industry, but in consumer marketing and services. CUC was known for coupon books, hotel chains, and rental cars, not developing or publishing software.

Pundits on Wall Street seemed divided. Some pointed out that CUC expanding its portfolio of consumer-focused services by offering games made perfect sense. Products were products, and computer software was the future. Others disagreed, seeing gaming as unrelated to CUC's core offerings. Forbes and his team had a database of member shoppers and relationships with manufacturers that sold their products at steep discounts. Games were a different market.

There was another oddity. A staff writer covering the sale for the Los Angeles Times noted that despite holding steady amid falling share prices, Davidson & Associates had made $150 million in revenue in 1995, yet CUC paid over six times that amount ($956 million) in stock for Davidson & Associates and their studios and properties. In addition, Bob and Jan Davidson had gained a ten percent ownership stake in Forbes' company, as well as two seats on its board of directors, a deal that seemed too good to be true.

The Davidsons were thrilled. Before the sale, they had visited CUC and come away impressed that a company with $1 billion in sales during 1995 staffed twenty or so employees in its corporate office. That made Forbes and his team birds of a feather, they believed, since Bob and Jan proudly fostered a similar culture in their Torrance, California-based office, which staffed 250 of their 750 employees.

Amid changes in ownership, higher-ups at the two Blizzards looked out for their interests. Despite numerous accolades and chart-topping sales, Diablo produced only nominal payouts for Blizzard North. "There may have been a little bit of bonus money, but it was not on the scale of the game's success, that was for sure," David Brevik said. "I think there was a small bonus or something like that, but there was nothing spectacular."

North's developers grumbled, albeit quietly at first. On paper, the math seemed simple. Diablo had sold approximately 1.25 million copies by November 1997. At approximately forty to fifty dollars per unit, that added up to forty to fifty million dollars, gross. Surely that would translate to huge bonuses for North's staff.

Reality did not match expectations. Under most publisher-developer deals, the publisher—Davidson & Associates—fronts advance money so the developer can hire staff, buy equipment, pay for software licenses, and cover other expenses. The developer does not see a cent of profit from their game until the advance had been repaid. CUC, Blizzard North's parent company at the time of Diablo's release, was pocketing the majority of its revenue.

"What we all didn't realize at the time—and it took me years to figure this out—was that the people who make the money on anything are the people who put up the money for the thing," Dave continued. "The people who are risking the money, get the payoff. That's the way all business works."

After Davidson & Associates acquired Blizzard Entertainment—then known as Silicon & Synapse—in 1994, Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime had awarded long-time employees with stock options as a means of long-term investment: Options had to vest, or mature, before they could be sold. The upside to waiting was that Blizzard and Davidson were on a sharp upward trajectory. With every passing month, the options increased in worth, virtually guaranteeing a huge payout down the line. In the meantime, they had handed out smaller bonuses to tide employees over.

"It wasn't a 'We're doubling your salary' type of bonus, it was Christmas bonus-type stuff, because the argument was that stock options were a better form of compensation," said Pat Wyatt.

During the Condor days, the bosses had handed out tidy bonuses at Christmas based on merit with promises of better compensation later, once Diablo had shipped. "Originally the contract stated that everybody would get royalties because the contract said when we're done with Diablo, everybody would get a royalty check, one split among the group," Dave Brevik said.

"I was promised a royalty," Michio Okamura said. "I was going to get a royalty for each copy sold. Then when Davidson bought them out, we couldn't do that anymore."

Condor's acquisition by Davidson & Associates rendered previous agreements null and void. North's bosses made up for the change by giving stock options to employees. Kelly Johnson, Michio, and other developers started following the market. On paper, they were rich. All they had to do was wait for the options to vest.

In May 1997, CUC announced a merger with Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS), Inc. Founded by Henry Silverman, HFS owned hotel franchises such as Days Inn and Ramada. The deal, another stock swap, was valued at $11 billion, and entailed the two joined companies assuming a new name, Cendant Corporation, that December.

The string of acquisitions made leaders at the two Blizzards nervous. First Davidson, then CUC, then Cendant. Their creations, and their livelihoods, were being passed around like hot potatoes. The time had come to protect themselves in case they got dropped. The Blizzards unified. Dave, Max, and Erich met with Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime to form an executive planning committee. While the group could meet to make decisions on any matter that would affect the two Blizzards, the impetus was a mutual interest in ensuring they and their teams benefitted from their products.

"That's why we said, 'We've got to have bonuses here,'" explained Max Schaefer. "There was no mechanism by which we're benefitting from these mega hits."

Dave, Max, and Erich represented Blizzard North on the committee. Allen and Mike were joined by Blizzard Entertainment's chief operating officer Paul Sams, who'd been a general manager at Davidson & Associates until he joined Blizzard Entertainment in 1996, to represent South. Once a month, one or more of North's bosses would fly down to Irvine to discuss issues and vote on actions. In the likely event of a tie, since all three members of either committee were bound to band together, an executive from the parent company would sit in on a meeting and cast the deciding vote.

According to Erich Schaefer, there had never been a need for a tiebreaker. "Everything was always a unanimous decision. Even though we fought about this and that, we always agreed, in the end, on what the best thing to do would be. The personalities involved—it could have easily turned [acrimonious], but it didn't."

The committee's first major issue concerned the implementation of a bonus system. Under the terms they decided on, royalties would be made available to the two Blizzards once sales reached a certain milestone. "Blizzard had to be basically hyper profitable to trigger the royalties," Max Schaefer explained. "Then it was a fairly generous royalty, and it worked out. It got us money in the end, but it was safe for Cendant and whoever to agree to because they weren't going to be on the hook for royalties unless they were making a lot of money."

Once royalties were triggered, bosses at the two Blizzards would get access to the money, and divide it between their employees as they saw fit. "We had a merit-based process by which we'd rank everybody," Erich Schaefer said. "I think the first thing we kind of decided was how much of a cut it was fair for us to take—Max, Dave, and me—and later we did that in conjunction with Blizzard South."

Every employee's name was written into a spreadsheet. When the time came to hand out bonuses, the bosses pored over the spreadsheet, examining data against their understanding of who had done what. Each employee would receive a bonus dependent on factors ranging from how much of an impact he or she had on a product, to work ethic, to specific skills, to education and experience. Things like college degrees carried less weight than work rate and impact, however. "It's not just how much you contributed, but how critical your position was, how hard you would be to replace if you left—all sorts of factors like that," Pat Wyatt added.

StarCraft, due out in early spring of 1998, would be the first product to fall within the parameters of the bonus program. The program was designed to benefit both Blizzards by giving each studio a smaller or larger percentage of royalties depending on which studio had taken the lead on certain projects. "For example, when StarCraft was released, Blizzard North got a fairly substantial percentage," Pat Wyatt said, "the idea being that when Diablo II released, some percentage of the Diablo II bonus would revert to the Blizzard HQ staff whether they had worked on Diablo II or not, just by virtue of the fact that they were Blizzard employees."

While the bosses of the two Blizzard hammered out details, their employees watched the stock value of Cendant Corporation continue its steady upward tick. They watched, and they talked.

Rick Seis was one of Pete Brevik's closest friends at Blizzard North. They went out to lunch nearly every day, usually with Michio Okamura, talking about story and style in games, particularly Diablo. "We were part of the original Condor team, so we had the experience from Diablo taking us into Diablo II," Pete Brevik said. "When new employees came on board, we would spend time talking to them, telling them what happened and how we got to this point."

Over lunch conversations, new recruits were regaled with tales of Blizzard North's rags-to-riches tale. The tone of conversation darkened when talk turned to selling Condor and what had come later: the mansions, the gleaming sports cars dotting the parking lot.

"It was more like the employees, the first-generation employees' relationship with management," Phil Shenk remembered. "There was some friction there. I could see both sides, and I don't even really want to talk about it, but I felt welcome on both sides."

Hope lay just over the horizon. Although rank-and-file developers such as Kelly Johnson, Rick Seis, Michio Okamura, and other vets from Condor's lean periods had not benefitted from the Davidson acquisition, they awaited the day when they could finally cash out and receive their just rewards for years of long nights, longer weekends, and loyalty.

The market's history showed that their payday was right on track. Productivity software such as spreadsheets and word processors made PCs attractive to businesses, and advanced computer games such as Myst and Doom flew off shelves as consumers invested in computers as gaming platforms. Microsoft arranged deals with vendors to pre-install its Windows operating system on computers bought in stores. College students working out of dorm rooms or their parents' garage daydreamed of launching the next Microsoft. Then, in 1994, consumers got access to fast and affordable Internet through America Online. Dot-com companies became the next big thing. Amazon.com delivered books directly to doorstops: no more fighting traffic, stopping off for gas, and reorienting busy schedules around store hours. Two Stanford grads compiled and published a directory of websites through their company, Yahoo.com, becoming the first search engine to function as the ultimate concierge: All users had to do was type in a few keywords—a restaurant, their favorite TV show, a video game—and Yahoo pulled up a list of websites on that topic. Ebay.com positioned itself as the first online auction site where consumers could bid on anything.

Blizzard North's staff was one of many tech teams envisioning six-figure cash outs. All across Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs not yet old enough to drink paid their employees—mostly friends—in pizza and soda. Venture capitalists saw dollar signs and threw investment money at startups, believing they were destined to go public and bring in millions or billions. In turn, the owners of startups enticed new hires with lower-than-average salaries made more appealing by large quantities of stock options. Sure, they wouldn't make much at first, but those options would be worth millions once the business went public.

True to predictions, several tech companies went public and created millionaires overnight. The cycle continued: Each company that held a mega-successful initial public offering (IPO) attracted more entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. By the late 1990s, financial analysts proclaimed that the "New Economy" forged by a combination of software and widespread Internet access had made recessions a worry of the past. Sunlight tickled the gleaming finishes of sports cars that filled up office parks and breezed down highways.

From 1996 through 2000, NASDAQ's stock index ballooned from 600 points to over 5,000. The bubble was at its biggest. By early April of 1998, the cloud of resentment hanging over Blizzard North's development team was beginning to thin. StarCraft had released at the end of March and was on track to become one of the best-selling games of the year. That should translate to fat bonus checks, the first of which would be delivered in roughly six months. Stock options were blooming, too.

Over breaks, developers talked about what they would do with their money once the options vested. Kelly looked forward to buying a new car. Michio wanted to pay off his mortgage.

"At that point," Michio said, "I remember looking at [my options] and thinking, You know, this actually isn't bad. If I just stick around five years until it fully vests, I'll have money."

ERICH SCHAEFER READ the headlines over and over. The words wouldn't compute, lost in the haze of shock and horror. "When we heard about it, we were at an offsite meeting in Las Vegas, and I remember we talked about it a lot. Everyone's options became worthless. I had plenty of options in Cendant that were doing very well at one point before the scandal, and then after the scandal we were all under water. None of them were worth any money."

Nearby, Dave Brevik gaped at the television. "We're in this hotel room, and all these panicked calls start coming in. We turn on the news, and the number one story is the Cendant scam. It was ridiculous. We were just watching the stock drop. It was painful. When we sold the company, we didn't get cash. We got stock. We were watching the money we'd sold the company for just disappear."

Corruption. Improprieties. Fraud. Falsification. Cooking the books.

On the evening of April 15, news broke that Cendant Corporation's top brass had committed accounting scandals to the tune of over $115 million. The financial bombshell caused stock shares to plummet: from $41 a share to less than $10, and Cendant's market cap fell from $38 billion to $9 billion. The news, stated by grim-faced anchors, cut Blizzard North's three bosses like knives, and they bled dollars.

Details were published in reports over the next year. CUC had been cooking its accounting books since 1995, generating over $500 million in profits out of thin air. Engineered by CUC International chairman Walter Forbes and carried out by his lieutenants, the scheme was concocted to satisfy trader expectations on Wall Street. "The reason CUC was acquiring a games company was because what they did was acquire companies and recapitalize all sorts of expenses," explained Pat Wyatt, "[in essence, it] just make the financial transactions look so complicated that it appeared that they were making money, but really they were doing things that were totally illegal."

Further down the corporate ladder, employees at companies owned by Cendant reeled from the fallout. Jim Edwards, one of the programmers on Diablo: Hellfire at Synergistic Software, recalled visiting Sierra head Mark Hood several times to discuss his options. Edwards remembered leaving their final meeting with his stock options settling at $46 a share. He thanked Hood and left his office. "As I walked back I heard all this murmuring. I sat down at my desk and everybody's staring at their computer, talking to each other. The news about the scandal had broken, and the options I'd just gotten were now worth thirteen dollars a share."

No one was immune to the aftermath. Not even the bosses. "You try not to think of stock options as real money until you have the real money in hand, because stocks do go up and down," Max Schaefer said. "It was pretty bad. We felt pretty angry about it. There was not a lot we could do. We didn't know if it would bounce back, or what was going to happen. We felt like we'd been screwed, and we didn't know what the future held."

"I saw the effects of the Cendant scandal firsthand because I carpooled with my brother every day. That impacted him more than me. It's kind of devastating to morale," said Pete Brevik. "At the same time, we would work really hard and we had a successful game in Diablo and weren't reaping the rewards."

A steep decline in stock value was the most immediate effect of the Cendant scandal. Another consequence was more insidious. Every day, developers like Pete Brevik, Kelly Johnson, and Michio Okamura carpooled to work in practical vehicles while tech entrepreneurs sped by in the latest and greatest sports cars. That the three bosses had also been forced to watch their options get burned to ashes didn't seem to matter. They had at least benefitted from selling Condor years earlier.

"They froze assets, our stocks dropped, and were worth nothing," said Kelly Johnson. "None of us still had gotten a dime of actual money. We all had stocks that none of us cashed in on because we were waiting for the end of the five-year [vesting] period. We hadn't taken any out. So we were like, 'Okay, now it's been about two years post-Diablo, and not a penny of bonus money do we have to show for our work.' The game was making huge amounts of money."

Blizzard Entertainment was hit as hard as Blizzard North. "I'd been wiped out, as had plenty of other people," said Pat Wyatt. "We all had our entire net worth locked up in these options because if you sell options, you have to pay an enormous amount of taxes. But if you let your money ride and sell it later, you can defer taxes. And if you believe in the company, it's okay—you're willing to work through the mistakes. Still, basically all my long-term money was tied up in the company I worked for. I was bent, and lots of people were bent."

In the summer of 1998, twelve employees at Blizzard Entertainment, including StarCraft lead designer James Phinney, walked out of the company and founded Fugitive Studios. The exodus rocked Entertainment's staff to its core.

"I remember everybody sitting around saying, 'What's happening?'" remembered Harley Huggins, artist in the cinematics department. "That was huge because there were only six or seven of us in cinematics, so two or three guys [walking] out was a big deal. You felt like you'd just done this great thing, and then the dust settles, people sobered up, and people started to say, 'Wait a minute... do I want to do that again?'"

As proud as Harley was of StarCraft, the crunch had nearly broken him. The one-two punch of an eighteen-month slog and the abrupt departure of some of his friends shook his fanciful vision of the games industry.

"I was devastated, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. People were really depressed after that, because you felt like, what did we just do? Is this all going to fall apart now? Looking back on it now, that was the first time I'd been through something like that. That hadn't happened at Blizzard. Blizzard had had an amazing retention rate, so that rocked a lot of people at the company."

Several developers at Blizzard North had had enough, leading to Patrick "Pattie" Tougas, Ben Haas, and Doron Gartner leaving to co-found Click Entertainment. A pall of lethargy and discontentment settled over the studio. Progress on Diablo II ground to a halt.

IN DECEMBER 1999, Cendant executive Henry Silverman held a press conference. Silverman claimed innocence. He had led HFS when Henry Forbes had approached him about merging CUC and HFS to form Cendant Corporation. Investigations backed up Silverman's claim of guiltlessness. The scandal had been perpetrated by Forbes and his people.

At his press conference, Silverman announced that Cendant would be moving forward, starting with a payout of $2.83 billion in answer to shareholders who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for its fraudulent practices.

"This is now behind us," he said.

Chapter 11: Shifts

Blizzard North was, "Here's your character. It's yours." You got a lot of ownership.

-Mike Dashow, artist, Blizzard North

I get there and sit down, and I hear over the intercom, "Everybody to the parking lot right now." And I thought, What the hell is this about?

-John Kubasco, artist, Blizzard North

Once you break that bond of trust between friends, it becomes employee-boss. And understand that it was from friends, from barbecuing with each other, knowing about each other's kids, wives meeting each other, to now we're employees and bosses.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

E3, THE ANNUAL summer trade show devoted to video games, returned to Atlanta in 1998—a year considered by many pundits to be among the best, if not the best in video gaming. Developers and journalists who walked the halls of the World Congress Center got to play games that would become revered as some of the greatest ever made. Metal Gear Solid, the original Pokémon (in red and blue flavors), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Spyro the Dragon, and F-Zero X were just some of the titles on display. So was a carefully curated portion of Diablo II.

"With Phil on board, we managed to bang out pretty much the entirety of Act One by E3 of 1998," said Mike Huang, network administrator. Huang was hired in the summer of 1997 to take over IT duties from Rick. "It was miserably hot, miserably humid," Huang continued. "But we had the demo. We had the first Act ready by then. The amount of work those guys did to make that happen was enormous, you can imagine."

Blizzard North's playable demo was embryonic. Players could choose from a few heroes, run around Act One's fields, kill monsters, pick up gold, and equip weapons. NPCs such as Gheed, a gambler who gave players items with unknown properties in exchange for exorbitant amounts of gold, stood outside his tent in the Rogue Encampment. Players could buy and sell goods from other vendors when they needed a break from killing and looting.

Equipment was not reflected on the player-character, so every weapon and pair of boots was displayed as a generic model. Normal operating procedure for Blizzard would have been to polish the demo further, but, internally, Blizzard North developers who had seen their stock wilt overnight were struggling to muster enthusiasm. Some of Condor's vets had broken their backs for nearly four years by that point and had little to show for their loyalty.

Later that summer, the first royalty checks for StarCraft came in. Although StarCraft's profits favored their teammates down south, the royalty checks distributed to North's developers were substantial. "I came from a start-up background, so I was happy to get anything," recalled Anthony Rivero, a character artist on Diablo II. "They were very generous. I'd only been there three months, and they gave me a $5,000 profit-sharing check. I was like, 'Really? This is fucking awesome. I love this place.'"

The bosses decided how to distribute the profits allocated to their studio. "To hand out bonus checks, Dave, Max, and Erich would go get you one-by-one and bring you back, and they would say, 'Great job. Here's your check,'" said Chris Root, technical artist. "And you'd open it up and go, 'Oh, fuck, did I pay some taxes today!'"

"Until I worked for Blizzard, I'd gotten tax refunds from the IRS each year bigger than my bonuses from the other big employers earlier in my career: Atari, Epyx, Activision, and 3DO," remembered Matt Householder, producer.

Rick Seis was unmoved by the number of zeroes on his StarCraft check. It was something, but not enough.

Many Blizzard North employees described Rick as one of the most vocal developers regarding the inequality between themselves and the bosses. To Rick's recollection, he was more reserved. When his peers had conspired to meet in secret to discuss ways to demand the bosses make them whole, Rick had disagreed. That wasn't how Blizzard North did things. Everyone had a say. Everyone's contribution was valued. Rick recalled taking a wait-and-see approach to what they did with their shares of stock from the sale of Condor. He wanted more money, yes, but he also wanted empirical data before he leveled any accusations against his friends.

Month by month, data piled up. Rick watched as Dave drove to work in a Porsche 911 Turbo. An Acura NSX, worth around $84,000, was his commuter vehicle.

"That rubbed everybody the wrong way," said Kris Renkewitz, character artist. "Michio, back when I was there, had a shit-box Sentra, a hunk of junk, and he still drove it after the company sale. Those guys were all totally pissed off."

When Rick believed he had enough proof of his claims, he requested private meetings with Dave, Max, and Erich.

"I had a couple meetings with them, at least one or two meetings, asking them about it, saying it feels like I deserve more, those kinds of things. I didn't think the wealth was distributed properly."

At each meeting, Rick contrasted the wealth the bosses seemed to have with his own. The bosses pointed out that Rick had earned one of the largest profit-sharing checks for StarCraft. Rick refused to budge. He had been loyal and hard-working. He had stuck with the bosses through periods when employees had to race to the bank to deposit paychecks before they could bounce. He had hustled right alongside them on early games in the pre-Diablo era. He deserved more.

"I just wanted it to be fair. I definitely had those meetings with them after I fought and fought in my mind about it. I knew I needed to do this. Those were just reasons for me, but there was also the first milestone of this massive disappointment; the transition from what Condor was to what Blizzard was, at least at the time."

Much of that disappointment lay in what Rick saw as the bosses' inability to recognize his chief complaint. It wasn't that he expected to earn as much as the bosses. He simply expected more recognition, in the tangible form of more money, based on his contributions. Sure, the bosses had worked long hours and sacrificed their personal lives alongside their staff. But there were more rank-and-file employees than there were co-owners, and by that reasoning, they'd put in more hours. Furthermore, that staff—those specific individuals—had been integral to what Diablo and Blizzard North had become.

Without Kelly Johnson, Deckard Cain and the cow that sparked the "secret cow level" rumor that got the whole Internet buzzing may never have existed.

Without Michio Okamura, Diablo would not have struck fear in the hearts of players who beheld the terrifying monsters—including the game's namesake—he created, drawing from a combination of his vivid imagination and his knowledge of Japanese mythology.

Without Eric Sexton, unique locales such as the Butcher's blood-splattered lair may never have left such an impression on players. Sexton had also been a veritable "fire hose"—Rick's descriptor—of creative ideas for other aspects of the game, including the affixes that defined an item's bonuses, as well as quests for the players to undertake to gain more experience and acquire more loot.

Without Rick himself, who had programmed the algorithms that assembled Erich Schaefer's background tiles into cohesive levels, all those tiles would have been as useless as pieces from a 10,000-piece puzzle without a picture to work from.

Without the staff as a whole, contract projects such as Justice League Task Force, NFL Quarterback Club, and the 3D football game for the cancelled M2 console would never have gotten off the ground, and Condor's coffers would have dried up long before the opportunity to make Diablo had materialized. Diablo, and the company, was a success because of everyone, and everyone deserved to share in that success.

At first, the bosses expressed sympathy for Rick's stance.

"Since Rick was one of our first people, he was one of the most bitter about the entire situation," Dave recalled. "He was quite upset about how unfair the whole situation was. He felt like he took a big risk and didn't get rewarded like we got rewarded. He wanted some of that. So then we ship a hit game, and we still didn't get rewarded, and he's like, 'What the hell?' Which was perfectly understandable."

Erich Schaefer believed that much of Rick's bitterness, as well as the ill well among other long-serving employees, was predicated on a misunderstanding.

"I think if there was a disparity, it was that we received the stock for [Davidson & Associates] in exchange for our stock in Condor. That was how I bought a house, not off of bonus money or anything."

Max's reasoning was simpler. Before selling Condor, the bosses had no money. After the sale, they had millions. Their natural inclination was to buy the things they'd wanted but had been unable to afford.

"We were struggling to make our own rent payments beforehand and had no discretionary spending money at all. Then all the sudden we had money to do whatever we wanted. We exercised that a little bit just in buying houses and nice cars, but we still came to the same office every day, and if anything we worked harder hours and did the same things with our friends."

Dave admitted he was more prone to flaunting his wealth than Max and Erich.

"I drive a much less expensive car now. I still like sports cars, but it isn't the end-all-be-all anymore. It was something I had always wanted, and when you can get it, you can get it. Erich bought a Porsche, but Max didn't buy a fancy car. They weren't really as ostentatious as I was. I spent a lot of money on sports cars."

Erich felt his lifestyle changed very little after selling Condor. He had always liked to travel, so he did more of that. Otherwise, he saw himself as the same guy he had always been. "I've reflected on this a lot, and pre-Blizzard and post-Blizzard, my lifestyle stayed pretty much the same. I like computers and playing games, so I don't spend extravagantly. I should mention, though, that clearly a big chunk of money in the bank is financial security," he added. "In those days, we didn't feel very financially secure, but we were pretty young, so it didn't feel like we had to. So certainly it changed my life in the long run in that I had money to investment in things. It impacted my life, but not so much my lifestyle. Work was always the same."

Rick remembered trying to reason with the bosses: If they were friends instead of just employers and employee, they would take what he saw as simple steps to close the gap between them. "Like, 'Dave, here's how to repair our friendship. Give me twenty percent more.' That's not something I said, but for example. You would then have a dialogue with me. At worst, you would go, 'No, I can't do that. My hands are tied; it is now contractual. It's done.' Whatever. The point is, we'd have a dialogue."

In every conversation with Rick, Dave's stance remained practical. First of all, he'd said, Diablo had generated no bonus money for Blizzard North despite its chart-topping sales. Any revenue it earned went to the two Blizzards' parent company at the time—the primary impetus for the bosses at both studios to demand a bonus program that rewarded them and their employees, not the people trading their company like a rare baseball card.

Second, Dave and the Schaefers had put everything on the line to start Condor. If Rick, Michio, or any other staff had missed paychecks, they could have quit and found other jobs. The bosses had to sweat every detail: paying employees, keeping up with taxes, finding and maintaining office space, signing their names on contracts with publishers who would hold them responsible if they missed milestone deadlines.

"The people paying the bills, and the people taking the risks—those are the people that make the money," Dave stated.

No explanation satisfied Rick. Several times a year he called a private meeting to point out the differences, the haves versus the have-nots. Any sympathy Dave felt for Rick melted by the time royalties from Diablo II began rolling in. In many cases, a single bonus check from Diablo II doubled or tripled salaries of some of the company's highest-paid employees.

"The fact that somebody that is a programmer, artist, or whatever on a project, the fact that they were getting quite a bit of money should have been enough, but it never was," said Dave. "And that was disappointing. The reality is, looking back on the situation, we had sweet, sweet times. Everybody got homes and things like that. People were able to afford things they wanted. People got nice cars and stuff like that. That eventually happened. It just took a little while. I think people had these ideas that: 'Look, Blizzard North is making tens of millions of dollars and none of it's coming to us.' Yes. That's called working for a company."

"I think some of the staff's reactions sort of disappointed us a little bit," Max agreed. "Here we had worked our asses off to get [bonus] checks out to people, and that resulted in them being resentful. That definitely knocked our enthusiasm for it down a little bit. Not all the time, because some people were super happy and very thankful for it, and that made it all worthwhile. But it was all a little bit of an eye-opener. We actually gave out six-figure checks at one point, and got legitimately angry employees who we'd just give a $100,000 check to. It was like, what? I guess I understand now that people read a lot more into things you say and develop their own impressions."

Rick walked away from every meeting more unsatisfied. Moreover, his perception of his one-time best friend and hero had faded.

"Up until that time, Dave was heroic. He was heroic to me. I don't even know how to describe that. And that was broken. That's a big fall for me, mentally."

Dave went from mourning the loss of Rick's friendship to boiling over whenever Rick raised the subject of wealth.

"It was always, 'Oh, Dave got a Ferrari.' Dude, he could go out and buy a Porsche if he wanted. I just handed him a check for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Go blow it on that. 'Oh, no, I can't do that.' Well, what are you yelling at me for? You know, I wasn't conservative with my money. Not as conservative as Max and Erich were, and not as conservative as Rick was, in my opinion."

"I tend to be kind of an emotional dude, and that was a big thing for me," Rick continued. "Once you've broken that trust, I suspect the things you..." He paused, considering. "Not things you say day to day, but when it comes to benefits for you versus benefits for me, I'm suspect toward it."

Chapter 12: Settling In

The PA system would say, "Charge your car batteries. Let's go."

-Chris Root, artist, Blizzard North
We just started crunching.
-Dave Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

BLIZZARD NORTH'S TEAM spread out through their office, a larger suite on Baer Island. By early 1999, it was clear the office was no longer able to grow with them.

"Matt [Uelmen] needed a larger space for all his instruments and recording equipment, and away from other people who'd mind the noise. We needed a bigger server room, a game room, that kind of stuff," said Stieg Hedlund, designer.

In the early spring, Blizzard North moved out of Baer Island's office parks and took over Suite #100 of 2655 Campus Drive in San Mateo, less than fifteen minutes from Redwood City. Where their old office had been utilitarian and rundown in some regards, Campus Drive's building was sleek and modern. The exterior was lined with huge windows that offered picturesque views of a nearby canyon.

"Deer would come by my window," said Scott Petersen, audio designer. "It was just a totally wonderful place to work."

Karin Colenzo set up shop at a reception desk out front. Beside her stood glass display cases that held trophies and framed magazine covers hailing Diablo's critical and commercial success. The lobby led to a large conference room with a polished table surrounded by leather office chairs. The bullpen was gone. At Campus Drive, the halls were lined with offices spacious enough to accommodate two or three developers apiece. Programmers and artists rolled through hallways on scooters.

Down the hall was a large room where the guys set up tables that held televisions and consoles dating back to the Atari 2600 up to a PlayStation 2 imported from Japan months ahead of the console's August 2000 release in the United States. Sofas and black beanbag chairs gave everyone a place to sit. "None of them popped. Ever," Karin said. "I'm surprised. People would try to block everybody in their rooms sometimes. People would keep their doors closed, and all the sudden they'd open it and see floor-to-ceiling black beanbags."

"When Blair Witch came out, we'd gone out to a vacant lot area and made a bunch of little stick guys, and hung them from the ceiling in our office," remembered Alan Ackerman, an environment artist on Diablo II. "One time we were sitting in there working without the light on and some air conditioning guy came and said, 'I need to turn the light on so I can access the duct—AAAH!'"

John Kubasco wasn't sure what to make of Blizzard North. He had a background in visual effects and artwork for films before landing a job in the games industry. He was in the middle of settling into his office on the first day when the PA system crackled and Kenny Williams ordered everyone to grab their remote-controlled cars and head out to the parking lot.

"So we got to the parking lot and everybody's standing around," John recalled. "Max is holding an RC car and a couple of other guys were holding an RC Car, and we're about to watch an RC car race. And I was like, Are you serious?"

Chris Root boasted that his car was the fastest. "A lot of the guys built them and took their time. I just made mine into a derby kind of thing. I had no problem smashing my car into somebody else's car. Probably I would say fifteen of us had RC cars for a while. The batteries only lasted fifteen minutes, maybe less than that, so the races were kind of quick."

After charging batteries, the next round of RC races would begin. In the middle of the afternoon, someone would pull other developers away from work to play hours of Motocross Madness, a racing game on PlayStation, or first-person shooters such as Quake and Counter-Strike on PC. "A lot of group trends would happen," Dave Glenn said. "Everybody would get into one thing or another, whether scooters or remote control cars. I remember when the new Gran Turismo came out, quite a few of us got into that. We'd do the endurance races and give up the controller after, like, an hour each. That was a lot of fun."

"When you got hired, they gave you a machine to work on and a switchbox, and another machine just to play games," John Kubasco said. "And I remember telling my mom, 'I don't know when these guys actually do any work. I didn't do anything today."

The addition of hires such as Phil Shenk, Dave Glenn, and Mike Dashow added fuel to a team still downtrodden over the Cendant scandal and waiting for more bonus checks to roll in.

"For the first major period I was there, we were just working on Act One: polishing Act One, adding creatures for Act One," said Mike Dashow, character artist. "I wouldn't say Act One took up more than its fair share, because we really used it for coming up with a vertical slice for the game."

In game development, a vertical slice is a playable portion that gives the development team a snapshot of how the full game will look, play, and feel. The first Act of Diablo II was a perfect candidate for a vertical slice. There was a town, nearly a dozen fields, caves, and crumbling fortresses, and the monastery where Andariel and her minions laid siege to the beleaguered survivors of the Rogues.

"We wanted Act One to play really well because we wanted it to suck people into the game," Dashow explained. "You can go lighter on another Act, but if you go light on the first Act and people aren't interested, no one's going to get to your second, third, or fourth."

Artists and programmers hopped from task to task, environment to environment. As Act Two was wrapping up, several developers turned their attention to its climax: A fight against hordes of undead in a labyrinthine pyramid that would end in a confrontation with Baal, Diablo's youngest brother and the Lord of Destruction. Players enter Baal's cavern to find it empty. Moments later, a deep voice rumbles, "Looking for Baal?" and a hulking shape charges out of the shadows.

In an instant players are under assault from Duriel, the minor Lord of Pain and the guardian set to waylay heroes so Diablo and Baal, freed from captivity, can make their getaway. Duriel is one of Diablo II's largest monsters. His lower half is a slimy, pulsating sac that resembles a slug. From the waist up, his body is muscular, his face frozen in a vulpine grin. His arms end in curved, scythe-like claws that he uses to carve up his enemies and drag his bulk around the room, running down any who attempt to flee. [SQ1]

Duriel's design was spearheaded by Mike Dashow. "My fondest memory of collaboration is working on Duriel. I was told, 'This is a boss, here's what he represents, this is what he's supposed to be.'"

Dashow illustrated several mock-ups for Duriel and took them to a meeting. Spreading them out on a table, he explained he was struggling to decide on a direction. Artists pored over drawings. Some liked the head on one illustration, the body on another, the legs on a third, the demon's narrowed eyes on yet another. "It was basically everyone just calling out their favorite pieces," he said, "so I Frankenstein'd it all together, and there was Duriel. I had all the pieces there in front of me, but it took other people's input to try and pull out what was the coolest thing there."

Inspired by the death animation Phil Shenk had given Andariel—showing the half-nude demon erupt in a pillar of flame and disintegrate into a pile of ash—Mike Dashow teamed with programmer Ted Bisson to go all-out on Duriel's death. The demon pops like a zit when players deliver the final blow, oozing green blood and squirting out maggots that can be squished by players walking over them.

"There was a lot of all this extra layer of polish that was just Ted and me," Dashow said. [SQ2]

MARCH 1999 MARKED two momentous occasions for Blizzard North. The first was relocating from Redwood City to San Mateo. The second was the formal start of crunching on Diablo II.

"Mike [Morhaime] became the president during that time, and Vivendi was putting a lot of pressure on him to release the game," said Harley Huggins, cinematics artist at Blizzard Entertainment. "It just wasn't ready. He was under a lot of heat and had a lot of stress because of that, so the pressure was on Blizzard North to get the game done."

The crunch kicked off innocuously. Both Blizzards were eyeing November as a release date, practically guaranteeing its status as a hot-ticket item for the Christmas shopping season. Dave, Max, and Erich sent out emails breaking down the situation to their team: They had a lot to do, so everyone would need to work extra hours—nights, the occasional weekend—to hit their deadline.

"The crunch was initially discussed as being a crunch to get to beta," remembered Stieg Hedlund, designer.

The team dug in for two or three months of irregular meals, poor diets, and absenteeism at home. It would be rough, but crossing the finish line would make all the sacrifices worthwhile. "You knew you were working on something that was huge, and you knew you were working on something that a lot of people were going to play on the very first day it came out," said Jon Stone, programmer. "You felt the weight and the excitement of that the entire time you were working on the project."

By June, the consensus within the two Blizzards was that the game wasn't ready for beta. "We should keep crunching in a more general way," Stieg remembered the bosses proposing. "This continued until the game's release in June of 2000. The total crunch time was eighteen months, remaining an industry horror story that tops them all."

Chapter 13: In Dave We Trust

At the last moment, Dave would play the thing and say, "Everything sucks ass," and tell us to change it all around, redo all the quests and storyline. Good thing, too. Dave has a pretty damn good, intuitive feel for a game's quality.

-Peter Hu, programmer, Blizzard North

When we finally got that working, we decided, "Well, that means we could put these kinds of buildings elsewhere in the game." We went back and build little cottages for Act One very late in the process. Dave, I think overnight, had these cottage tiles how we wanted them laid out for how he wanted to make buildings.

-Stefan Scandizzo, artist, Blizzard North

Somebody—Dave, Max, or Erich—had the idea to send Karin around to do roll call every day. She'd walk around with a clipboard and do a bunk check. If you weren't there by ten, there was some punishment.

-Phil Shenk, artist, Blizzard North

ON THE SUBJECT of cannibalism, Blizzard North's developers were divided.

"One time a programmer came up with a quest," remembered Dave Glenn, artist. "He said, 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we went around collecting all these body parts to make this relic?' And people said, 'Oh, yeah, that would be cool.'"

The quest occurs in Act Two, when characters in Lut Gholein charge players with discovering an ornamental box called the Horadric Cube. Alchemical in nature, the Cube transmutes certain items into other items according to recipes. The quest continues as players search out parts of a staff that, when inserted into the Horadric Cube, fuse the separate parts into a magical item vital to opening the passage to Duriel, the boss of Act Two. Another quest involving the Cube was added to Act Three, where players gather up a mace and body parts to transmute them into another key item.

Diablo II's development team soon found another role for the Horadric Cube. Monsters spit up body parts—spleens, hearts, eyeballs, lungs—upon defeat. Players could ingest any of the parts to recover lost hit points or energy to use skills. In effect, body parts in Diablo II performed the role of Diablo's recovery potions. "It was really gross. It was awesome," said Peter Kemmer, programmer. "Then someone had the idea: 'That's too much clicking. Let's streamline it and have them do potions.' And I said, 'No! Body parts are awesome!' We had this whole battle for about a month where the company split into two sides: the pro-body-parts side, and the anti-body-parts side."

The debate divided Blizzard North's staff. Advocates on both sides went so far as to print out posters declaring their stance and tape them on their doors. "Everyone had a strong opinion about it. We didn't get into knockdown, drag-out fights, but we all had opinions," clarified Mike Dashow, character artist. "There was a long debate where everyone had opinions about this, like, 'Yes, you should eat hearts, it's really cool' to 'That's kind of a little weird. I can buy the Barbarian doing that, but not the Sorceress. She doesn't look like a heart-munching kind of character.'"

Undergoing Blizzard North's usual democratic process, body parts were iterated on repeatedly. "You had to right-click on the part to transform it into something usable," recalled Peter Hu, programmer. "I was totally for it, I even put up a placard on my door to that effect, but in hindsight, I was totally wrong. I don't think I ever admitted it until after Blizzard North, though."

Blizzard North's custom was to manifest a concept by writing code, creating artwork, and getting a test up and running, rather than talk it to death. Snacking on spleens went into the game and stayed there, until Dave Brevik declared his opposition. Body parts were out. Potions were back in. "Almost everybody in the company disagreed," remembered Mike Scandizzo. "After about a month of playing the game, I guess people came to realize that what he'd done was right, so they dropped the issue. When Dave said something about gameplay, that's how we did things."

Dave's stance was simple. Diablo games were predicated on mouse clicks. The first game was so easy to pick up it could be played with one hand. Mastery, however, was more complex. Every click performed an action, and every click should also carry a high risk-reward scenario. Walking all the way across the screen might wake up dozens of monsters. Clicking to attack instead of clicking to retreat could cause players to bite off more than they can chew. If even a single click lacked gravitas, it should be eliminated. Clicking a body part to transmute it was a waste of time. "Eventually, people said, 'Well, I'd rather just have a potion than go through all the steps [to make a potion].' As a mechanic, it wasn't very fun," said Anthony Rivero, character artist.

"I was pro-monster parts. But I can definitely see, after all these years, it makes since that we didn't go through with the parts," added Michael Huang, network admin.

Dave put potions on the chopping block after proposing that players should regenerate health and mana continually as they played, eliminating the need for organs, potions, and any other type of recovery item. "What we found is that the game ended up being a much slower game [with resource regeneration]. What would happen is you'd go in and fight and you'd almost die, but then you were encouraged to just sit there and wait for your health and mana to come back."

"I saw this type of gameplay in games like EverQuest," agreed Stieg Hedlund, designer. "Waiting around for your bars to fill is neither fun nor is it gameplay. I was very clear that I never wanted to in any way incentivize a player to stand around doing nothing."

Recovery, the team came to realize, was a vital part of the gameplay loop. "The worst part about Diablo would be if I could just stand still and click," Rick Seis said. "That's not what you want. You want people to move, change skills, do things. That's what makes it exciting, not walking up to a guy and going, click-click-click."

As the Horadric Cube's functionality expanded, programmers added the option to transmute several types of one potion, such as health, into another, such as an energy-restoration vial. Grisly interactions lived on in another form, that of the Necromancer hero.

"He was tough to design. I'm still not really happy with him," admitted Phil Shenk, artist. "It was tough to find who he was going to be."

Phil volunteered to create the Necromancer hero. The character's original design was a stooped older man who moved with a quick, shambling gait. Phil envisioned more of a social outcast: gaunt, pasty-faced, long white hair. Deciding that made the character look too feeble, he referenced pictures of rock-and-roll icon Billy Idol, who wore leather jackets and black pants on stage, and of Sting's character in the movie adaptation of Dune. In Phil's revised illustrations, the Necromancer was thin, but trim instead of gaunt, with alabaster skin and shoulder-length white hair.

"He ended up a little more 'normal', quote-on-quote. Like he could sit in a tavern and talk with the other guys instead of looking like, 'Oh my god, what is that smell?'"

The Necromancer's most popular skill tree, Summoning, lets him raise and command the dead. As players gain experienced and open up more advanced skills, they can roll across the screen with a veritable army of skeleton soldiers and magi, undead monsters, and golems. Summoning-focused Necromancers effectively become generals, standing behind their minions and casting curses while their followers do the messy work.

"Necromancers were always supposed to do nasty stuff having to do with corpses," said Stieg. "Revivifying them as skeletons was one of the first things planned for them." [SQ1]

To raise a skeleton, players first have to kill an enemy. Then they target its corpse, cast the appropriate spell, and the corpse bursts apart in a spray of blood and meat as a bony warrior rises from the remains. By accident, Erich Schaefer hit on another way to use the animation of a corpse exploding like a bomb. "I was playing the Necromancer and there were corpses everywhere, and I thought, You should be able to use those. I think we were already raising skeletons from the corpses, but it felt like we should do something else with the corpses, so why don't we cast a spell and have them explode?"

Corpse Explosion hits like a fantasy-themed domino effect. Instead of raising a monster from a cadaver, players detonate it to inflict massive damage on nearby enemies. Every additional skill point spent on Corpse Explosion increases its radius, and virtually every explosion wipes out two, three, even half a dozen monsters. Within seconds the screen is carpeted in gore and viscera.

"You can talk to anyone about the idea for Corpse Explosion. We were all just giddy," said Tyler Thompson, programmer. "That thing goes in and there's just no way we're getting rid of something like that for any reason. I mean, it's Corpse Explosion! It has to work! It's awesome!"

"That's why we've always been kind of bad at design documents and planning things from the beginning. Our best ideas came from actually playing the game we were making," said Erich Schaefer.

KELLY JOHNSON WAS sprinting through the sweltering, meandering jungles of Act Three when he heard it. A high-pitched, babbling sound, like a kid strumming his lips while humming. Up ahead, green fronds drooped from the trees bordering the path.

Suddenly a dart streaked from the foliage and struck him. His Paladin grunted.

Another dart whistled through the air, followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth.

Kelly grinned. His avatar was dying, and he was thrilled. The Paladin had been his creation, and so were the little vermin up ahead. "My favorite character is probably the Fetish," he said of his work on Diablo II. "Even the Shaman, the Fetish Shaman, I love the way that came about, because there was no direction given to me."

His mission, handed down from Erich Schaefer, was simple. Diablo II needed a different class of monster. Most were brutes, large and strong and slow. The Fetish should be different. Kelly drew them as impish creatures: diminutive, slight, and fleet of foot. Some he armed with knives. Others he gave long wooden pipes from which they spat out darts. Knife-wielding Fetish rush in and swarm players, stabbing and cutting, while dart blowers hold back and spit missiles.

"In games, little guys are cannon fodder. Like the Fallen: they're such cannon fodder, and they're meant to be. But with the Fetish, I said, 'I want the Fetish to be something that you fear.' They could take you out if you don't pay attention. When they come out, they come out fast. They swarm you, then they run away."

If the Fetish were bad, Fetish Shaman were living nightmares. Fetish Shaman resurrect their own kind and breathe fire. Worse, when players think they have killed the Shaman, they realize it's only half dead: Each Fetish Shaman consists of two normal Fetish, one standing on the other's shoulders. With his pal dead, the surviving Fetish runs forward and begins stabbing. "I came up with the idea from doing research," Kelly explained. "It's a natural defense mechanism to want to appear bigger, so I came up with stacking one Fetish one on top of the other, and then I added a headdress."

Fetish became the bane of every player who set foot in Act Three. "I love the Fetish to this day," Erich Schaefer said. "They had a lot of personality just as an idea from the beginning. Just little guys that were fearless, and overachieving. As the player got bigger and stronger, suddenly your enemies are these tiny dudes running around making crazy sounds."

Evan Carroll fleshed out Act Three's bestiary.

"At that time, everyone kind of took a character. That was the thing I absolutely loved about the job. Michio Okamura had concepted characters to some extent, sometimes just quick sketches, but most characters had a very loose description."

Eyeing Michio's sketches, Evan chose the Vulture Demon, later renamed simply "Vulture." He took the image literally and animated a vulture that waddles along the ground and pecks at players. His twist was that vultures can take flight, swooping and circling lazily, immune to damage until they return to the ground.

"Erich Schaefer would come to us and say something like, 'We need a vulture demon, and it's going to have these attacks, but if you think of anything else that you might want to see it do, we should talk about it.' That part of character and monster design was very open. It wasn't limited to just art, but also some of the gameplay for the characters."

John Kubasco enjoyed the collaboration between artist and programmer. If a coder-artist duo decided a monster should run, for instance, the artist could go back and create a running animation, or the coder could just cut five frames of the character's walk cycle. "You'd sit there with him and play. You'd play to the point of spawning your character and see what he does. Then you'd go, 'Hey, Tyler, this is wrong. It's a black character with red stripes and you've got him shooting a green glob of magic. That doesn't make any sense. Can you make the glob red?' And he'd go, 'Oh, okay, cool.'"

Act Three's twisting paths, snaking streams, and dead-ends through a deep jungle are collectively a far greater enemy than any of its demonic inhabitants. "I did the abomination that is Act Three. It's really punishing, right?" asked Peter Kemmer, programmer, with a grin.

Peter was determined to change things up. Acts I and II, he explained, were designed as rectangular boxes. Borders were defined to divide the large space into several playable areas, environmental details such as rocks, puddles, trees, and bushes were added, and then the box was filled with enemies and quests.

"The first two acts were kind of based on that layout, and I wanted the third act to be something really different and really kind of punishing, in a way."

Case in point, Act Three's areas—caves choked with cobwebs and infested with spiders; derelict cities and sacred temples; long, sinuous paths through jungles cut by streams and bordered by underbrush, trees, and bogs—did not flow linearly. Players might take a fork in the road only to wind up back where they started.

"We started coming up with new algorithms, and they were a real pain in the backside sometimes," admitted Stefan Scandizzo, an artist and level designer who cut and arranged environmental tiles.

One of Act Three's most intricate and bewildering areas is a sewer system that unravels beneath three contiguous surface areas. Players can enter the sewers, a maze of narrow lanes bordered by canals, in one zone and emerge on the surface of another with no clue how they connect.

"What made that difficult was, it wasn't just wall segments that I had to make line up," Stefan explained. "I also had to make sure the canals lined up. Not only that, but I also had to make sure that all of the island spaces between the canals were accessible somehow. That took a huge amount of back-and-forth playing." [SQ2]

The allure of loot made combing through sewers and other zones worthwhile. To Frederick Vaught, the contents of treasure chests and barrels were less exciting than the containers themselves.

"I kind of became known as the object guy," explained Fred, environment artist and Object Guy. "It was so complicated to get things into the game. Once you learned something, you were the go-to guy because it was too complicated for anyone else to spend time learning the system."

Some artists liked animating characters. Others, such as Stefan, got a charge from painting and knitting tiles into navigable tapestries. Fred loved making items, and not just of the interactive variety. Bodies hung from chains, swaying and squirming. "At that point in games, objects were very static," he said. "As I progressed I would try to make objects move, animate them, give backgrounds more life and movement, which was not even possible through tile sets. But for objects you could do that. Now you have all this movement in backgrounds."

ONE AFTERNOON, MAX announced a content freeze: No more adding objects, enemies, skills, animations, code—anything at all until a new build of the game could be generated and evaluated.

Alan Ackerman, artist, was one of many affected by these spur-of-the-moment declarations. "I'd say, 'Max, I have to continue to add stuff. I'm doing the automap. I can't do it until the level art has been cut up and put into levels.' He'd say, 'Oh. Well, except for you.' Then someone else said, 'Hey, I can't do the levels until the art is generated.' Max would say, 'Oh, yeah. You too, then.'"

In game development, the slow but steady trickle of content is known as feature creep. "That was one area where I wish the management team was a little bit more, 'No more. This is it,'" Alan reflected. "A lot of times you'd hear, 'Hey, I created a new monster.' They would say, 'Oh, well if you created a new monster, we should give him his own dungeon.' What? Wait, aren't we in a content freeze? The bug lairs in Act Two came in during a content freeze, I think." [SQ3]

"The thing with feature creep is, people blame that for anything," Dave Brevik said. "It's a nice little scapegoat, but sometimes feature creep can lead to your best stuff."

One benefit of Diablo II's creep-heavy development was mercenaries, computer-controlled companions that players can hire to fight alongside them. Each of the game's first three Acts offer different types of mercenaries. In Act One, players can hire Rogues, the archers from the first Diablo. "It started off with having Rogues running around the wilderness," Eric Sexton, character artist and designer, recalled of mercenaries. "Occasionally you'd come across a Rogue fighting off some demons, but you couldn't do anything with her. That transitioned to, what if you could pay someone in town and have her follow you?" [SQ4]

Alan Ackerman had been hired to help paint and construct backgrounds. His first task was to paint the automap, a miniaturized view of the world players can reference as they explore. The automap started simply: As players move, the automap draws gray lines to signify borders, blue lines for water, red lines for doors.

"Dave Brevik said, 'I don't like this. It pulls you out of the game,'" Alan said. "I thought, Let's make little miniature walls that are semi-transparent. I think the original idea was, you're only going to need a limited number of pieces for the automap; there's only four directions for the wall, plus a door, so you might only need sixty pieces of art."

Alan's first stab at making mini maps was taking existing artwork for a background and shrinking it. That ended up being a mistake: Diablo II's miniaturized map was so accurate, like a model of a real-world location players could more easily recognize at a glance, that the bosses suggested he render every area's automap in a similar fashion. "I was thinking, Yeah, okay. But I didn't know how big the tile sets were when I did that. Had I known, I would not have done that. A huge part of my time was spent making one-tenth-scale art out of finished art assets." [SQ5]

Kurast, a vast city that spans several areas, is populated with temples, altars, huts, and houses of fluctuating sizes. At first, the structures were set dressing. Players could not enter and explore them; they existed to make the city feel more real. Inevitably, a developer suggested the houses and huts become explorable. The problem was the environment artists had not painted roofs for the buildings.

"It looked weird. It looked like everybody had sheared the tops of all the structures in the city," Stefan said. "I suggested developing another layer. I said, 'Well, what if we make another layer that goes transparent when you step into the bounds of a building's interior space?'"

Stefan's solution was to repurpose tiles that had already been made for walls and floors, and paint them on the tops of structures. Every entryway into a building has an invisible trigger. When players cross it, the structure's roof fades out so players can see inside. When they exit, the roof reappears. Excited by the feature, environment artists inserted cottages into Act One that utilized the shifting roofs Stefan had come up with for Act Three.

Alan's automap and Stefan's translucent roofs were a byproduct of Blizzard North's grassroots approach to making games.

"If not for the organic process, a lot of [our content] would have been lost," Stefan said. "At least the guys working on the project had enough integrity that, if there was more they could add, they would. They wouldn't waste their time and just sit at their desks. That was really cool."

"Feature creep implies something entirely inappropriate," added Peter Hu. "If you decide that you're going to design a game organically, calling it feature creep doesn't make much sense."

Organic development had the painful side effect of tacking extra hours onto a project. Many of those hours would go to waste.

"When you have the money and time to do things, you can do stuff like the whole potion-making debate," said Fred Vaught. "You can go down a road that takes a long time, then say, 'No, this isn't working' and throw it all away. We did that a couple times. You go down a road for so long, you invest so much time and energy into this one thing, and then they say, 'No, we don't like that' and you throw it out. It makes the game better, but at the same time, you spent three months working really hard on something."

Feature creep benefitted and harmed Act Three's production.

"I would say that to some extent we were hurrying a little bit by that point, and Act Three probably didn't get the attention that some of the other areas did," admitted Max Schaefer. "Levels are all about chokepoints and open areas. By Act Three we'd developed an implied trust that if you followed a path, it would work out. And that was the first time that following the path doesn't necessarily work out, even though it was trivial to go back and just take another path."

Perhaps the most egregious example of feature creep in Diablo II occurred near the end of the project, and had nothing to do with the game itself. "I was hired with the intention of working on the expansion. I came on about midway through the development of Diablo II," remembered Anthony Rivero. "I think they were already making Act Three at that point. I worked on Diablo II for a little while, but before it even went gold, I and a small crew of guys went to start working on Lord of Destruction."

"The idea was that we'd start before Diablo II shipped so that we could ship it shortly after, like six months or twelve months," added Phil Shenk. "They first asked me to do it, then Tyler joined me, and Tyler and I were working on the expansion for almost a year before Diablo II shipped."

A handful of developers kicked off preproduction on Diablo II's expansion in mid-1999. Game developers have a habit of starting the next project before the current work is completed. The advantage is that once the current project ships, the next project is fleshed out enough for the rest of the team to migrate over. In Diablo II's case, work on the expansion started too early.

"The most ridiculous aspect of the expansion team was that the authors of major systems moved onto the project, and refused to support the systems they had created," Stieg said. "This set up an unnecessarily antagonistic relationship between the two teams, where someone from the Diablo II team would ask for help on something, only to be told 'I'm on the expansion team.'"

By the summer of 1999, the bosses assimilated the developers working on the expansion back into Diablo II. All hands were needed for the game to have a chance at being finished.

DAVE BREVIK BANGED out an email and clicked Send. Around the office, computer speakers pinged as his memo hit inboxes.

"Sometime in late '98, I remember Dave sent out an email titled Why our game sucks," Stieg recalled. "I admired him for not holding his punches. There are plenty of places I've worked since where management would handle their employees like they were made of glass. I accepted it as a frank criticism, but never took it as meaning the game would be anything other than the screaming success it eventually became, just things that bugged him, and that he wanted to see fixed."

Dave made his irritation known in myriad ways. "One funny anecdote I remember is that sometime after I started on Diablo II," said Jon Stone, programmer, "David Brevik added a high-priority item to their bug tracking system which read: Diablo II is not fun. Expected behavior: Diablo II should be fun.' I seem to remember that bug lasting until very near the end of the project."

Whether developers found his critiques funny or not, no one disagreed. "When I first started, the company was a little bit smaller," said Mike Scandizzo. "If we'd have been able to print our own money, the money would have said, 'In Dave We Trust.' It was all about Dave and Dave's ideas. What Dave says, goes."

Mike's brother Stefan Scandizzo recalled sitting in Blizzard North's lobby, drumming his fingers on a knee that bounced with nervousness as he waited for his interview. Suddenly the doors burst open and a man wearing thick glasses and a wrinkled t-shirt and shorts stormed in. "'Fuck. Fuck! I've ruined the entire thing. It's all going to hell. We're going to have to start over,'" he remembered the man saying. "Then the guy barged out. Karin, who was then sort of the receptionist, said, 'That's Dave Brevik. He's our president.' That's how I will always remember my first interaction with Dave. When he was passionate about something, you knew about it."

John Kubasco made friends with Pete Brevik. One morning, he told Pete he doubted Dave even knew his name. Pete assured John that Dave knew him. Unconvinced, John bet Pete twenty bucks. "Dave walked by, and Pete goes, 'Dave, we've got a bet that you don't know what this guy's name is.' And Dave goes: 'John Kubasco.' And I went: 'Aw, shit.'"

From the outside looking in, Blizzard North's visionary was cool and confident, an alpha male who happened to wear thick, nerdy glasses. "The way I understand the Blizzard North process working, even back in the Condor days, was Dave Brevik would essentially go into his office for two weeks, door closed, wouldn't talk to anybody," said Joe Morrissey, IT engineer. "Then he'd come out with something playable. It might just be ASCII [text] characters on the screen, but they'd say, 'This is the core of our game,' and they'd just build off of that."

The truth, according to Dave, was that he worked best when he operated in tandem with Max and Erich. Referring to themselves as a three-headed monster, each brought different strengths to the table. Dave was considered the visionary and lead tech guy. Max was affable and gregarious. Erich, who loved rolling up his sleeves and mucking about with numbers and other nuts and bolts of design, was Blizzard North's velvet hammer.

"One of the things Erich was really good at was getting people to open up, talk about their ideas, and share them," Michio explained. "He would know how to listen to ideas and give you input on, 'Here's why it works' or 'Here's why it doesn't work.' I think Erich was really critical for that. He did things in a very natural, grassroots way."

Dave was a hammer without velvet. "Dave had a way about him," said Kelly Johnson. "If he didn't like something, the word he used was stool. He'd go, 'That's stool, man.' He wasn't ever into making artwork, but if he played the game and didn't like something, he'd say, 'That's a bunch of stool.' He wouldn't say to change something, but we knew if Dave didn't like it, change it, because Dave was usually right. He had a very good bead on things."

Dave's confidence could be disarming. He was a programmer, a self-identified nerd who melded his love of video games and programming with other stereotypically male hobbies. He wore sports jerseys paired with thick glasses and socks-and-sandals footwear. He was confident, yet humble. He was proud of Blizzard North's success, yet he shied away from reading reviews of Diablo because he fixated on flaws rather than what had gone right.

As temperatures soared in the middle of 1999, Dave felt no heat, no pressure. He called Mike Morhaime at Blizzard South and targeted November as Diablo II's release. "I thought we had a full six months of crunch work left, but that we'd easily make our target. We worked and worked and worked," he said.

The months wore on. Features crept in, making the game better but dragging out development. Dave let himself get sucked in by EverQuest, losing himself in Sony's fantastical world.

When he had to, he could buckle down, and he made sure everyone else did, too. That fall, Dave tasked Karin with doing morning roll call. Anyone who wasn't at work by 10:00 a.m. sharp would lose a sick day. Phil Shenk balked. Game developers were notorious night owls. So, too, was Dave Brevik, whose enforcement of the policy made him come across as a hypocrite. Phil wrote the bosses an email pointing out that their team was giving their life blood, voluntarily spending time away from friends and family to work long hours: six days a week, sometimes seven, for twelve to eighteen hours a day.

"Then I think Brevik made a speech," Phil recalled, "saying, 'Yeah, this is really stressful. We made a bad decision; sorry about that. We know you guys are giving us your lives for three or four years. It certainly isn't our intention to start slapping your hands for it.'"

"I don't think that Dave was satisfied completely until the end," said Pete Brevik. "I always felt like he wanted to add one more thing: more quests, one more skill to this or that. I liked that. He's putting everything into it that's going to make it the best it possibly can be. But it will come at the expense of people who think they're finished now have to go create new artwork and the story has to be rewritten to incorporate this or that. The impact can affect a lot of people who think there's an end in sight where there really wasn't."

As November loomed, the stress wore on Dave. He took breaks, but stayed late. They would make November. He had willed things into existence before, converting Diablo from turn-based to real-time in a single evening.

Crunch continued. Anyone who wasn't actively writing code or painting artwork tested prototypes.

Early that November, Dave's phone rang.

"I remember the call from Mike Morhaime saying, 'Dave, you guys aren't going to make it. We're going to push back the launch to the spring and let you guys take a breather.' I was so upset. I was just devastated, because I felt like not only have we prolonged the crunch, but I was too close to see what was going on."

Chapter 14: Solidarity

We'd hire new people, and along with all their paperwork they had to sign and their little starting packet, they got a sleeping bag. We all had sleeping bags.

-Eric Sexton, artist, Blizzard North

It was this bizarre mix of bad but forceful management, and then self-motivation, and a lot of slacking at the same time

-Peter Kemmer, programmer, Blizzard North

KARIN COLENZO LOOKED up as Kelly Johnson breezed into the office pushing his bike beside him. He chatted with her as he unstrapped his bicycling helmet and removed his sunglasses. Ducking into the restroom, he changed out of his cycling jersey and shorts and into a t-shirt, shorts, socks, and sneakers, then went to his desk.

That afternoon, Alex Munn crossed in front of Karin's desk. He was in a zone, eyes glazed, headphones on. She watched him step into the parking lot. The day was warm and sunny. Alex breathed in the fresh air, then began to run. Forty minutes later he returned, got himself cleaned up, went into the kitchen for a drink, and returned to his desk.

A few days a week, Marc Tattersall and some of the other artists piled into a car and drove from San Mateo to Half Moon Bay, a small coastal city dotted with restaurants. They would stay for a few hours before heading back to work.

"I loved it because there was the understanding that we were a generally seasoned team, or at least a good team in terms of quality, so they didn't really have to monitor and watch over people's shoulders every minute," Marc said. "If we had a three-hour lunch, it wasn't a big deal because we were putting in sixty hours a week. It wasn't a whip-cracking environment. In general you'd have to do something pretty bad to get yelled at."

"Marc Tattersall was doing really good stuff, but he would go and play a lot of pool," said John Kubasco. "Dave Glenn, I remember him having kind of weird hours. But nobody would really care. He would sleep there, and he'd do a shitload of stuff in one night. It was basically just: Take care of your stuff, and everything will be fine."

Around 5:30, Karin sent out a memo that the bosses would be catering dinner. An hour later, a delivery service pulled up, and she helped set up trays of steaming food in the kitchen. One by one, developers pushed away from their monitors and converged on the meal.

"Dinner was always a small time of rejuvenation. People would just kind of hang out, talk, make jokes or whatever. Then they'd slowly make their way back to their offices and start working again."

"We had free food and drinks brought in all the time, and did what we could to make it a pleasant office to be in, because you really had to be there a lot," Max Schaefer added.

Catering was a shared ritual during Diablo II's crunch. Others were more personal. After pulling an all-nighter, Dave Glenn would close the door and nap on his futon until the late morning or early afternoon. Stieg Hedlund came in every morning, poured a cup of coffee, and grabbed the latest build of Diablo II from the server. He played for hours, gameplay on one monitor, spreadsheets open on a second screen. Around lunch, he'd saunter over to the foosball and ping-pong tables. When he needed to nap, he'd crash on the couch in Matt Uelmen's office.

"You didn't go home for three or four days at a time, and when you did, it was just to shower or something," Kelly Johnson recalled. "People were just like, 'I'm going to do at work what I'd do at home,' so we drank some at work. It didn't interfere with the work, it's just what people did because they were at work seven days a week, literally."

As work on Diablo II's third act continued through the summer of 1999, Stefan Scandizzo looked for ways to shake off exhaustion and engage his creativity. At certain regions within Act Three's jungle, players come across pyramids whose walls appear to be two, three times as high as those of surrounding structures. Their height was an optical illusion created when Stefan rotated roof tiles and forced them to function as wall tiles. In early 2000, when work had begun on the game's fourth and final Act, he created statues with heads that swiveled to watch players as they ran by. "That's what kept me going: finding ways to take the existing system and abusing it as much as possible."

Anthony Rivero was part of a trio of character artists teamed up to create the boss of Act Three. "The first experiment that we did in terms of sharing duties on an asset was between Cheeming Boey, Phil Shenk, and me, on Mephisto."

Mephisto, Lord of Hatred and Diablo's eldest brother, did not start out as a collaborative effort. "That guy was completely designed by Phil," said Cheeming Boey. Phil had drawn Mephisto as a giant skeleton with long, curved horns, two branch-like arms and tentacles extending from his armpits. Instead of legs, bits of flesh drooped from his lower torso. A misty aura enabled him to drift through the air as he hurled balls of lightning at players.

Once he finished his drawing, Phil passed it to Anthony, who created a 3D model—which would be pre-rendered, or flattened, to a 2D image for implementation into the game—and textured it. Anthony then handed his Mephisto model off to Boey, who animated the demon lord. "Actually," Boey amended, "he was designed without the fleshy bits hanging off him, but I told Phil that he didn't look right. The fleshy parts were actually done by me. That's an example of how we worked together. He did stuff, and anything I provided was okay."

"That was the beginning of the more streamlined, assembly-line approach," Anthony continued. "We started to do more of that on the expansion pack. That was the beginning of the modern pipeline."

Two months of crunching stretched out to three. Three lengthened into six.

"It was bad," Eric Sexton remembered. "Twelve-hour days minimum. It wasn't a constant year-and-a-half of crunching, but we'd say, 'We're coming up on our deadline. We're going to crunch for three months.' Then we'd reach the deadline and realize, okay, we're not going to make it."

The end of development was like the mirage of an oasis, always within reach until it reappeared on the far horizon.

"Everyone would a break for a month, then we'd crunch for another three months and not make it again. We did that for a year and a half," Sexton continued.

"We thought we were closer than we were for too long," Erich Schaefer admitted.

The bosses and senior producer Matt Householder organized milestones around trade shows: E3 in the summer, ECTS (European Computer Trade Show) in the spring or fall. Everyone pushed to finish content so Blizzard North would have something to show off at the show of the season. That, in turn, would give gaming journalists something to write about, maintaining hype for the game.

Four weeks before a trade show, Blizzard North's leaders would announce a mini crunch, even though the last mini crunch was technically still in effect.

Reality dawned gradually. Act One was massive. If they wanted every other Act to boast the same scale and volume of content—and they did—they had a long way to go. "We underestimated the amount of work needed to finish the game," Erich Schaefer continued. "Our standards were very high; we never really compromised. We did take some stuff out, but we never said, 'Let's rush this thing out and ship it.'"

Every aspect of Blizzard North's culture, every decision the bosses made, had consequences. Feature creep stretched out development, but led to some of the game's most memorable and subtle features. Playing games both inspired and hampered design. Dave Brevik's crushing disappointment over missing Diablo II's launch window pulled him deeper into EverQuest's virtual world, learning trades to craft his own items, and raiding dungeons full of enemies and treasure. In that world, every piece of armor he forged lent a sense of accomplishment. Every sword he found, every spell he learned, made him that much more powerful. In real life, he was wealthy and successful, but plagued by problems at home and caught in an interminable work schedule that tested even his endurance for making games despite being a self-professed workaholic. In the game, he was more than a skilled warrior. He was a badass.

Mike Huang, Blizzard North's network engineer, played alongside Dave. Mike Scandizzo, one of North's newer programmers, joined them. So did Divo Palinkas, another programmer and one of the studio's few female employees. They played for hours, sometimes entire workdays. "Regardless of whether or not our extracurricular activities had an impact on development timelines and how much we worked and all this kind of stuff, the end result kind of speaks for itself, right?" Dave asked. "Did we go about it in an unorthodox way? Yes. But we all had pretty good success there, and we all had some fun."

Developers have spoken and written about the importance of playing games to stay on top of trends and to consider how other studios make games. To many at Blizzard North, certain peers and bosses blurred the line between research and distraction.

"It did not take three years of production time," said Kris Renkewitz, character artist, of Diablo II's development. "To be honest with you, working on it solid, a year and a half would be a lot. Two years, max. There was definitely a year's worth of fucking around at that company. And they'd probably all say, 'Well, fuck you, Kris. We did blah-blah-blah.' Okay. All I know is everybody played video games all day long for the first eight months. I sat there and watched it happen."

"EverQuest was a huge time sink," Alan Ackerman said. "A lot of people in the office were into EverQuest. We had a guild that had a bunch of Blizzard people in it."

Alan was not immune to EverQuest's allure. A massive, persistent world where he could go adventuring with friends, kill monsters to gain experience and learn new abilities, and find new gear? It was like Diablo, but on a grander, three-dimensional scale. Even so, he and everyone else had jobs to do.

"People who should have been working were playing EverQuest. People who should have been working were playing Counter-Strike. It's endemic in the games industry as far as I can tell. You're in the industry because you like games, so unless someone lends some direction, that's going to happen."

"The fact is, you can't work all the time," Dave Brevik countered. "We were demanding so much for people and from ourselves, there had to be a little playing. And again, it was important that we experienced these things because they were having a profound impact on the industry. I mean, yes, we played a lot of EQ, but it directly led to World of WarCraft, which makes Blizzard a crap-ton of money. Was it a bad decision to do that? They're laughing all the way to the bank about that."

Jon Morin survived the first nine months of crunch by focusing on the positives. He worked with friends, and he got paid to make video games, his dream job. Moreover, he had engineered some of Diablo II's most impressive systems such as the paper-doll components. As 1999 wore on, his outlook soured. The hours were becoming untenable. When he was home, all he wanted to do was sleep. He had no energy to pitch in around the house, or spend time with his girlfriend. His sleeping bag, given to all new hires along with a stack of paperwork, was more familiar to him than his own bed.

"I've talked to people in the game industry about it," he reflected, "and they say, 'Wow, you crunched for how long?' Almost a year and a half. That was really bad. That probably took a few years off my life. We probably worked about fifteen, sixteen hours a day, mostly seven days a week. We had a couple hours off on the weekends. I was almost in a constant state of exhaustion, but somehow, I just made it. It's weird: You're on this high the whole time."

Anthony Rivero, character artist, knew that high. "I was just talking to someone today about how cool it is to know that this game, Diablo II, is a part of popular culture. To know that your work is going to be seen over and over again by players all around the world? That's a really cool feeling."

"I was consistently confident that the game would be a commercial and artistic success and was usually in the position of wanting more time to do it right," agreed Matt Uelmen, Blizzard North's composer. "Act Three is really interesting in that it really had some of the best and worst moments of the game, and that gives a nice insight into where the team was at in that period."

Just as every developer coped with the crunch in his or her own way, everyone had opinions on crunch as a systemic part of development. "I'm still generally inclined to see long hours as part of the price that comes with having a job that isn't some kind of civil service thing," said Matt Uelmen. "If you're working on something exciting, long hours should be a pleasure. It may sound counterintuitive, but I'm a real believer in the idea that the best stuff is created when you're able to have a little bit of objectivity and look at it from the consumer or gamer's perspective. If you just keep hacking away until that person is satisfied, it is hard to go too wrong."

Admittedly, Uelmen's perspective could be due to the workload he carried on Diablo II as well as personal outlook. "Most Hollywood composers would have a big laugh at the idea that making eighty minutes of music over forty months is stressful, even with a few hundred sound effects thrown in. Having creative control and no one in between me and upper management was the opposite of burnout-inducing. Diablo II was never that bad in that regards on my end, though it certainly helped that I had substantial work done in the first year or so of the project, just going off of genre descriptions for later acts."

Unless a manager requests a new asset, artists are among the first developers to complete their tasks on a game. With their contributions finalized, they are free to touch up artwork as needed, and assist with play testing. Likewise, artists are among the first to start working on a new project. Concept art is needed to help designers and programmers visualize a game's direction and begin to lay a foundation for the world.

Programmers are not so lucky. Although artists may start before them, senior programmers kick off projects even earlier: talking with external companies to negotiate licenses for engines and tools, writing proprietary code such as the engine that will power the company's next project, building tools for developers who are prototyping art or code or design or audio. Preparing a vertical slice for trade shows is important since trade shows give press and consumers an opportunity to learn about a game, but bigger shows such as E3 require engineers to prepare special demos that hide certain features and story elements the studio wants to keep under wraps. Much of the work that goes into creating a demo for a show is unique to that demo, and cannot be rolled into the main project. Their work doesn't stop once a game arrives in the hands of players. Programmers shift to troubleshooting, balancing gameplay systems for upcoming patches, and other support duties.

"I can tell you that I crunched for eighteen months," said Rick Seis. "Not all [programmers] did, but they would definitely be on the high end. There were a handful of us that crunched right away, and then a month later a couple more would be on, and then a month later a couple more would be on."

Despite his unhappiness with Blizzard North's growing bureaucracy and the widening gulf between himself and the bosses, Rick still firmly believed in the by-the-bootstraps work ethic that had enabled Condor to build Diablo. He took his role as lead programmer on Diablo II seriously, reviewing code and jumping in to polish when something didn't work quite right. When he perceived that sections of code under his purview—usually related to AI—weren't up to snuff, he worked around the clock.

Tyler Thompson matched him step for step. Three days a week, the programmer slept at work. On the other nights, he made a point to get home by eight to see his new wife, but collapsed in bed by 10:30. When he realized that schedule wasn't working for either of them, he tried alternating days, going into the office around ten in the morning or noon at the latest, working until midnight, curling up in his sleeping bag until six or seven, and then working another twelve hours. Then he would head home for a day. That schedule was better, until approximately twelve months into what seemed to be a never-ending crunch.

"My wife and I would go out to a restaurant, and after about a month we learned that I could not order. My brain had gotten to the point where I could not remember the last entry I'd read. I couldn't make decisions. For months we'd sit down at the restaurant and I'd just hand her the menu."

A variety of factors caused developers to view crunch differently. One was youth. "I felt really, really alive during Diablo II's crunch. I once clocked myself having worked 136 hours in one week. I think I enjoyed every minute of it. It's good to be young, huh?" said Peter Hu, programmer.

Eric Sexton's marriage was one of several sacrificed at the altar of Diablo II. As his relationship worsened, he spent more time at work—the place responsible for his deteriorating health and personal life. But all things were relative.

"I think everybody I know from back then is divorced," admitted Sexton. "You didn't think about it. It was almost a Pavlovian response: 'That place good. I want to be there.' Getting into fights with your spouse made work that much better."

Dave, Max, and Erich gave the team breaks, but often with little to no advance notice.

"There were some Fridays that we'd have a meeting and leadership would say, 'Hey guys, take the weekend off!'" said Stieg Hedlund, designer. "The issues with this were that everyone outside the company would already have made plans expecting us not to be free, and we'd also generally just sleep."

"You just don't tell people to work twelve hours a day for four months. It's really taxing," added Peter Kemmer, programmer. "It drove me out of the company, and I'm sure it drove other people out because there's only so much of that you can take."

Jon Stone was among those who left after Diablo II was released in June 2000. He found employment at Industrial Light & Magic and, later, Lucasfilm, where he worked on effects for films such as 2013's Pacific Rim and 2015's Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

"It was, to this day, still the worst crunch I've ever experienced on any project. It was very challenging, but because it was my first time on a big game project, I wouldn't think I minded it that much. It's not something you want to keep doing into your thirties, but at the time it was a new thing to me."

Chapter 15: Ghosts and Ashes

For me, it was like, I'm seizing this opportunity. Whatever happened in the past with these other guys, that's their problem. I need to worry about my own career.

-Anthony Rivero, artist, Blizzard North

I think people were okay with the idea of no titles when it was fifteen, twenty people. It was pretty clear what people did and pretty clear what hierarchies there were. And they'd compare themselves to peers outside the company.

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

ANTHONY RIVERO SLIPPED on a pair of headphones and jogged across the parking lot. His feet carried him to a trail that wound through trees and hills near Blizzard North's office. Half an hour later he returned to see one of his workmates sitting in his Mercedes reading a book. Anthony didn't know the guy very well, just that he was a character artist, like Anthony, and that he had been with Blizzard North since the company's early days making games for Sega Genesis and Game Boy. Anthony peeled off his headset and approached to make chit-chat.

"I went and just started talking to him: 'Hey, how's it going?' I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of he didn't get his fair share, and there was something wrong with something that happened before I got there. He was a little miffed by it."

Anthony and other new blood listened when Condor veterans relayed tales of the good, bad, and ugly of Diablo's development. Scott Petersen, an audio engineer brought on to help Matt Uelmen compose Diablo II's sound effects, observed studio veterans falling into two camps. Members of the first group seemed resigned to how things had shaken out. The Cendant scandal had wiped out everyone's stock options, but royalties were flowing. Bonus checks would only get bigger when Diablo II launched—provided Blizzard North could ever ship the damn thing.

Scott remembered the other camp being less composed, either unable or unwilling to be mollified. "There was some real bitterness going on from some of that crew. It was a little bit poisonous at times. It's unfortunate. They didn't even know how good they had it. It's like, you're bitter about all that? I mean, come on, man. You're on top of the world, still."

To Rick and others who felt jaded, "on top of the world" was relative. Condor had been a great place to work, they explained, because of the culture the bosses had fostered. There had been no divisions until the sale of the company. Rick stressed that the bosses had promised everyone would be taken care of. To his way of thinking, the bosses had broken their word.

"The people that came in during Diablo II thought Blizzard North was awesome. "They were like, 'This place is great!' The thing is, Condor was two times better, and how could they have understood that? They weren't there. So, for them, certainly, the difference between how they were feeling and how we were feeling was pretty large."

Bitterness remained a source of stress throughout Diablo II's development, and was likely exacerbated by the crunch. "Rick was just miserable all the time," Anthony Rivero said. "He was just pretty disgruntled. There were a couple of times I talked to him, and I just came away and felt like shit."

"I remember someone telling me how bad it was," said Fred Vaught, an artist on the environment team. "They were working their asses off on Diablo, and the leadership was saying, 'You're going to get bonuses.' I think they all felt they got screwed in the Cendant scandal. At one point, most of them were pretty wealthy on paper. So first they get screwed during the sale of the company, then they get screwed with their stocks. How can you not be a little bitter?"

Many who sided with the Condor crew—Kelly Johnson, Michio Okamura, Rick Seis, Jon Morin, and Eric Sexton—agreed that the bosses had yet to make up for all that had happened. To their thinking, the bosses should have taken them aside, admitted they were wrong, and tried to make it right by cutting each of them a personal check for a hundred thousand, or half a million, or a million, on top of bonuses the company was earning through the system that the two Blizzards had built together. Other developers found that idea, and the Condor staff's resentment, ridiculous.

"I came on right after the Cendant scandal happened," said Bob Steele, artist. "There were a lot of people who were aggrieved, feeling like they'd been screwed over. It was like, 'Well, you can't blame the three guys for that.'"

Some of Blizzard North's longest-serving members felt inclined to take their time submitting work. That attitude angered many newcomers. "There were people who just weren't pulling their weight," said Cheeming Boey, character artist. "That upset me because I don't want my hard work to be diluted by someone who isn't pulling their weight. I was in my second year of school, and I was wondering why I had so much drive and other people didn't. I was wondering, How could people be in this company and not want to make artwork?"

"As far as I was concerned, I still had a game to ship, and I didn't want my reputation to get soiled because no one else was going to pick up the slack," Anthony Rivero agreed. "I think that's why some of us clicked, too. We resented people who didn't work hard toward making a good game. It happens at places like that where people get kind of complacent."

"We wanted to get it out there and get it to other people," Peter Kemmer added. "I remember hanging out on the Battle.net forums and feeling like a rock star because I'd say, 'Oh by the way, I'm helping write part of the Diablo II engine,' and all these kids were like, 'Oh my god! Holy shit!'"

Many new hires ushered in a radical shift in how the bosses scouted developers. When they had formed Condor, they had had to scrape together money to lease a tiny office and hustle for contracts. Experience had been less important than passion. "When you're three guys with computers and $10,000, nobody gives a shit about you," Dave Brevik said. "You can't even really hire anyone, because it's like, yeah, come take a chance on us! They say, 'Who are you?' And we say, 'I don't know. We're nobody.'"

Passion was still a criterion the bosses looked for in prospective hires, but experience carried more weight. Michio Okamura had landed his job in 1994 based on hand-drawn illustrations of superheroes like Superman and Batman, but he'd had little experience with computers. Over his first months at Condor, he had pulled double duty, drawing animation frames for Justice League Task Force by hand—then handing them off to Max Schaefer, who digitized them on computers—and learning how to use computers. The bosses hired Michio for one simple reason: Talent. They could teach him how to use art software, but artistry like his could not be learned. By 1997, the bosses admitted that a candidate who was an ace artist but unpracticed stood little chance of being hired over a savvier candidate.

There were consequences to raising the bar for employment. One was a hunger to succeed. On his first day at Blizzard North, Anthony Rivero had been given two computers tricked out with all the latest games and art software, a Wacom drawing tablet, and the freedom to create any monsters and characters his imagination could conceive of. "Oh, and by the way, you're working on one of the greatest PC games ever."

"I think the new guard took up the mantle and ran with it," added Dave Glenn, environment artist. "We had the enthusiasm, it was all new to us, and we wanted to prove ourselves. That's a natural cycle for a game studio and a project like that. That's what made the game what it was, to a large degree. And those guys did step aside in many ways. Max didn't fight me. He was happy he had somebody who knew his stuff and that he could shovel responsibility onto. He knew it was in good hands."

Another consequence was ego. After Diablo II's gold master disc had been sent off for mass production, the bosses distributed a company-wide email telling everyone to think about what title they deserved. That title would be included in the game's instruction manual and credits screen, Erich Schaefer explained. "That was a general rule we had: We wanted everybody to just have one title."

The bosses' logic was that nobody performed just one function at Blizzard North. Everybody was welcome to pitch features, monsters, skills, hero classes, areas, quests—anything. Limiting employees to one credit circumvented arguments over who had done what. Another rule followed by both Blizzards was to write Game Design by Blizzard Entertainment—or Blizzard North in the case of Diablo and Diablo II—as a testament to the collaboration involved in bringing a game to life.

Dave, Max, and Erich had a hunch regarding who would ask for which title. Stieg Hedlund was the only developer listed as a designer because he had been the only developer explicitly hired for that position. Likewise, most of the artists were fine being listed under the character or environment teams, or even just as an artist. A handful of other people staked their claim as leads in their respective groups. "Usually the titles were a little bit illusory, because anytime you wanted to do something that wasn't what everyone else wanted to do, you still had to make your case no matter who you were," Max Schaefer remembered.

The bosses believed leading a discipline—programming, character art—was more of an administrative duty than a creative one. Anyone who staked a claim on a lead title had to take charge of that area, something that they had to have done during development rather than near the end when titles were being finalized. "Tyler was definitely someone who would take that seriously," Max continued. "He didn't want to be a lead so he could have the satisfaction of being a lead. He wanted it because he knew he could get it done, and we wanted him to do it because we knew he would take it seriously and make it happen." (Although Rick Seis was credited as lead programmer on Diablo II, Tyler's work ethic and expertise would earn him a leadership position later on.)

To their frustration, the bosses were floored by disputes that arose around titles. "That was always a little bit of a sore spot," Phil recalled, "because somebody would come in and say, 'I'm going to be senior artist.' Then there'd be this big meeting about it, and someone would say, 'Well, we can't say 'senior artist' because then somebody else—blah, blah, blah.'"

Veteran employees were dismayed at the weight newer hires gave to their positions.

"People wanted to know what their titles were," Karin Colenzo remembered. "Later on, when we were much bigger, people didn't understand why Matt had 'Voice of Reason' on his card. People coming in wanted to know, 'Well, what is that? Well, what does he do?' The tides started to shift."

Scott Petersen got a kick out of Matt's playful moniker, so he wrote Mixmaster on his first business card. As the project ramped up and excitement around Diablo II rose, he found himself reconsidering. "I do remember wanting to get my title changed, looking at my business card and going, 'That's not very businesslike. What's a Mixmaster anyways? Maybe I should get a regular title like Sound Designer.' It was kind of sad. I sort of lament that transition."

"I not only noticed it, I succumbed to it at various naïve, very youthful phases," Ben Boos admitted. "I mean, first the business card issue comes up. And it's not a big deal. You're 'artist.' Then you're this, then you're that. I'm telling you, we had so many freaking business cards. That partially forced the bloody issue because it was constantly coming up: 'Okay, what's going to be on your card?' And I just thought, Oh, that would be great: more responsibility. You know how it is. You're hungry, dumb, and young."

At different stages of Diablo II's design, Blizzard North's meritocracy seemed a sham. At one point, a senior developer who'd been with the studio since the Condor days stormed through the halls. He knew his worth, but to his thinking, one of the new hires served as incontrovertible proof that his bosses did not. "I busted my ass for over two and a half years. I was there when the company started, worked my ass off for Diablo 1. And my reward is they're hiring somebody brand-new, who's getting paid more than I was, a guy who's already been there?"

The developer—who preferred to remain anonymous—stopped in front of Dave's office. Dave looked up from his computer. His eyes went from the developer standing in his doorway, to the object in his hands: A sword.

"After five years with Blizzard employees receive an official five-year sword in a framed presentation case," said Matt Householder, senior producer.

The developer threw his sword to the floor and stormed off. The office was silent.

Cooler heads prevailed over time. The developer asked to speak with Dave, Max, and Erich privately, and vented his problem. A new artist was making more than he was, despite his seniority and contributions. Dave, Max, and Erich gave him a raise to make sure he made more.

"It came up a lot," the developer lamented. "Every time someone new came in, they start asking, 'Why aren't you guys rich? Why don't you guys have this?' We wasted a lot of time talking about that stuff."

IN THE FIRST Act of Diablo II, players are given a quest to rescue Deckard Cain, the wizened storyteller from the first game. To accomplish their mission, they must return to Tristram.

They arrive to find the town razed to the ground. Familiar haunts like Ogden's tavern, Pepin the Healer's hut, and Griswold's forge are charred husks. Flames chew through other buildings, exposing blackened interiors.

"All that remains of proud Tristram," said Warriv, a caravan driver in Act One's town, "is ghosts and ashes."

Chapter 16: Blood and Fire

Dave, Max, and Erich had some specific gameplay edicts we had to follow. Dave never wanted to be forced to read the quest text, and minimal button presses to do any action came from Dave and Erich. Otherwise there was a lot of freedom to improvise.

-Steven Woo, programmer, Blizzard North

I could have said, "Eh, I just want two different types of chests." But I thought, No, I want four different types. I was in charge of it, so I took pride in it.

- Fredrick Vaught, artist, Blizzard North

In retrospect, Blizzard North really started its decline the day Jon Stone left in early 2001. It is a subtle thing, but that kind of work ethic, creativity, and sense of humor is really the core of a great team.

-Matt Uelmen, composer, Blizzard North

MANY PLAYERS, CRITICS, and game historians point to Diablo's loot system as its core appeal. Games that procedurally generate loot are commonly referred to as Diablo-likes, even games outside the fantasy-RPG genre such as Gearbox's Borderlands shooters.

Giving loot all the credit for the Diablo franchise's success fails to acknowledge Blizzard North's holistic vision. Diablo II's game systems—gems, procedurally generated areas and loot, tiers of items, the feedback of mouse clicks, the sound cues of items popping out of monsters and treasure chests—weave together into a spider web-like design. Every strand of the web depends on the support of the others. Touch one, and the web may unravel.

The game loop begins with a mouse click. The avatar responds instantly, teaching players that the game will leap to obey their every click. The feedback of clicking on an enemy comes next. Speakers emit a solid thwack, slice, or stab depending on the type of weapon being used and whether the enemy is wearing armor. The animation of the swing, thrust, spell-casting, or bowstring is also pleasant: fast, yet not so fast that the animation looks shoddy.

Players keep clicking—or click and hold—a mouse button until their target dies. The target's death animation should be strong: A Fallen flipping through the air and collapsing in a pool of blood; a Skeleton shattering into a heap of splintered bones; a Zombie crumbling into dismembered limbs. That animation is tantamount to pulling the lever on a slot machine. The sight and sound of an item bursting free of a defeated monster means the machine has decided in their favor—but to what degree? And what effect should the sound of that item appearing in the world have on the player's psyche?

DIABLO II BALLOONED to approximately four times the size of its predecessor. Even as the project swelled, Blizzard North's developers worked on a micro scale, polishing individual elements until they sparkled.

"Max always had this saying: 'There's never enough blood and fire.' That was what he pushed the artists to do: more fire, more blood," remembered Michael Huang, IT engineer.

Max Schaefer's emphasis on blood and fire was a philosophy less suggestion and more ideology. Taken literally, it amounted to window dressing. Andariel's lair at the end of Act One is painted in flames and pits of bubbling blood. Figuratively, "blood and fire" referred to small touches that made big impacts on the game, the action-RPG genre, Blizzard North, and the gaming industry.

A smooth difficulty curve was one such blood-and-fire change. "One big challenge, which I felt resulted in a big win, was establishing a formulaic difficulty curve for the game," explained Stieg Hedlund, designer. When brainstorming enemies with character artists, Stieg thought about how enemy types were reused: A character model could be given half a dozen paint jobs and different attributes such as more or fewer life points, then seeded throughout areas. A brown-and-red zombie in Act One's pastures posed less of a challenge than a blue-and-green zombie roaming the marshy shores of Act Three's jungle. It was a marked difference from Diablo, where leaving one environment type and setting foot in another—such as level 4, the final cathedral-themed dungeon, to level 5, the first floor of the catacombs—ushered in a difficulty spike, a way of reminding players not to get complacent.

Stieg could easily manipulate an enemy's attributes by tweaking values in a spreadsheet. "I could essentially design all of this stuff unhindered, right down to what their actual damage and hit points would be, even without needing to see any of it on-screen, until the tuning stages when nothing could substitute for actually playing the game."

Dialing in numbers for individual enemies was tedious work, and prone to error. Stieg might adjust the value of one enemy in a particular area but misalign the health or damage of other enemies, leading to uneven difficulty. The alternative was a global difficulty curve, modified by changing a single variable. Not only did altering one variable simplify the process of massaging the challenge posed to players in an Act, or a particular area, or the entire game, the difficulty curve could effectively be scaled as high as Stieg wanted it to go. From there, the value could be dialed in through extensive playtesting based on how powerful players should be in a given area.

"All of this called for some higher math, which one engineer, Tyler Thompson, helped me to set up. Today, I think the method I'm describing is used ubiquitously, but I think we were one of the first games to do so. In fact, looking back, it was somewhat rudimentary, compared to the spread sheeting I have done, and continue to do, since. It was definitely a breakthrough at the time."

Gut checks, usually in the form of a tough unique monster, were another method of communicating to players that they might be too weak—or too powerful—for a new area's challenges. "I do remember the Blood Raven quest was one of the last things we put in," remembered Phil Shenk, character artist.

Blood Raven is a unique, bow-wielding Corrupt Rogue enemy that lurks in a cemetery in the game's first Act. She moves quickly, fires off arrows as fast as she moves, and can raise undead. Blood Raven was designed in the spirit of the Butcher, a unique monster found in Diablo's second level. "I felt pretty strongly about that, because I loved how in the first Diablo, you'd run into the Butcher, and he'd be too tough for you. You'd get your ass kicked," Phil continued. "You'd get down to the Skeleton King and kill him, and by that time maybe you were ready to kill the Butcher, so you'd go back and kill him, and you'd feel pretty cool, like you'd progressed."

Giving players the option to live to fight another day evoked the spirit of Blizzard North's design philosophy. "That's always been our goal," said Erich Schaefer. "Make the thing easy, make it so you don't have to read instructions on how to play. That was always important to us: Easy to pick up and get into."

One of the easiest-to-pick-up aspects of Diablo II was the concept of flippies, any item that flips out of a treasure chest or defeated monster before hitting the ground with a telltale clang, thud, or chime. "When I started there, the first thing that I worked on was flippies. Flippies were one of those give-them-to-the-new-guy tasks," said Mike Dashow, character artist. "Someone's got to do all those animations of every single weapon in Diablo II, and of course they all flip differently because an axe is [heavier] than a sword."

Items had threefold appeal. The first was purely aesthetic. "A lot of the armor worn by heroes was incredibly detailed. Bob Steele was in charge of that, and was very meticulous," said Anthony Rivero, character artist.

Part of Bob's process was visiting local bookstores and libraries every week to dig up new source materials. "That was fun because at the time it was a fun learning experience. I enjoy the process of, 'How can I do this? How can I fix this?' It was really fun."

Bob figured the job would keep him busy for a few months before he moved on to other work, so he took up the mantle, creating daggers, swords, clubs, axes, crowns, gloves, boots, helmets, caps, shields, and all manner of other implements.

"I volunteered to do it to get the process started and ended up working on it until I left."

The secondary appeal of items was their variety. From inlaid jewels in crowns and pockmarked wooden shafts on battleaxes, to gleaming plate mail and wicked points at the ends of halberds and great swords, Diablo II's items are best viewed in the inventory screen, where players see the thumbnail-sized portraits Bob painted. As other artists came on, Max and Erich assigned them to help create weapon assets to ensure a huge variety of every type of item, such as the six types of caps from leather hoods and skulls to crowns and great helms fashioned from steel.

What started as a job that nobody else had wanted became a point of pride for Bob.

"Being the prick that I am, if someone didn't meet my quality standards for rendering or texturing, I would reject them, touch them up, or withhold approval. I went on vacation, and when I came back, one of the other artists had posted a picture of me over the checklist with Approved by Robert Steele across it. I just started laughing. I think I spit my coffee out everywhere."

Item variety extended to categorization. There are six tiers, each a jump in quality over the last and sporting names written in colored text to help players distinguish them. Normal items, with names displayed in gray text, possess no special properties, while magic (blue) and rare (yellow) gear boast extra properties such as increased damage and health, or the capacity to leech health or energy from monsters with every hit. Items in a set, displayed in green, each exhibit additional attributes and further augment the player's abilities when half or all items in a complete set are worn. Unique items are written in dark gold text, and are given unique names. Unique items often feature the most powerful properties.

Crafted items come in two forms. Some contain sockets into which players can insert gems, which bestow different effects depending on the type of item they're socketed into. A ruby inserted into a shield increases resistance to fire, while fitting a ruby into a weapon adds fire damage to attacks. Gems come in five tiers, each more potent than the last, and can be upgraded using the Horadric Cube.

Pete Brevik walked up to Stieg one morning and relayed an idea he'd had while watching the Conan: The Barbarian film. He had fixated on the gems in Conan's sword, and then suggested to Stieg that they create gems players can insert into weapons.

"It added hours of replayability to the game," said Pete, a programmer. "It's weird how things like that happen: You just watch a movie, and all the sudden you're converting it into another idea and you make it real in a video game."

The Horadric Cube was the quest item that led to the team's animated debates over the function of body parts in Diablo II's economy, produced the second form of crafted items. "By this time, games like Ultima Online and EverQuest had come out, and we wanted to incorporate the idea of crafting, but in a simple, non-hardcore way. This was the cube," Stieg explained.

The Horadric Cube functioned like a cookpot. Players insert certain combinations of items, called recipes, and the Cube converts the ingredients into a special item. "After we were done with the Cube, we were like, 'That was actually really fun, combining items. We should totally have something that makes use of the Cube after players have done this quest,'" remembered Mike Huang, technical producer.

Blizzard North's developers baked in additional recipes to whip up handcrafted items. The catch was that recipes were never shared in-game. The developers hoped players would experiment with the Cube by mixing and matching items, then go online and share recipes with others.

"The programming resources that it took to program the Cube in the first place could be massaged just a little bit to do other transmutations as well," Michael Huang explained. "We said, 'Well, what are things that would be really useful to make?' Transforming one potion into [a stronger potion], or mixing and matching different things, certain gem combinations—things like that."

Psychology lies at the center of Diablo II's web of systems. Clicking feels good because the audiovisual feedback—walking, attacking, picking up an item—is pleasant to perform and to behold, and because there's a strong possibility that a defeated monster will drop an item. The item could be a gem or a quiver of arrows. It could be a bundle of throwing knives or exploding potions. Or it could be a sword—but what type of sword? Which color of text? The game generates items based on numerous factors such as players' experience level, their location in the game, and the toughness of the monsters they're fighting.

Diablo II's drop rates, calculations that determine how often and of what quality items drop, were finely tuned over three years of production. If better items drop too often, players will grow numb to the steady stream of upgrades. If they don't drop often enough, players will get frustrated—because a boss is proving too difficult to defeat with their current equipment setup, or because they're not receiving enough loot to stay invested in clicking. Variable curves influenced virtually every possible scenario. For instance, Stieg explained, players should be able to equip most items the moment they appear, but not all of them.

"Players could find an item that would carry them through several levels before they'd find a better one. This was intentional as well—getting players invested in their avatar, and their avatar's cool equipment."

If the drop rate is just right, players will look forward to getting a new sword, staff, helm, or pair of boots—even if it's gear they can't use quite yet, and even as they bond with the gear they currently have: the boots that increase their walk and run speed by twelve percent, the sword socketed with two sapphires to add cold damage and slow enemies, the chainmail socketed with three diamonds to boost all their resistances, the gloves that bump each of their skills up by one point.

Progression is another strand in the web. Every click carries players forward: to a new area, to the completion of a quest, to new items, and to leveling up. Each level-up earns them five stat points and one skill point. Players may not consciously realize it, but they're playing for more than loot. Fans of Sid Meier's Civilization series of strategy games know the phenomenon of one more turn: the game loop is so addictive that they can always find a reason to keep playing. Diablo II's loop operates in a similar way. Players spend hours clicking on the chance they'll find one more item, discover one new area, or because they're on the verge of leveling up and improving their favorite skill or learning a new one.

"One thing that's kind of addictive—and it's purposely addictive because it's what we were all looking for—it's basically slot machines inside of slot machines inside of slot machines," said Peter Kemmer, programmer.

The developers anticipated that players would search for the most efficient ways to farm items of the highest quality. That was fine. Waypoints, portals scattered through each Act, let players travel to an area instantly rather than on foot. The faster they can get to their favorite boss to kill it over and over again, the more they'll want to play.

"That's why everybody ended up doing boss runs in Act Three," said Dave Glenn, environment artist. "Mephisto was the most convenient boss to kill because you're only one level away from him, and [his] levels are pretty small. That was one of those things where once everybody was playing it, we looked at the numbers and said, 'Why is everybody doing this?' And it was like, 'Oh, because it takes you only five minutes to find him instead of a half hour.'" [SQ1]

Every action in Diablo II is fun, even actions as innocuous as moving items around the inventory grid to organize gear. Every click is meaningful. Every click brings players to the precipice of something—or more than one something—exciting.

"You really have to test those systems through play," Erich Schaefer said. "About one-third to one-half of testing comes from my personal play experience because I tend to play these games myself over and over every day, and then the rest of it is from people in the office complaining."

SCOTT PETERSEN AND Matt Uelmen rooted through stacks of CD-ROMs. Each disc was filled to capacity with yells, screams, groans, moans, thuds, grunts, slices, cracks, smacks, scrapes, scratches. They had thousands of sounds at their disposal, but when nothing pre-recorded would do, they turned to instruments and technology: drums, guitars, synthesizers, and computers loaded with cutting-edge recording and mixing software.

In this case, nothing they had on hand would do. They walked to the supermarket down the street and loaded shopping carts with melons and vegetables. Back at the office, they wrapped produce in saran wrap, turned on their microphones, and destroyed their groceries. The meaty yet hollow sound of a watermelon exploding was, in Scott's mind, exactly how a zombie skull would sound as it was caved in.

"That was the basis for almost all of the melee damage sounds for Diablo II. It was a blast. You just find yourself getting maniacal because the process of recording is a lot like a performance. You try to get the right sound out of the object. That's sort of a musical experience whether it's a drum, or a chunk of wood, or you're hacking and slashing on a turkey carcass, which is one of the things we had—you just try and put your best effort into it so you get the best recording out of it. It was kind of intense there for a little while."

"Working with Scott and Jonathan was amazing," Matt Uelmen agreed. "I was incredibly lucky to have that experience. Our backgrounds just meshed extremely well: two out of three of us had a rock music background, two out of three had some training as composers, two out of three of us had a strong technical audio background, so the combination was really magic."

A programmer able to carry—or at least code—a tune, Jonathan Stone rounded out Matt's audio team. Matt and Scott served as Diablo II's dedicated sound designers, creating the effects and tracks that would punctuate the player's journey through Diablo II. Jon's task was to layer those sounds into an aural environment.

"It's more like a movie set where you need to create the entire sound environment instead of letting it follow naturally from the world's architecture," Jon explained. "You need to place each sound where you want it to be heard."

The original Diablo served as Jon's inspiration as well as his impetus for improvement. He admired what Uelmen had done in the first game, but noted—and Uelmen tended to agree—that the game lacked aural variety in each scene. There were six main tracks: the title theme, Tristram's motif, and a track for each of the four dungeon environments. Jon, Scott, and Matt were united in wanting to deepen those arrangements and diversify sound effects. For instance, in Diablo II, the smack of a Fallen's club against a hero wearing leather armor sounds different than if that same club strikes a hero wearing chainmail.

"That was something we talked about quite a bit," Jon explained. "Little sonic layers that could reinforce the reality of the objects in the world. A lot of time was spent in crafting small details like that. While any particular one didn't have a dramatic effect on the game, when taken together, I think they really made Diablo II sound much richer than Diablo."

Game feedback began with a click and culminated in the appearance of treasure: click, click, kill, click, click, kill, click—loot. Matt stressed to Scott and Jon that they should design sounds according to the action happening on-screen. Every now and then, he'd pick up his guitar and strum a dramatic chord while singing "Kill the monster, kill the monster."

"It goes back to that whole idea of being as clear as possible," Scott explained. "I was obsessed with getting the right sound for the right moment." He fixated on one effect in particular, the telltale ding of a gem falling from a defeated enemy. He created the sound by purchasing dozens of wine glasses and tapping objects against them until he hit on just the right note.

The result of creating homemade sound effects by combining everyday items is known as Foley, named after sound artist Jack Foley's technique of creating sounds from everyday objects and matching them to film. When Foley wasn't needed, Scott would comb through archives of pre-recorded effects. "I took it upon myself to really work on the combat system defining how an arrow sounds when it impacts and does damage to a creature versus when it ricochets, or glances, or doesn't do damage, and just applying that system to all the different character classes for all the melee, and doing that for all the spells, et cetera."

Despite the resources at the bosses' fingertips, North's recording environment was primitive. Foley was recorded in a closet-sized room. Scott didn't mind. Tight resources forced him to get creative. Modern 3D games can tie the sound of characters taking footsteps to that character's movement animations and the environment they're walking on, such as metal plates, soft grass, or dead leaves. Diablo II offered no simple way to link audio to visual cues, leaving North's team to improvise by creating a loop of footsteps that played according to a set rhythm. They tweaked the loop over and over, playing the game until the footsteps matched each character's movements.

"Jon was responsible for making sure that all that stuff was handled," Scott said. "He did a lot of the initial implementation of those kinds of sounds; syncing sounds to events that happened on-screen and actually adding the sounds to the game."

Eager for feedback, Scott would seek out Erich Schaefer and play a few effects. Erich would nod and go on his way.

"Unless you put in something that's really, really bad, you just don't hear too much about it," Scott admitted. "People don't have opinions about sound. They have opinions about a color, but not sound. Or they'll have really washy feedback, like, 'Oh, I don't know, that doesn't really sound powerful enough.' At least they have those comments so I can tease out more information from them. Like, 'Oh, what do you mean by that?'"

One of the team's most ambitious and challenging objectives was to create a seamless sonic environment. Since players would be able to go from, say, the Irish countryside down into a cave and back up to the surface without triggering a loading screen, the soundtrack would need to flow from one leitmotif to another without any break in between.

The trick, Jon knew, was that Matt and his collaborators employed wildly different instruments from one track to the next: percussion and Chinese wind gongs for Act Two's Arabian-style town and surrounding deserts; guitars and flutes to remix motifs from the first game; electronic instruments, and more.

"The solution we hit upon was long cross fades between music tracks where the beginning of each track would be all percussion so you wouldn't have a jarring juxtaposition of two keys on top of each other. As the melody from the previous track faded out, the percussion intro of the new track would fade in. That was how we worked around the fact that we couldn't really predict when, exactly, the player would initiate a transition between levels."

With a solution in place, the sound trio did more work to hide the fade from one track to the next. The composers—usually Matt Uelmen—begin each track with five seconds of percussion and then seamlessly flow in the next track. "I can say that I've always felt like I needed the discipline of a project to really grow in terms of my musicianship," Matt Uelmen said. "The transition to Diablo II—where I needed to do an action pastoral track, something vaguely Arabic, something vaguely tropical, et cetera—was a good incentive to explore new sounds."

"As someone who has focused on visuals at Double Fine and Industrial Light & Magic, I have a lot of respect for that part of the experience, but I still feel that sound is what gives games their weight," Jon added. "It gives you the sense that there's gravity in the world, and that the objects you're interacting with are physical and grounded, not just weightless computer renders. It's something that's overlooked, and it may always be overlooked. It's something people usually don't notice when they're playing a great game: The degree to which the sound environment convinces you that the visuals are even better than they are."

BLOOD AND FIRE were only two of Diablo II's secret ingredients. "Two of the most common comments made by all artists were, 'Make the claws bigger,' and in the case of females, 'Make the breasts larger.' That was partly due to issues of working at that [isometric] perspective, and the resolution," said Evan Carroll, character artist.

Choosing pixels over polygons freed up the artists to map out sprawling environments and paint hordes of monsters without fretting over how many polys the player's video card could push onto the screen. The downside was that Blizzard North's character artists had to rely on their imaginations to fill in blanks. Concept sketches depicted elaborate characters and items. Rendering artwork at 640x480 resolution, however, resulted in a loss of fine details.

Working in Maya and Photoshop, artists wove together fist-sized links and painted bright textures that made chainmail glimmer. In-game, it looked like a shiny lump of metal.

"Michio said what they did in Diablo was literally just, like, a black-and-white checkerboard pattern," said Phil Shenk, character artist, of the North team's process for creating armor in the first game. "They'd be six inches wide in real life. And it looks like nothing when you look at the model up close. But small, you'd actually see these little black and white specks. We made the black and white parts reflective so they'd catch little glints as the character turned."

Michio teased Phil about his tendency to overbuild characters, decking them out in details that would be lost in-game. Phil knew that, but going overboard was his way of flexing his artistic muscles.

"There I was working on this super high-profile game. I was always looking at my characters up close, and that looked good for the magazine renders. We'd tell ourselves during development: 'This is going to be the biggest, last sprite game ever made,' because we knew that after Diablo II, everything would be 3D, pretty much." [SQ2]

While every strand in Diablo II's web was important, perhaps the most crucial was the freedom to create—a core tenet of the studio's culture established by the three bosses. For the original Diablo, Kelly Johnson had rendered Deckard Cain, storyteller and identifier of mysterious items, as a wizened Black man who stood at the center of town, clad in a blue robe and inviting players to listen to legends gathered from across the world of Sanctuary. Cain was even more grizzled in Diablo II, stooped from age and mistreatment at the hands of demons who bubbled up into Tristram and went on a killing spree. They spared the storyteller, suspending him in a cage until players save him.

Although Cain's character model appears older than in the first game, Kelly had rendered it years earlier. "Because of how crazy things were on Diablo, the final version of the model I made didn't get into the game, so we used it in Diablo II." Kelly played up Cain's storyteller persona and his torture at the hands of demons following Diablo's events, depicting him as bent-backed and leaning on a gnarled cane for support. "I always felt that the character's main pose has to be the one that determined the personality. What do you want to bring out? Is it regal? Is it sneaky? A lot of that has to do with the main pose that the character will be in all the time. It also depends on the space you have to work with."

Cain plays a bigger role in Diablo II. He travels with players from Act to Act, shedding light on unidentified items and explaining events in the story. Matt Householder, senior producer and Cain's writer, described the sage as the glue that brought the game's four Acts, and the cinematics that told a story parallel to the one players uncovered in-game, together. "Michael Gough, the voice actor who did Cain, was skilled enough to make most anything you write sound good, no matter how fundamentally pompous or silly it might be. Witness: 'You have quite a treasure there in that Horadric Cube!'"

Kelly had also unwittingly created another of Diablo 1's most memorable characters, a cow, on a lark. The animal's model was recycled to create a small herd that grazed north of Tristram's town square. Players started a rumor that the cows were the gatekeepers of a secret level where the game's best treasure could be found. The rumor swept the Internet and gaming magazines. There was no truth to it, nor did Mike Dashow have any designs on making the cow level a reality when he created a new cow model as a joke early in 1999.

"The cow was one of those throwaway characters that show up in Act One somewhere," said Mike Dashow. "Character Studio [toolset within 3D Studio Max] did not have a quadruped, so the easiest way to make a cow's skeleton work was, you take a biped, put him down on his hands and feet, stretch out all the proportions, and model a cow from that. So it was just one of the minor creatures that I'd done in the game."

Mike Huang made a harmless proposal: Why not render the cow as a bipedal enemy to riff on the cow level rumors from the first game? Dashow ran with it. "You could swap out the animations back and forth between the bipeds. I'd already done the Barbarian at that point, so I said 'Okay, let me just basically save the Barbarian's two-handed thrust weapon animation, load that into the cow, and the cow goes from standing on all fours to standing on its hind legs and holding up a halberd.' I put a ring in the nose or something simple like that, and there it was, a cow in a screenshot, just in time for April Fool's."

Blizzard Entertainment, a long-time purveyor of pranks, published the cow on its website. What had started as a wink from Diablo's creators became reality when Rick Seis told Stieg Hedlund he could whip up a secret cow level by tweaking a few numbers in a spreadsheet. The level was derived from Act One's pastoral maps, and populated by Hell Bovine, an upgraded enemy from Dashow's simple cow and equipped with the Barbarian's attack animations, a gold nose ring, and a scythe.

"This was one of those awesome moments in game development when everyone stopped and watched people playing the level," Stieg recalled.

The secret cow level's audio was arguably as memorable as its visual elements. Instead of grunts and growls, the Hell Bovine utter a single word when they catch sight of players, when they attack, and when they die.

"I think [the audio team] did something similar with the sounds effects for this enemy, recording one of the artists saying 'Moo' repeatedly and adding that to the game. We all had a pretty good laugh," Stieg continued. [SQ3]

WORKING ON THE game—adding more blood and fire—kept the team motivated. "Six months into this crunch period, you're going into the holidays, you're still going, and you're not really close to being done although it always seemed like you were two or three months out—you start to really physically and mentally burn out," said Max. "We could see it and play it, and we knew it was going to be big. I feel for people who work on projects that aren't going to be hits. In our case, we had every confidence that it was going to be a successful hit."

"I almost exclusively played Diablo II from pretty early on in development," said Fred Vaught, environment artist. "I don't even know if I played any other games in that period of time. It was the best game ever. I still think it's one of the best games of all time."

"The whole slot machine effect was just utter, total crack," agreed Scott Petersen, audio designer. "Even if there was no need for you to grab any gems or rings because you're just testing something or you're implementing something, you'd still go grab it and check it out, maybe look at your skill tree. There's no way to not enjoy that experience. It's just such a pure and perfect combination of elements. I was always amazed at that."

"I never felt depressed or worried, or concerned, like, 'Why are we doing all this?'" Erich Schaefer remembered. "I did want to make it easier. I wondered how we could lighten the burden on the staff, that kind of thing. But I didn't ever question the goal."

"If that solidarity wasn't there as a foundation, we would have fallen apart," stated Michio Okamura, character artist. "By then, people were invested in the team, the project."

Chapter 17: Vantage Points

The WarCraft style was kind of like Warhammer's: everything's bigger. We used to joke that in Diablo, you add spikes and skulls. In WarCraft, make it big!

-Alan Ackerman, artist, Blizzard North

The definite vein of the culture at HQ was that Blizzard South was Blizzard, and Blizzard North was the company Blizzard bought.

-Gage Galinger, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

The vibe we always got from the bosses was that [South was] evil. When they would come up, it was always like, "What's going to happen? What are they up in our studio?" There was always that vibe: Hopefully nothing ugly happens. It was less a visit than it was, "Uh-oh, the emperor's on the ship."

It was a little bit of a surprise when Bill Roper left for Blizzard North, because the animosity between South and North was such that you wouldn't think you'd see someone that high up shift over to North. The impression was, "Oh, they sent him up there to kind of whip things into shape, crack the whip."

-Robert Huebner, programmer, Blizzard Entertainment

MAX AND ERICH Schaefer looked around the conference table and asked what their visitors from Blizzard South thought of their idea. The awkward silence was so thick, so total, Harley Huggins could have heard a pen drop.

Harley was one of a handful of cinematic artists from Blizzard Entertainment who had flown to San Mateo for a kickoff meeting with Blizzard North. The one and only topic on the agenda was the creative direction for Diablo II's cinematics. The cinematics team had been passionate but fledgling over StarCraft's development. Heading into Diablo II, Harley, Duane Stinnett, Matt Samia, and the others were determined to get organized. That meant coming up with a production pipeline, creating and tracking assets, and writing a script for a cohesive story in advance rather than at the last minute.

"One of the driving forces behind that was we were going to make a movie eventually, and we needed to get organized so we could do that," said Harley. "We wanted to show that we could tell stories and not just do vignettes."

As North's leaders and artists outlined their idea for the game's introduction, the visitors' excitement turned to incredulity. Although accounts differ, many in the meeting insist that one of the predominant concepts was to show demons running rampant through a citadel, setting it aflame and corrupting the Rogues headquartered there. Any Rogues who escaped corruption would be raped.

One of Entertainment's artists spoke up: There was absolutely no way that concept would fly. North's leaders objected by reassuring the visitors that the cinematic would be done tastefully. Harley asked if North was serious. Max reiterated that the cinematic was important because it showed the depth of hell's depravity.

"I wanted to ask, 'How do you do that?' I don't know how to 'tastefully' show a demon raping a woman."

"Obviously, it wouldn't have been graphic, it would have been suggested," said Max Schaefer. "But I think thematically, that was stretching it, even if it wouldn't have been graphic. Knowing myself, I probably argued that we should keep it."

The meeting adjourned, and North's team took their guests out to lunch. When they reconvened, the visiting artists put their collective foot down. No rape scene, graphic or otherwise. Their counterproposal was to use Diablo II's cinematics to tell a story that paralleled in-game events. Their reasoning was simple: There was no way to render out every possible combination of helms, gauntlets, boots, rings, and weapons worn by players in a cinematic. Doing so would have required Blizzard South's cinematics team to come up with thousands of models to display.

"It was better to approach the story from kind of an outside perspective, and that's really why the cinematics run parallel to the story," said Dave Brevik. "They give flavor to the universe, but the direct story was in-game where you can interact with everything."

Blizzard South's team had an idea for a narrator, a character named Marius, who crossed paths with "The Wanderer," the Warrior hero from the first game who had killed the Lord of Terror and shoved the demon's Soulstone into his own forehead in a noble but ill-fated attempt to contain the demon. Marius had the unfortunate luck to be in the tavern when it happened. With the town burning around them, Marius followed the Wanderer as if compelled. The two journeyed east, on a dark quest to reunite with Diablo's brothers. Diablo II's cinematics would check in with Marius and the Wanderer between Acts.

"We pitched that, and I think some people thought it was cool," Harley said. "But I do specifically remember one person slam their head against the wall, and he got up and left."

Stieg Hedlund had worn a neutral expression all through South's proposal. When the artists had asked Dave, Max, and Erich what they thought of it, they had shrugged. Cinematics were Blizzard South's territory. Stieg recalled gathering his materials and quietly leaving the room, without throwing a fit. "I didn't like their direction, but what made me leave the meeting was that I had met with the Blizzard North management immediately prior to this meeting and given them my vision for the cinematics and they had approved it, but gave me absolutely no support in the meeting."

Their passivity aggravated Stieg. The Diablo franchise was Blizzard North's baby. Surely they should be exerting more control. Instead, they were rolling over for a team who seemed more interested in making a short film they could submit for an Oscar than they were in telling a story that adhered to what Blizzard North wanted for their game. "I just felt that I had no input in the meeting, that Blizzard Film Department was being given the green light to do whatever they wanted, and that it was a waste of my time to sit in the meeting."

Blizzard North's bosses had judged pushback as useless, so they hadn't bothered to try. "We tried working with Blizzard Film Department a few times," Dave remembered. "They wanted creative control on everything. They had a vision of what they wanted to do with the cinematics, and we really didn't have much, if any, input. We gave suggestions, and after that, they ignored us."

"We'd come to a weird balance where we made the game we wanted to make, so they made the cinematics they wanted to make, and we just had to make sure everything worked together," Erich Schaefer agreed. "I'm sorry to Stieg if we killed some great idea he had going."

Stieg wouldn't budge. Teammates at North would ask about his stance and his direction for cinematics, and he would tell them. According to Stieg, more and more developers sided with him until Allen Adham paid North a visit to discuss the issue. Stieg and several other developers from North, as well as the bosses, attended the meeting. He listened impassively as Allen spoke and then opened the floor for input from North's team. Stieg saw the meeting as a song and dance.

"It was clear to most people from Adham's highly aggressive and defensive opening of this meeting that he was in fact not inviting real discussion, but rather telling us to shut the hell up."

Stieg got the impression that anyone who disagreed with Allen was welcome to find another job.

"Things were better once Adham left the company. He definitely gave off an us-versus-them feeling where we were outsiders and, his Blizzard South guys could do no wrong."

Harley Huggins recalled that meeting as one of several instances where poor communication hampered what could have been a more productive collaboration. The two Blizzards operated like distant outposts: Technically under the same umbrella, but far removed geographically and ideologically rather than two halves of a whole. He remembered his team making overtures to communicate with Blizzard North as the cinematics were being produced, but getting little feedback. Erich Schaefer, admittedly uninterested in narrative, would just hand-wave away requests for input and tell the team to keep doing their thing while North did theirs. That was all well and good, until Entertainment's cinematics team needed more information on the four Acts to inform their movies.

Oftentimes they needed feedback immediately. A lead at Blizzard North would promise to get back to them, but would forget, or simply go silent, leaving the cinematics team to make decisions on their own. From the cinematic team's perspective, it often just became easier to make the decisions for themselves rather than try to engage their aloof and temperamental cohorts.

Late in 1999, Mike Morhaime informed the cinematics crew that Max and Erich Schaefer would be visiting for a meeting, and to prepare materials to give them an update on progress. Harley took point, setting up storyboards and character designs. Max and Erich came across as noncommittal.

"There was a lot of, 'Well, are you sure you don't need more time?'" Harley said. "I felt like they were really trying to fish for an opening so that they could say, 'It doesn't matter if the game's not going to be ready because cinematics aren't ready.' I stuck to my guns and said, 'No, no, we're going to make it.' They were really under pressure too. In general, there was really horrible communication between the two studios."

FROM THEIR VANTAGE points at either outpost, developers at the two Blizzards constantly speculated about and evaluated the other. They studied everything, from creative approaches and hierarchy to efficiency and culture.

Most of North's team agreed that Blizzard South was the more efficient branch. They had the strike team. They had engineered Battle.net and jumped in head-first to help finish and spit-shine Diablo. South's art style was more colorful, more cartoonish. In a word: Bigger, evidenced by the bulky armor and absurd muscles of characters in the WarCraft and StarCraft universes, inspired by Warhammer and Warhammer: 40,000, respectively.

North's team saw themselves as more creative and quirky. They, and their games, were grittier, more off-the-cuff. Input could stem from anywhere, from anyone, at any time. They were, in a word, cooler, and that coolness was reflected in their games.

"We did have strike teams for Blizzard South products," Dave Brevik said, referring to teams of developers at one Blizzard who'd test games made by the other studio. We had [one for] StarCraft, we had them for WarCraft III. They just weren't really as formalized."

Blizzard South's strike team, made up of Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham, Pat Wyatt, and other leads, viewed North's input on their products differently than the feedback they gave North.

"Certainly from an intellectual standpoint, if we're bossing them around all the time, it would be totally understandable if they would want to have some input on our games," reasoned Pat Wyatt. "But we made all these great games that were great without their input, whereas they needed our help and involvement to build Diablo to be a really high-quality game. We already got plenty of feedback from our friends, family, and other testers. We already know what we want to do; we don't need other people telling us what to do. We're going to go make the game we want to make and it's going to be awesome. Trust us."

Cultural and operational differences extended beyond company walls. Northern and Southern California have been rivals since the nineteenth century, when SoCal's city of Los Angeles outgrew its water supply and had to funnel from NorCal and the Colorado River. Over the years, the rivalry has spanned everything from sports teams and politics to lifestyle and affluence. NorCal is historically more rough-and-tumble, more liberal, more artistic. SoCal, while still liberal, is less so, often deriding NorCal with the descriptor "San Francisco values." In the presidential election of 1860, NorCal's counties favored Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate—back when Republicans were socially liberal—while SoCal pulled for the more conservative Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.

"We were very much the hippies and said, 'It's okay if you come in late as long as you stay late to get your work done,'" explained Tom Ricket, a programmer at Blizzard North. "Or, 'If you're so awesome you can get all your work done in four hours [and then go home], then yay for you.'"

To Blizzard North, the dividing line between their culture and Blizzard South's had nothing to do with sports, politics, or even game development. Karin Colenzo, office manager and de facto den mom to a lot of the guys, kept the kitchen stocked with drinks and snacks. She also bought paper cups in bulk so nobody had to keep track of mugs and glasses. "One of the famous things that was always said about down south was that they had a soda machine, and they would have to pay for sodas themselves, but they wouldn't be provided with cups. Cups were not a free thing that were given to them," said Mike Scandizzo, a programmer at Blizzard North.

"We got everything at Blizzard North. They were very generous. Snacks, drinks, everything," said Marc Tattersall, environment artist. "Down there, they had a vending machine where you had to pay for sodas, and they had water. But there were no cups. You had to bring in your own mug. It was just a whole different mentality than we had up north. We used to joke around about Karin bringing them cups when we went down there."

"There was always a desire to not become Blizzard South. We saw them as pussies in a way: no cups, having to pay for soft drinks, all this regimentation," agreed Tom Ricket.

Managers and developers at Blizzard South knew why Karin brought cups with her when she visited the SoCal office. "We provided free soda!" Pat Wyatt exclaimed. "We don't want five thousand paper cups to get thrown away every week. Just bring a frickin' cup and wash your damn cup. Here's free soda. What more do you want? I don't think that was corporatism. I think it was more a desire not to go through 5,000 cups per week."

Large-scale gatherings between both studios were infrequent.

"Blizzard North had a party at some bar. They hosted a party for everyone at Blizzard, and that was the first time I met anyone from that studio," said Harley Huggins.

Chris Arretche, a QA tester at South, recalled one occasion when North's team flew to Irvine for a meet-and-greet in the middle of summer. South treated their guests to an outdoor barbecue. The food was hot, but the weather was hotter: 103 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Everybody was just dying in the heat, so nobody's really in a good mood. They're cranky and have gone to their corners to try and find shade. It was a really awkward meet-and-greet. I remember thinking, Wow, this sucks. It's too bad this happened."

Though ill-timed, the companywide barbecue was important. It was one of the few times each year when Blizzard's teams got a chance to mingle. Day-to-day communications took place over the phone or email, and tended to color each studio's impressions of the other.

"North was a little bit different from Blizzard South," said Frank Gilson, a QA tester later promoted to a producer in Irvine. "They seemed a bit more family-and-friend connected: So-and-so worked there because he was friends with such-and-such a person—a little more of that than is usual. They were a much tighter social network, the Blizzard North office."

Studio leads from Blizzard Entertainment would stop by Blizzard North and then report back to Entertainment with details on projects. One sticking point was how North's team referred to Blizzard. "The bosses maintained a sense of independence from Blizzard, who they called Blizzard South," said Peter Kemmer, programmer at North. "They were going to run Blizzard North as their own company, the way they wanted to run it, and screw those guys if they don't like it."

Entertainment's team believed they held the final say on any matter, at any studio. According to managers at the Irvine-based studio, the strike team judged many pieces of artwork in Diablo subpar, particularly items, and decided to bring them up to their standards. "My impression was that Blizzard North was not totally on board with us touching up their artwork to that degree," said Stu Rose, artist at Entertainment. "Sammy Didier came up with some beautiful armor sets because the armor sets they had been doing were kind of brown and muddy. So Sammy came up with a colorized Blizzard South version of the artwork, then put it in the game and got rid of the brown stuff." This would prove to be controversial.

"I know it was with their knowledge," said Pat Wyatt. "I don't know if it was with their consent or not. I sort of assumed that it wouldn't have been possible for it to go into the game without Blizzard North's consent."

While Michio Okamura had created the bulk of Diablo's monsters, Erich Schaefer had painted every single background tile and oversaw the implementation of all artwork. "We had a special rendering method where we would render stuff off into little parts from a 3D package into a giant picture of a million little parts, which I would then cut up and place by hand. Any artwork Blizzard South touched up would have to go back through me. You can't really touch up hundreds of frames of animation. And they didn't touch any backgrounds, that was all me. It's conceivable that they did a pass on inventory graphics."

"That's where I think a lot of the tension came from between the two studios," Pat Wyatt continued. "Blizzard North was like, 'Hey, we released Diablo!' And it's like, yeah, but you guys couldn't have done it without a lot of help. It was a really rough road because there was so much arguing about all of it."

"A lot of times they threw that in our face: 'Well, we helped you with Diablo. We had some programmers come down,'" said Rick Seis, programmer at North. "Okay, great. You made Battle.net. Make no mistake: Battle.net is just a service. The game is what made this thing go."

Aside from barbecues and tense meetings, Blizzard South's upper management largely forgot about Blizzard North for days at a time. The team up north was charged with handling their own project until support from Irvine—usually in the form of Battle.net engineering or testing Diablo II—was needed. Often, members of Blizzard South's strike team were the ones who decided when support was needed. The game presented three difficulty modes: Normal, then Nightmare, followed by Hell, each unlocked by completing the one before it.

Nightmare and Hell modes were formidable. Along with tougher monsters, players earned better item drops and more experience points. When players died on Normal, they permanently lost a percentage of gold in their inventory, and they had to retrieve their corpse. On Nightmare and Hell, they also lost a percentage of their experience points. The idea was to encourage players to exercise more caution by making death more meaningful. However, a developer at Blizzard South died once on Nightmare and immediately complained that losing experience upon death ruined the game.

"They thought that was going to kill anybody making advancements. Clearly not," said Tyler Thompson, one of North's programmers. "But we got pretty strong feedback that we should remove that. Frankly, having Bill Roper come and join us helped bridge that a little bit better. He could function as a good liaison between the two Blizzards."

South exerted its influence when Diablo II began to flag. "The person who was assigned to produce Diablo II was Bill Roper, so it was his responsibility to go and make sure stuff was happening," said Pat Wyatt.

Bill Roper had risen through South's ranks from humble beginnings as a voice actor on WarCraft to the face of the company. He did interviews with TV hosts and gaming journalists, interacted with fans online, and wrote many of Blizzard's press releases announcing game features, sales, updates, and product launches. "He got stuck with all the PR stuff," explained David Pursley, an artist at Blizzard South. "He was really good, so that's why they kept having him do it. He originally made the press fall in love with Blizzard, his work with public relations. They kind of pigeon-holed him. He liked doing it, but he also really wanted to be part of design."

Following WarCraft II, Bill had stepped up to produce Diablo from Irvine—the tip of the strike team's spear—until Allen Adham replaced Bill as producer on the game. Blizzard South intended for Roper to get more involved on Diablo II by planting him inside Blizzard North, enabling him to assist with—and monitor—the game's progress firsthand.

"Bill's goal was to come up and get us to release Diablo II faster, basically," Max Schaefer said. "I guess that's sort of what he did. Blizzard South probably considered sending him to be a way of getting their voice into our office, but that really backfired on them, I would say."

Bill logged countless hours in Diablo II, and appreciated that when he offered advice and feedback, the bosses listened. He didn't always get his way, but that was fine, too. North was built as a meritocracy: All ideas were considered; great ideas made the cut. Implementing secret cow levels and roofs that faded in and out meant days or weeks of extra development time, but made the game better.

The bosses viewed their relationship with Blizzard South as often heated but always fruitful. Creative people were supposed to butt heads so that the best ideas prevailed. Diablo's early designs had called for a mode titled Hardcore, a play on perma-death, or permanent death, from roguelike games: When characters die, their saved data is deleted, forcing players to start from scratch. Blizzard South had put the kibosh on the mode.

"There was controversy, especially from Blizzard South, thinking that players would be really mad," Erich Schaefer recalled. "Once they actually died, they would hate us, hate Blizzard, hate Diablo."

"Blizzard has this philosophy: Don't do things that are going to cause people to gimp themselves without realizing it," reasoned Pat Wyatt, Blizzard South's vice president of research and development.

For Diablo II, Dave, Max, and Erich floated a compromise. Hardcore would be included as a mode only after finishing the game once, so players new to action-RPGs wouldn't select it for their first outing and get frustrated. When starting a Hardcore character, a warning would pop-up to brief players on what they were in for before letting them begin.

"It was something we wanted all along because I think it's very compelling, even if you try it just once or twice, it's really interesting," Dave continued. "But at the same time, it's definitely not mass market. You'll get torched in reviews and online. But nobody blasted the feature in Diablo II, and it's because of how we presented it. It's an extra thing that you can try once the game's done, and it still provides that compelling experience."`

"There's a natural competition that occurs between companies like ours that kind of colors everything," added Max Schaefer. "If there was any sort of disagreement, I think even our employees would be like, 'Damn those guys!'"

North's team heard about every disagreement between the two Blizzards—either after the fact, or during louder, more colorful conversations. "There were disagreements, and we would fight," Dave Brevik said. "In fact one I time I was really upset—I don't even remember what it was about—with Mike Morhaime and literally told him to fuck off, slamming the phone down on the receiver. Not the most brilliant move ever, but we fought just like in any relationship. Perhaps more than we should have, but we were kind of immature."

Dave, Max, and Erich often blew off steam following tense discussions. Their descriptors of their counterparts in Irvine colored their employees' impressions of Blizzard South's leadership. "We thought they were all assholes down there," said Jon Morin, programmer. "Dave, Max, and Erich were always like, 'These guys are assholes.' And of course they say something, so the Blizzard South guys say, 'Oh, those guys are assholes.'"

"The bosses were talking about management," said Eric Sexton, artist. "My impression was Blizzard was fine, but management was a bunch of assholes. That was the thing we got kind of fed, and probably came to believe over time."

North's bosses preferred to be the filter through which any information about—and from—Blizzard South was shared with their team. "We wanted our own little studio, we wanted to keep our group focused on what we were doing," Dave said.

"I would also say obviously we didn't want the guys down south giving suggestions or whatever to our people directly, because they might feel pressure to implement them regardless of whether that was something we wanted in the game or not," Max agreed. "Also, we would change our minds on things, so we wanted to develop this consensus between all of us before we pitch headlong into implementing something."

Ben Boos referred to the bosses' shielding efforts as a reality distortion field, one behind which many employees were happy to take shelter: The less they had to worry about what South wanted, the more they could focus on making their game, their way.

"They just did so much to assuage worry by just being like, 'Calm down, grasshopper.' They would always just deal with it."

Dave, Max, and Erich buffered their team from more than conflicting opinions and orders. Every change in ownership resulted in turbulence: from Davidson & Associates, to CUC, to Cendant, to French water company Havas in November of 1998, then as one part of Vivendi Universal Publishing under Havas in the spring of 2001, and then as Vivendi Universal (VU) Games that November, the result of consolidating VU Publishing's two halves.

As the two Blizzards changed hands more frequently, many developers made a point of following gaming news and fretting over what each change could mean. Would they still be compensated through a bonus program? Would their new parent company make demands that would compromise their creativity? Worse, would there be another scandal that stripped them of their worth through no fault of their own? Dave, Max, and Erich did their best to head those concerns off at the pass.

"I give props to Dave, Max, and Erich for being a shield for us, for getting us the time to make our games," said Kelly Johnson, artist. "They had to convince those people, 'Hey, we need the time to make the game our way.' Sometimes publishers don't care. They have quarterly whatevers, so games have to come out. I give those guys credit to be a good shield for us, to buy us time to develop our games."

Despite his grievances, Rick Seis never doubted the bosses' influence. They were an iron curtain. For others such as Jon Morin, the scale of that curtain—nearly all-encompassing, all-enveloping—had potentially disastrous consequences. "This was something I always hated about Blizzard South, but I kind of blame on Dave, Max, and Erich: Those three never really introduced us to anybody down there. They never really touted any of us."

Jon recalled approaching Mike Morhaime during a get-together at E3 following Diablo II's launch, only for Mike to give a blank stare in return. Jon gave Mike his name, and the executive blinked and asked how long he had been with the company. Privately, Jon fumed. He didn't consider himself an egomaniac, but he wasn't just some programmer. He had played a huge role in Diablo II's development, engineering the paper-doll system, among other features.

"Sometimes that just kind of pissed you off. Like, what the hell? This guy doesn't know who I am? I helped make him money. That's also being a good boss," Morin. "You [introduce] your people. As you're walking around, you go, 'Hey, this is so-and-so. He did this, this, and this.' Then your name's in their little database, and it makes you feel good."

"I don't think it was ever intentional," Dave said, "like the Blizzard North founders saying, 'Mike Morhaime, you can't meet the people on our team.' That definitely was not happening. But we never really made a conscious effort to have them interact."

AT LEAST ONE developer at Blizzard South knew, in general, who was who at Blizzard North, but had to warm up to the subject of Diablo II. According to several developers, Chris Metzen, Blizzard's lead designer and creative writer who had taken the original Diablo's jumble of quests that Blizzard North's guys had written and strung a narrative through them like beads on a necklace, resented the other studio's leaders doing their own thing. Blizzard North's team would come up with the in-game story, leaving Blizzard South to create cinematics and only cinematics.

"I remember going to Chris and saying, 'I need some feedback on these storylines,'" explained Harley Huggins. "At first, he said, 'That project is dead to me.' I said, 'Yeah, but it's still going to say 'Blizzard' on it, like it or not.' I got him to help out a little bit, but that was it. He had very little to do with Diablo II. I think that's why he was so pissed: he felt like they didn't want his input, and he felt like he had no input into the story."

Kelly Johnson had a different interaction with Chris Metzen. "They wanted to work on Diablo. Metzen definitely did. I remember he and I got drunk one night. We were at E3. And [Metzen] was just gushing over Diablo. I remember being at E3 with these guys and drinking. They were saying, 'Oh, man, you guys are so lucky. We want to work on Diablo.'"

Chapter 18: Hell Unleashed

The pace that we were working at was slow. That was partially because it could be.

-Phil Shenk, artist, Blizzard North

The root cause [of the crunch] was the desire, by everyone at Blizzard North, to make a game that blew away the original Diablo in size, scope, and quality, and with a high-performance online client-server system.

-Matt Householder, producer, Blizzard North

BY EARLY 2000, Diablo II's crunch showed no signs of slowing. Some programmers had been working six or seven days a week for twelve months. One of the environment team's most dedicated artists, fueled by excitement and adrenaline, shouldered through long hours by pouring his energy into the game's fourth and final Act.

"Act Four was pretty much Dave Glenn's handiwork, and we told him to just go nuts with it," said Max Schaefer. "We pretty much said, 'Make your version of hell.'"

Players begin Act Four in the Pandemonium Fortress, an outpost built from towering pillars and polished stones. Outside, a staircase snakes down to barren terrain punctuated by jagged spikes and prisoners chained to columns.

"The upper levels of hell that come right off the town were inspired by the film What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams," said Glenn. "You know, the hell he goes through to find his wife, just kind of dark and dusty and dry. Just kind of creepy, littered with corpses, a lot of iron spikes and chains."

Glenn's intent was to establish a contrast between hell's upper levels and the lava-filled pits players would venture into as they fought their way to Diablo's lair. While the notion of caverns flooded by lava seemed conventional, he worked with programmers to animate tiles so every lake and stream boiled and undulated like ocean waves.

"It was a crazy little challenge, but that's an example of what would happen. I'd come up with some wacky new idea, they'd say, 'Our system doesn't support that right now, can you help us figure it out?' Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't."

Another optical illusion, staircases, was born of Glenn's desire to experiment. The original Diablo had staircases, but they were gateways to other levels: Players clicked a staircase, the screen went dark, and a new level faded in. All other terrain had been flat. For Diablo II, Glenn devised a way to create staircases so that characters appeared to be ascending or descending, when in fact all terrain was two-dimensional.

"Even though the perspective is isometric and even though we put in all the fake Perspective mode stuff, it still worked because of the angle and the way the characters walked."

From the Pandemonium Fortress, to the lava lakes and the Chaos Sanctuary where the Lord of Terror awaits, Act Four is the shortest chapter of Diablo II.

"There are two reasons for making Act Four shorter than the other Acts," Max Schaefer recalled. "One is we were hurrying a little bit. The second is, by its very nature, hell is not a pleasant place to be."

"It's the finale, and you don't want the finale to drag on," Glenn agreed. "When we first created I said, 'We should have had more time to add tile sets for hell,' but I think over time, I came to appreciate that it was an abbreviated act. It got you to the punch, especially after slugging through Act Three, which always seems to take forever."

One hero class strode rather than waded through Act Four's hordes of knights, gargoyles, and damned spirits. "The Barbarian was actually one of the last characters put in the game," remembered Mike Dashow, character artist. "Kelly had done the Paladin, Phil did the Amazon, I had done the Sorceress, who was the third one put in, and then it came down to two characters." Phil called dibs on the Necromancer, and Kris Renkewitz had done an early take on the Barbarian that Erich Schaefer wanted Mike Dashow to take back to the drawing board.

"There were some sketches to work on in the beginning, and some basic direction, like, 'Big bulky guy. Go."

The Barbarian's bulk streamlined some of the design work that went into his skill trees: He was a big dude who should wield big weapons. Players can specialize in over half a dozen types, from swords and axes to halberds and even throwing items such as daggers, hand axes, and potions that burst into flames or clouds of poison on impact. Specializing in a weapon increases the damage players deal with weapons of that type. Whirlwind sends the character spinning across the screen like a tornado wrecking houses. [SQ1]

The trait that made the Barbarian most appealing to players who, like Max and Erich Schaefer, just wanted to cave in monster faces, was the ability to dual-wield weapons. Certain two-handed weapons such as great swords could be held in a single hand, meaning players could forgo a shield in favor of dishing out more pain.

"The dual wield was a lot of animation, because you needed twice as many attack animations, and the attack animations were already the bulk of the animations you were doing for the character," Dashow explained. "Evan Carroll ended up doing half the animations for that character. I did the modeling and I did the effects and everything, but I ended up splitting the animations just to make sure they all got done in time."

Dual-wielding would have remained a pipe dream if not for Jon Morin's habit of holding on to his code. More than once, Jon had taken initiative by writing a game system he thought would make the game cooler.

"I'd written a whole system for single-wielding, but the bosses said, 'Oh, we want him to be able to attack with both arms, and we want his animations to do all these crazy things.' At first that sucked, but you eventually get used to it. You didn't get too attached to your code. I mean, you want to get attached to it in that you do a good job, but if my tenure at Blizzard North taught me anything, it was how to be very modular. When I write my code, I make it open to, 'Okay, what's he going to want? Oh, that? Okay, I'm ready.'"

The Barbarian was also partly responsible for Blizzard North's decision to rebrand Mana, the first game's source of magical power, to a more generic term.

"There was controversy to the idea that Barbarians would use spells," Erich Schaefer remembered. "That was kind of how we unified: For all the classes, instead of having spells, they're now called skills. And instead of mana, it was called energy."

AMAZON, PALADIN, SORCERESS, Necromancer, and Barbarian.

No matter which of the five heroes players choose, their journey through pastures, deserts, jungles, and hell brings them to the Chaos Sanctuary, an edifice forged from black and red stone, and host to the deadliest enemies in the game.

A few areas in Diablo were made from presets, maps with no procedurally generated elements. King Leoric's lair, the sixteenth and final level, and the Chamber of Bone, for instance. Diablo II had more presets—twenty-eight total, thirty-four with the addition of the expansion set—one of which was the Chaos Sanctuary.

"I came up with the idea for the level and how it would fit together; the general shape," Glenn said. "Then, Rick figured out how to make that work with what his idea was, called spawns."

In the center of the Sanctuary, a pentagram stretches over a pit of fire. To confront the Lord of Terror, players must summon him by activating five seals.

"That was a brainstorming kind of session. Like, how do we introduce each boss?" Glenn remembered.

Although Diablo II's four Acts were made in more or less linear fashion, with programmers and artists doubling back to fine-tune elements, production on the game's final boss started much earlier.

"Apparently, from what I hear, for Diablo in the first game, the Condor guys had worked straight through from the beginning until the end," said Mike Dashow. "They got to the end of and it were like, 'Whoops, we're out of time! We need to get Diablo in here!' We didn't want to have him be this throwaway boss at the end of Diablo II, so Rick and I started well in advance."

"Toward the end of Diablo II, people were grinding," Rick said. "One of the brighter spots in my last chunk of days was working with Dashow to try and make Diablo awesome."

Once again, Michio Okamura concepted the titular character.

"We were brainstorming for Diablo II, the final boss, and we weren't really getting [a design] that we were happy with," Michio said. "I basically came up with my version, I got the green light, and I went ahead and created a 3D statue."

For the first game, Michio had modeled Diablo as a humanoid demon: Bipedal, fiery red, and covered in spikes, he towers over players. For Diablo II, Michio envisioned the demon lord as more monstrous and feral. He was wider, broader, with a long tail and a body lined with horns and spines. Though he stood upright to attack, he could charge on all fours.

"I kind of liked the idea of a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur-slash-dragon-lord with intelligence. It basically looks like Diablo on steroids. I wanted to give him savagery, but a certain intelligence: Diabolous Tyrannicus Rex." [SQ2]

With the character conceptualized, Michio handed the Lord of Terror over to Mike Dashow and Rick Seis. Every monster has fourteen animation categories such as walk, attack 1, attack 2, and seldom-used categories such as block and run. Then there are special animations used only for unique circumstances. Diablo was the only monster to use every animation slot.

"We said, 'Wait a second—we could save on memory if we just do one direction, not eight directions,'" Mike Dashow said. "'Who cares about seeing Diablo's back when he's dying? I want to see the front view and we'll make the duration of the animation eight times as long.'"

The Lord of Terror's death animation befit the defeat of a final boss.

"I really went crazy with having his body decompose," Dashow remembered. The in-game story, charging players with killing Diablo, recovering his Soulstone, and smashing it to prevent the Lord of Terror from resurrecting, informed the animation. "It's like, 'What is happening here? Well, his soul is getting sucked into his Soulstone so you can crush it.' So, there's a whole story of it keeping him alive and what happens to Diablo when he loses his soul and it gets sucked into a Soulstone? There was a lot of story feeding into that animation. There's particles falling off his body and his body's shriveling up and it's getting darker and grayer as he claws in agony. Then I did this big, whole animated version of the soul getting sucked into the Soulstone and the glow effects on top of that. I really went all out on that. It's the end-game boss! You've got to go all out!"

"The thing was, it reminded me a lot of Condor," Rick said of his collaboration with Dashow. "Because he would go, 'Diablo shouldn't run away from people; he needs to do something Diablo-esque if he needs to get away.' And then he'd go make beautiful art, and that was a lot of work for him. And then I'd do my part, and it was this great collaboration, which really worked well."

THE CLICK OF fingers dancing across keyboard keys and pummeling mouse buttons were the only constant sources of sound at Blizzard North. The bosses catered dinners, and developers played games, but work ruled days and nights. Then, in May of 2000, Stieg Hedlund saw a light at the end of the tunnel. The game's design was polished thanks to countless hours of play testing as well as feedback culled from Diablo II's lengthy beta test, which let select players journey through the first Act.

Marketers from Blizzard South checked in with Blizzard North's bosses every so often, asking if they had a firm date in mind so they could nail down advertising. "At some point we said, 'We're going to ship sometime in summer, probably near the end of June.' That was probably very early 2000, like January or February. We were pretty confident," Erich Schaefer said.

Like thin rays of sunshine poking through gray clouds, relief and hope dawned over the team. Tyler Thompson couldn't believe it when the bosses announced June 29 as the day Diablo II would arrive in stores. Planning had never been their strong suit. Months earlier, when they believed November 1999 a likely ship date, he had gone to them armed with data. They had taken six months to build Act One, not counting time spent doubling back to polish. Act Two took five months. He met with them in late summer, and was stunned when they claimed they could wrap up Acts III and IV over four months. Two Acts, in less than the span of time it had taken to build one? It was impossible. "And they were like, 'Surely you can come up with some way to speed us up, Tyler,'" the programmer remembered. "I told them, 'Maybe like a ten or twenty percent thing, but not... It's not going to work, guys.'"

"So much of Blizzard's overall success has been because they're really good about putting tons and tons of resources into testing things like that," said Matt Uelmen, North's composer. "They did a good job on Diablo II, I thought. As much as people were frustrated with some of the performances of Battle.net especially in the beginning of that release, I thought the single-player game was miraculously stable given all the various components that were in it. I felt my job in that last month of development was helping make that happen."

Delays caused stress, but were ultimately viewed as steps toward the greater good. Each delay gave the two Blizzards time to improve, correct, add, polish. After all, they occupied rarefied air: Unlike other studios, slipping past critical windows like Christmas wouldn't mean bankruptcy or cancellation. "I'd worked for a few other companies that didn't have that large cash-cow behind them, so I'm used to pushing production, really pushing it," said Bob Steele. "I'm not sure if it's a good thing to have that much money floating around forever."

"The theory that you should take the time to get it right existed at Blizzard from the beginning," Max Schaefer admitted. "But I think certainly the fact that there had been some successful titles coming out gave us the leeway to push that to an absurd degree."

Chapter 19: Battles and Battle.net

We weren't exactly sure how it would work, but basically we wanted to skip the chat room and make a real environment.

-Dave Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

We had big arguments over, when you're in the Battle.net chat room, are you your account, or are you your character?

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

People would come in before their characters were loaded, and as soon as they would show up on my screen I would kill them dead.

-Cheeming "Amigo" Boey, artist, Blizzard North

TRISTRAM HAD BEEN a one-cart town, home to a handful of traders and ground zero for Diablo's invasion. Diablo II's four towns were grander in their way—more characters, structures built to match the motif and color palette of surrounding regions—but Blizzard North's developers had an even larger gathering place in mind for the sequel's revamped multiplayer experience.

"For a long period of time, what I really wanted to do was a Battle.net town where you'd be dumped into the game, a public space, where you could do trading and chat and stuff," Dave Brevik said. [SQ1]

Kris Renkewitz drew concept art for a bustling online settlement. "I laid out this massive thing. They patted me on the back in front of the entire company. It was this incredible moment."

Dave Brevik dropped the online town for practical reasons.

"The number-one reason we got rid of Battle.net Town was really Dave's focus—rightfully so—on making sure people got into the game as quickly as possible," explained Mike Scandizzo, programmer. "Minimum number of clicks to bring you into the game, and realizing that walking around in a town to get where you need to go was going to slow us down."

The developers compromised by restructuring Diablo II's Battle.net interface. It still consisted of a chatroom and buttons to begin and join sessions, but a gallery was added to the bottom of the screen that displayed the avatar of every player in the chatroom.

"I did all the Battle.net [character representations]," Jon Morin said. "The cool part about that was you could see your character in the chat room. So, you'd go into Battle.net and people would see what he looks like, saying, 'Wow, that guy has everything.'"

Scrapping Battle.net Town did nothing to dissuade Blizzard North from Diablo II's core focus. Doing away with the cheating that plagued Diablo had been a major impetus for moving on to a sequel.

"The guys at Blizzard North and at Blizzard South played Diablo online almost exclusively," Erich Schaefer recalled, "so we said, 'Let's keep making the game we want to play,' and we wanted to play multiplayer."

The team would architect it as a client-server game: Players, the clients, had to connect to servers that functioned as gatekeepers, checking for unsavory actions such as duplicating items and using hacks to kill other players in safe zones. Moreover, the bosses wanted to engineer as much of Battle.net as possible at Blizzard North to maintain ownership over their game. "They had written and maintained [Battle.net]," Dave Brevik said of South, "so when we were changing it, they were like, 'Back off! Back off!' But it was like, 'We've got to do this.' There were definitely some challenges there, something they felt ownership over and had a team working on, and we're tinkering with it for our game. There were some mixed emotions on both sides."

The bosses weren't just being territorial. Logically, the team in charge of writing a game would better understand how it should function on both the client and server ends, and needed to be able to add, change, or remove features as they saw fit. Blizzard South's team would run the servers, but the bosses were adamant that integration—any code that ran on servers—should be handled at Blizzard North. For that momentous task, Dave hired Mike Scandizzo, programmer and brother to Stefan, one of Diablo II's level designers.

"From what I understand, for the original Diablo, the Battle.net support and networking support was provided by Blizzard headquarters, Blizzard South—whatever you want to call it," Scandizzo said. "They supplied help with some very good engineers, but this gave Blizzard HQ their fingers in the Diablo pie. It enabled them to say, 'Since we're contributing, we can change some of the features. We can push you in this or that direction.' Dave was looking for a level of independence from them."

Blizzard South wasn't in the best position to push back against Dave's insistence. Between Diablo and StarCraft, approximately 20,000 users logged on to Blizzard's free online service at any given time. Even though the games were peer-to-peer, servers were needed to track statistics, share custom-made maps, and match up players. Pat Wyatt, then the only engineer assigned to maintaining Battle.net, scaled up, rolling out bug fixes, optimizing communications, dividing the service into tiers capable of focusing on processes such as database management. [SQ2]

Over a few months, Battle.net's concurrent users swelled from 20,000 to 120,000. In the midst of that work, Pat modified the service's code to support features that Diablo II would need when it launched, a date yet to be determined. "I worked on all the Battle.net stuff and created a protocol that Diablo would talk in order to request what it wanted. So, they worked on all the game-specific code, and then they worked on the game side of Battle.net stuff, and I worked on the Battle.net side of the Battle.net stuff. We'd just talk over the network to implement their features."

Mike Scandizzo recalled getting off on the wrong foot with Blizzard South. Within one week of joining Blizzard North in 1998, he sat in on a meeting with the bosses and Mike Morhaime to discuss what Blizzard North needed on its end. He asked for full access to Battle.net. When South's bosses refused, Scandizzo pushed back.

"I basically made a strong but polite argument that they had no resources to provide help for us. They didn't have a Battle.net team going, they were spread too thin on their existing projects. Dave made a comment to me that I was his velvet hammer. I said something along the lines of, 'Oh, I should put that on my business card.' And he said, 'No, you shouldn't because that's actually Allen Adham's title.' The comparison flattered me."

Pat Wyatt did not recall his interactions with Scandizzo being adversarial. As a matter of fact, he agreed with Scandizzo's assessment that Blizzard South lacked resources to expedite operations on Battle.net because he, Pat, was the entire Battle.net team at the moment. To facilitate work on North's side, he handed over Battle.net's vaunted storm.dll file. Scandizzo dug into it but was frustrated to discover that it contained no documentation. He learned by doing, studying communication protocols and figuring out how to do things like log in to Battle.net chat and servers. Once he grasped its inner workings, he rewrote most of the library and documented it for future reference. "All along as I was doing this, there was resistance from down south. Not only because I was doing unnecessary work in recreating their libraries, but because I was also cutting them out of the picture."

Blizzard South's engineers seemed to pick and choose their battles. Mike Scandizzo recalled Mike O'Brien insisting that Diablo II's servers run on Windows NT because it could handle networking tasks more efficiently than the consumer-focused Windows 98. Scandizzo pointed out that networking wasn't a bottleneck. The issue was Battle.net having to keep track of in-game elements such as artificial intelligence routines that tracked enemy movement and locations, combat details and calculations, and routines swapping in and out of memory. According to Scandizzo, O'Brien held firm in his belief that communication was the issue and allegedly rewrote a portion of Scandizzo's code and took it to Mike Morhaime, insisting that his work supplant that of North's engineer.

Scandizzo claimed Morhaime flew under the radar and paved over Scandizzo's code with O'Brien's.

"Well, if someone from down south is essentially rewriting my networking code, what do they need me for?" Scandizzo remembered thinking. "This was one of the times that I was ready to quit."

Dave Brevik phoned Morhaime to discuss the situation. He proposed that Scandizzo write his own library of functions that addressed concerns of both studios. Morhaime agreed. "Sometime after I'd left the company, they completely replaced everything I'd written where networking was concerned," Scandizzo claimed. "Their argument was that it was easier for them to maintain down there if they used code they were familiar with."

Not all arguments stemming from Battle.net concerned technical details. Parties on both sides fought passionately for creative input on decisions that seemed trivial but went a long way toward immersing players in Diablo II's world. For months, Blizzard North asserted that players should be represented in Battle.net by their character name. Blizzard South disagreed, preferring to streamline the login interface across all Battle.net-compatible games and require users to log in with an account. "We argued that that was putting the cart before the horse," said Max Schaefer. "We felt that Battle.net was just a matchmaking service to put players in games, and that no one cares about it so much, they just care about whether or not the games work. They don't care that they're in an experience called Battle.net, it's just the way they interface with other people."

Compromise won the day. Players logged in with an account, and then proceeded to select their character. Once they joined a Battle.net chatroom, their character and name were displayed along the bottom of the interface courtesy of Jon Morin's code.

"That actually went on for weeks, that sort of debate. The design of that whole interface was what we were concerned with more than beta testing and that sort of thing, which was handled down south," Max continued.

Other changes straddled technical needs and creative desires. PVP and PK-ing—short for player-versus-player and player-killing—were even touchier subjects than the debate around Hardcore mode. "I think many people actually used the term 'digital rape' at some point to underscore how strongly they felt that player-killing should never be allowed," Max said. "It's weird. Today people don't think anything of player-killing, but back in the day it was extremely controversial." [SQ3]

Despite being one of PVPs most passionate supporters, even Max had to admit Diablo's implementation left something to be desired. Fighting was forbidden in Tristram—unless unsavory players hacked their game—but with a single click of the Hostile button, one player could turn on another without warning down in the dungeons. The Hostile button returned in Diablo II, but could only be activated in town. Players had to reach a certain level of experience before they were allowed to attack others. When one player went hostile, all other players received visual and audio warnings.

"I felt that our reasons for increasing player-killing pre-requisites was a philosophical thing," said Erich Schaefer. "There was a huge school of thought that you should never allow player-killing because the loser is going to be mad and we wanted to make a fun game for everybody."

At least one of Diablo II's developers took a contrarian view. PVP was fun, but only if he could bait players into trusting him first. This developer guarded his identity carefully, known only as Amigo, his Battle.net handle.

Amigo quickly rose to infamy. After running into him in the beta, composed of the game's first Act, Anthony Rivero leaped up from his chair and stalked around the office, demanding that Amigo reveal himself. The PK-er, who he knew had to be someone in the office, had slaughtered an entire party and looted their corpses while they watched helplessly. At a desk near Anthony, Amigo wore a grin. "I think that was my first taste of player-killing, and I knew that when I was having fun, someone else wasn't. And that felt really good," remembered Cheeming Boey.

Boey, as his friends called him, grew up in Malaysia and studied art in San Francisco. He was one of Blizzard North's most driven character artists, working tirelessly to make Diablo II the best game possible. In his spare time, he drove his peers—and, later, consumers—wild with rage.

"You have to imagine a guy from Malaysia calling himself Amigo," he said. "I hardly knew Spanish. That was the only word I knew."

Boey got under players' skin by thinking outside the box. He knew, for instance, that slower computers hitched for a second or two when loading areas. North's developers played on top-of-the-line machines, so Boey made sure to enter areas first so he could lie in wait.

"Boey was a PK'er at heart," said Phil Shenk, character artist. "That's the only way he ever played Diablo II." [SQ4]

Phil Shenk recalled playing alongside Cheeming Boey during one of Blizzard North's testing phases, before the programmers had devised hoops players had to jump through to enable PVP. One of his favorite tactics was to would pretend to be a girl who needed the help of more experienced male players. Playing an Amazon, Boey would feign ignorance, stumbling around helplessly. Male players, eager to score brownie points, went out of their way to explain the game's mechanics and lead Boey along paths and into caves.

Watching over Boey's shoulder, Phil would shake his head.

"Boey would deliberately miss shots and stuff, and say, 'Oh, wow, you're so cool! You're really good at this game! Tee-hee!'"

Unbeknownst to Boey's good Samaritans, he had stockpiled high-level weapons only the developers had access to. At an opportune moment, usually when his escorts were ahead of him battling monsters, Boey would equip his best bow and unleash a torrent of arrows until his helper let out a screen and collapsed to the ground.

"The guy would be like, 'What the fuck? What are you doing?'" Phil said. "And Boey would stay in character. He'd be like, 'Oh my god, oh my god! What happened? I don't know what happened! I was just clicking around and... I'm sorry. I thought I was killing the monsters!'"

Boey's escort would struggle with his emotions, peeved but also intent on ingratiating himself to this damsel in distress. Until roughly half an hour later, when Boey would turn on him again. Realizing he'd been duped, the player would unleash a stream of obscenities and slurs only to be silenced by Boey's verbal tirade.

"Well, then Boey would just unleash obscenities like you've never heard," Phil continued. "'Shut the fuck up! I'll rip off your head and shit down your neck you stupid fuck!' Just go crazy. The other guy would freak out and leave the game. And I'd always say, 'Man, Boey, you're psycho.'"

Amigo's exploits almost landed him in hot water with one of Blizzard South's senior producers. "During the beta test, Boey was doing his PK thing, and he killed this one guy," Phil explained. As luck would have it, Boey killed Bill Roper. "Now, Bill Roper wasn't part of Blizzard North yet. He was just visiting from Blizzard South as a producer."

Boey had no idea Roper controlled one of the heroes who had just joined his party. Uncharacteristically, Boey took point, leading his group all the way to Andariel. Roper and Phil, members in the party, rushed in to attack the boss. Boey hung back, went hostile, equipped a bow socketed with topaz gems to add lightning damage and a sapphire to slow their movement with cold damage, and unloaded.

"All the sudden we heard this yelling down the hall," Phil remembered. "'What the fuck? Who just fucking killed me? I dropped all my stuff and he took it!'"

"And Boey's just sitting there looking like, 'Oh my god, I just PK'd Bill Roper,'" Phil said. "Then we laughed our asses off. It was pretty shortly after that that we turned off the means to just go hostile in a dungeon."

"I think that was the first time in my life I felt like my job was over. But nothing happened, so it was all good," Boey said.

THERE WAS ONE instance where everyone thought their jobs might be finished. In the final days of development, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS), the application Blizzard North used to back up Diablo II, was corrupted. Art, code, audio—everything was ruined. Without a miracle, Diablo II would not ship, and the team would have to start over from scratch.

"Software development coordination was one of the most difficult parts of Diablo II's development," said Michael Huang. "Everyone had a different part of the project they were responsible for. There were some common areas. For instance, if a new character skill was added, there was a text file that mapped the skill to the code and the file for the spell animation, and the audio file for the sound effect. In a perfect world, people would check out the file, make the appropriate changes, and check in the file. In the real world, things happen."

A slow chain reaction of things occurred. The first was user error. VSS allowed other programmers to check out and modify code even if it knew another programmer had already checked out the code in question. When both developers would attempt to check in a new version, the first programmer to do so could proceed without a problem. Anyone who attempted to check in the same code after him or her would get a message explaining that the code had already been checked in, and asking if they wanted to overwrite or merge the files. Sometimes, the developer—tired and overworked—would click the wrong option.

Another issue was the daily "get," the command in VSS to compile all code and assets and get the latest build of the game for everyone to play. As the game ballooned in size, gets would take more and more time, frustrating Dave. "At one point, he was so frustrated with the broken builds, that he told his programmers not to check in their code unless they were sure it was working," Huang said, a directive that was often ignored or forgotten as development wore on.

Blizzard North switched from daily gets to having Huang build core files and the executable—the file that launches the game—at the end of the day. That way everyone would be current the next morning.

"Towards the end of the project, you are just changing things that need changing only," said Rick Seis, who said that the game's database of code and assets was corrupted not once, but several times. "You don't want to add any further bugs, features, unbalancing changes, and such.  This means, only loosely approved fixes and tweaks are checked in. I remember this occurrence wasn't at the very end, but certainly towards the end of development portion, as opposed to, the 'just fix bugs only' towards Gold Master which is at the very end."

One evening in the late spring of 2000, a developer rushed to Huang's desk, panicked. One of the new hires had pulled out a drive in Blizzard North's network—the drive that contained the crucial files. Huang got hold of the drive and reinserted it, only to discover it had been fried. To make things worse, the drive had also contained the server's operating system.

"Dave had already left for the evening, so I called him on the phone at his house and talked to him, explaining the situation," Huang remembered. "I thought for sure I was going to be fired. But Dave very calmly told me to go home and we'll deal with this tomorrow. I already knew what we had resource-wise, so it wasn't hard to come up with a plan."

The plan, a Hail Mary, depended on the resourcefulness of Blizzard North's team. While a universal version of the game existed, most developers had been backing up code and audiovisual assets on their local computers. The bosses, Huang, Rick Seis, and other senior-level developers began the painstaking process of piecing the game back together bit by bit.

"This meant, finding the guy with the most recent full build and make that the build," said Rick. "All others, mostly programmers, needed to remember what they changed, and do a [comparison against] the new build. So, if you can imagine, a bunch of people checking in and out code to get their stuff in—it's a bit of a mad house and programmers dealing with code merging conflicts which is super annoying."

At the end of a long shift that lasted several days, the game had been rebuilt. There was a consequence, though not one that would take on any importance until decades later. According to the three bosses, most of the root code and a majority of the assets had been lost. The files gleaned from one developer or another had been backups of backups, not originals—like recovering a photograph after a fire rather than the digital file of the photograph. This meant that Diablo II would release in late June as expected, but a re-release down the road—say, in the late 2010s, when high-definition remasters for contemporary operating systems like Windows 10 were all the rage—would be next to impossible.

"What caused the corruption?" Rick asked rhetorically. "Just VSS being VSS. No way to tell."

A few hours later, a thunderstorm broke out over the valley. Lights and computer monitors flickered, then died. Their work was safe, but without power, no one could do anything but goof around. Several employees entered the main conference room and watched lightning flash and rain fall through the windows, talking quietly or watching silently. When the storm ended, power was restored. Everyone left and went back to work.

Kelly Johnson sat back at his desk and reflected on Condor's first office on Baer Island. Early 1997. A cramped bullpen ringed by three cramped offices. Diablo discs flying off store shelves. Promises made by the three bosses—or words perceived as promises—dangled before the Blizzard North crew, a dozen smelly, bedraggled, but satisfied developers who decompressed by gathering around a TV and playing NHL '94 on Sega Genesis and Mario Kart 64 on Nintendo 64.

"Fast forward to 2000," Kelly said. "You walk in and everything's quiet. Everybody's holed up in their own little worlds. The edginess was gone, that dynamic and energy that came from the wild mentality of gaming."

BLINDLY FOLLOWING THE Wanderer—or perhaps unable to break free of his pull—took its toll on Marius.

Diablo II's parallel story of Marius' and the Wanderer's trek east unfolds across five cinematics. They cross the vast desert to Lut Gholein, brave the sweltering heat of the jungles to reach Mephisto, and open a portal to hell, where the Wanderer sheds his human skin in bloody fashion and emerges—like a twisted butterfly from a cocoon—as Diablo, Lord of Terror.

By the final cinematic, Marius, a relatively young man at the game's start, appears to have aged decades. His skin is weathered, his hair grayed and ghostly thin. Players leave Marius where they met him, in an insane asylum where he awaits Tyrael, an angel resplendent in golden armor and blindingly white wings, to give him what he'd stolen: The Soulstone belonging to Baal, Lord of Destruction.

Rendering Diablo II's cinematics didn't leave Harley Huggins and the rest of Blizzard Entertainment's burgeoning cinematics team as haggard as Marius, but the work—at nearly half an hour of running time—nearly broke them. Nevertheless, the sequel's cinematics remain one of the team's proudest accomplishments.

Their work began by taking stock of risks. Certain objects such as hair, cloth, and fur simply could not be rendered in a way that would be visually appealing. They sidestepped the restriction by giving the tavern patrons Marius encounters in the first cinematic bald heads. Marius was a special case. He was their protagonist, and worthy of extra effort.

"We got hair on Marius, but it was so hard, and we knew there was no way we could do that for [every character]," said Harley. "We gave Marius peach fuzz, but long hair was beyond us at the time. Cloth was really hard. Cloth was a simulation; you had to set all this stuff up and run the simulation for hours." [SQ5]

Marius was necessary to the team's goal of telling a story that ran parallel to in-game events. Technical restrictions prevented them from creating movies that followed the player-character, but Marius could witness events and tell a story from his perspective providing insight into the world and moving the story forward outside of gameplay.

"The Acts were mapped out by that point, so I was able to tie the story into what was going on in the different acts, in a way," Harley explained. [SQ6]

The final cinematic gave players a denouement arguably as shocking as Diablo's ending. Over the course of the videos, Marius—and players—had believed he was recounting all that had happened to his visitor, the archangel Tyrael, and believed Tyrael had tracked him down to recover Baal's Soulstone in order to finish the destruction of the Prime Evils. Marius hands over the stone, but before he does, the screams and cries of the asylum's inmates reaches a fevered crescendo. Tyrael takes the stone and reveals he is not the archangel, but Baal in disguise. Soulstone recovered, Baal kills Marius and torches the asylum, setting the stage for an expansion pack.

"That's the thing that was fun about it back then," Harley said. "We tackled these challenges sitting in a room where something would come up. We'd get frustrated and say, 'How are we going to do this? This isn't going to work.' Everybody would leave, and then one of us would have a brainstorm. We'd get back together, the person would explain their idea, and then we'd say, 'Oh! Everything's going to work out!' That was part of the excitement and fun of working back then, when it was a smaller group." [SQ7]

Chapter 20: Separate Ways

Diablo II is arguably the best role-playing game of all time, the best dungeon-crawler of all time and the best PC game of all time. And that's before you get to everything it influenced.

- TIME magazine, August 2016

Even though we did some large-scale beta tests, I don't think any of that really prepared us for the onslaught of players at launch.

-Michael Huang, web developer, Blizzard North

They were just larger-than-life. They were these big personalities, each different in his own way. I was a bright-eyed young lad when I started, and looked up to those guys. That never really went away for me. They held Blizzard North together. It was what it was because of them.

- Ben Boos, artist, Blizzard North

I don't think Diablo would have been done as well, or we would have been as successful, if I had not worked so hard. There were, of course, some prices for that.

-David Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

ERICH SCHAEFER STEPPED across the threshold of the Virgin Megastore and stopped cold. For a moment, his bone-deep exhaustion lifted.

"When I finally went on my honeymoon, I was totally burned out. I was like, 'I'm getting away from all this. You guys ship the game. I'm done.' I didn't feel too bad because there wasn't really much stuff to do at that point. Ordinarily I'd have stuck around for ship, but at that point I just had to say, 'I'm gone.' I remember being in Paris at the Virgin Megastore and seeing big banners for Diablo II. People were lining up. That was really cool. I basked in it. I thought it was pretty great."

Over its first twenty-four hours on store shelves, Diablo II sold 184,000 units. One week later, the number had risen to one million. Six weeks later: two million sales, named the fastest-selling game of the time by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2000—to be surpassed only by other Blizzard-published titles such as 2002's WarCraft III, various World of WarCraft expansions, and 2012's Diablo III. The two Blizzards made more waves by temporarily stealing the world's attention away from a certain famous boy wizard. "Diablo II outsold Harry Potter," Chris Root remembered. "There was an article about how when the book first went on sale, we outsold it by huge quantities."

"I was pretty much bowled over by it," Scott Petersen said. "I was very happy to see that kind of success. I had never experienced anything like that. I had worked in the indie games industry for years and had never seen a reception like that."

Within one year of its release, Diablo II had sold four million copies around the globe. Sales have yet to stop. When Blizzard Entertainment announced Diablo III in June 2008, the Diablo Battle Chest, a compilation of Diablo, Diablo II, and the sequel's expansion set, ranked #19 on the best-selling games of 2008. Two years later, the Battle Chest still appeared in the top ten PC games list compiled by retail and market analysis firm NPD Group in 2010.

"I'm really proud to have been part of that because I think there's one thing that really differentiates that game: it's infinitely replayable," Peter Kemmer said. "People still play that game."

"Now, today, you can still walk into any store—and there it is, right on the shelf," said Dave Brevik. "It's crazy. It's a little embarrassing, almost."

Dave had never been comfortable with fans treating him like a rock star. He was a game programmer fortunate enough to earn a living by making games. Even so, he appreciated their support and always enjoyed meeting other gamers.

Karin Colenzo arranged an ideal meet-and-greet. One of her traditions since the Condor days was making a weekly shopping expedition to the Electronics Boutique shop at Hillsdale mall, just down the road, where she would buy one copy of each new game for the studio's library. On her next trip, she ran an idea by the store's managers, who had come to know her as one of their regulars: Some of Diablo II's developers could come by the store on launch day to sign copies of the game and chat with fans. The managers agreed and promised to have everything ready. All Karin needed to do was set a date.

"At that point, I didn't know that [Blizzard Entertainment's] PR was supposed to be in charge of this stuff," Karin said. "I said, 'Let me talk with Dave, Max, and Erich, and see what they think.' We ended up setting up this little signing. Just a few guys. We set up this table, and the manager said, 'We'll take care of security.' And I'm thinking, You're going to need security for this?"

On the day of the signing, Karin was joined by Dave, Rick, Matt Uelmen, Max, Erich, and Kenny Williams. The group strolled down the corridor leading to Electronics Boutique. Rounding the corner, they stopped dead and gaped. A line of fans snaked out of the store. For the next few hours, the developers signed boxes as fans gushed over their game.

While the world sharpened their swords and joined friends on Battle.net, Blizzard North's developers reflected on the game and the crucible they had undergone to create it. "I've always said the success of all of Blizzard's games was mainly about execution," Stieg Hedlund said. "Like all the -Crafts, the Diablo series has definite forebears—though, I would argue, does more to construe them is a new way than do those other franchises—but executes to a very high level on every front. Even with the knocks on the art in Diablo II, it's hard to argue that it's not fully realized within the limitations we accepted."

For Ben Boos, Diablo II's pixel-heavy aesthetic gave it an allure that no flashy 3D game could rival.

"When you got down to painting potions and you're looking up-close at that art—oh my God," he said. "I mean, you really only had a few pixels to work with. So it was just kind of comforting and fun, and we were hanging on to the last of an era, making a 2D game in a time when everything was going 3D. For me to play in pixel land like that was so much fun, whether it was swords, gems, or UI. What's funny is, technologically we left that era behind in the dust of the 3D revolution, right? But it's funny to see it kind of come back with Facebook and social media and stuff. There's this willful return to the land of the pixel, and I see now that it's a viable style. It's not just predicated on the technological level you're at; it's an aesthetic we love."

Diablo II's perfect storm of audiovisual flair and by-the-seat-of-their-pants design choices worked out, to put it mildly. Max Schaefer was grateful and relieved. "It was the right thing at the right time, which is what every game maker is aiming for. The industry changes so fast: when you start to conceive of a game, it's four years later when it gets published, and the world has completely changed. So when you hit something that's the right game at the right time, it's very satisfying. I think Diablo II endures in part because an insane amount of work was put into it, and we made a lot of correct decisions and approached it from a consistent sensibility that the so-called Diablo killers—which to some extent are trying to be Diablo, yet something different—tried to replicate."

From random dungeons and virtually limitless possibilities for character customization, to the rate at which players discover items and earn experience and skill points to grow stronger, many of Diablo II's developers considered its pacing as the reason for its success. "It veered away from the 'I'm in a battle with this one guy' and broke it down to being a frantic onslaught," Marc Tattersall said of the radical departure from the original Diablo's slower, more tactical speed. "I've broken mice playing that game. I think that was a testament to the company, and especially to Dave, Max, and Erich. I just made art for the game; they deserve credit for the game's success. It was an awesome game to work on and the best game I've ever worked on, and Blizzard North was the most fun I'd ever had at a company."

"I think the game had a real and genuine depth, which was a product of the quirky individual styles of the people that made it, and the real passion they brought to their work," Matt Uelmen agreed. "On top of that, it had some really high-quality testing, for which the QA grunts in Irvine in that era deserve a ton of credit."

"There's a lot of debate about whether random dungeons added replay to our games," explained Stefan Scandizzo, who had spent countless hours toiling over pieces for those dungeons. "I would like to think it added some. I think there are some people that, in terms of using games as a time killer—would they have played the same level over and over again? They might have. They had a gameplay mechanism that worked very well. It was all about kill-reward and compulsive gameplay: I'll just earn one more level, I'll just get to one more waypoint. Those were layered. Those compulsive behaviors were layered over and over each other such that it was very hard to put the game down. That's what social games are about today: compulsive gameplay and short spurts. Getting them to come back and do a little bit more. That's why Diablo II is successful."

"I think being able to put so much variety into the immersion, with such a simple engine, was an achievement I'm pretty proud of: The fact that you could go from drastically different environments with such limited resources from a technological standpoint," agreed Dave Glenn.

For others, the simple fact that the game was created in a place where they were encouraged to chase any whim that popped into their imagination was the largest contributor to Diablo II's timelessness. "There were so many informal postmortem discussions about the process, with the general thought being that everything was so poorly managed," Evan Carroll remembered. "But I don't know that Diablo II would have been the same. It was what it was, it was how we worked, and I think that constant revision was a necessary part of the process. I think that informality was absolutely necessary for it to succeed."

"Blizzard North was special," Scott Petersen said. "It was a special time, a special product. I think we all felt very blessed to be a part of that. There was a level of bitterness that depended upon your perspective. I think some people were bitter, some people were happy. But everybody felt—I believe everybody really felt—grateful to have been part of that, that cultural event, essentially. And I think there's a lot of pride because of that, too. Like, 'I made that.' It was just a magic formula."

Kelly Johnson zeroed in on one crucial aspect of that culture. "We did a release party on the Hornblower ship that cruises up the Bay. Dave was being interviewed by the media, and he was so psyched he was almost stuttering. He couldn't get his words out because he was so excited. I'm never going to forget watching him smiling and trying to explain the game to people, because he was so excited it was coming out."

ON JUNE 29, 2000, Blizzard North's team went home. One day later, a skeleton crew returned dressed in t-shirts, torn shorts, socks and sandals. They were firefighters equipped to douse flames in code. "Especially for the programmers, there were issues to deal with right away," Max Schaefer said.

Diablo II's first patch, version 1.01, had gone live on Battle.net on June 27, two days before release, so it would be available for players as soon as they jumped online. Most fixes were esoteric: certain monster corpses prevented players from squeezing through a tight pass in Act Two; a type of spider enemy caused the game's frame rate—the number of times the screen is redrawn every second—to drop precipitously; another glitch disconnected players from a game's host when he or she stepped through a town portal that just happened to open atop mounds of gold dropped by monsters.

Patches 1.02 and 1.03 were pushed out over longer periods, between June 29 and early August. The rate at which Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment—whose crew pitched in on fixes for Battle.net servers as well as game balance—rolled out updates was determined by the severity of bugs being reported by players. "The intensity wasn't there," Rick Seis explained. "It was more fire-fighting mode, which means generally sitting around waiting for a fire to start, and then quelling it. That's a lot more comfortable position, because in between, you can kind of revel in what you did. You can read reviews or what not. But then there was this really high intensity spike because potentially something you did was making tens of thousands of people not able to play. And the longer you took [to fix the problem], the worse it was."

Energy was another factor that determined the fervor with which Blizzard North's team tackled fixes. Over the past three years, Ben Boos married and had children. His family was blossoming. So was his career, in a way. Friends working at other game studios had released two, three, even four titles in the time it had taken him to publish one, even though that one game was arguably the biggest game in the world. Yet, reflecting on the difficulty of creating the game gave him pause.

"I will admit: the seeds of decay in paradise set in near the end in the sense that one tour of duty—at the end of that, I felt like an era had passed," said Ben. "I just started to wonder at that time: How long can I do this? I'll admit also: I think we were spoiled little brats because we were living in the roaring '90s. I bet a lot of people in these times would be quite happy to have our 'rough' times from then, because those were pretty sweet days."

When they weren't putting out fires, Diablo II's creators let their hair down. Developers raced remote-controlled cars for hours. Most showed up late and left early. Anyone still around after dinnertime was there to play games.

"After Diablo II was shipped, we really wanted to do something fun," said Karin Colenzo, office administrator. "I think we'd heard about Blizzard South going places and doing things, and thought, Why can't we do stuff? Let's do something after Diablo II."

Dave, Max, and Erich agreed, and asked Karin to round up some ideas. She pitched a three-day cruise. On a Friday, they would board a yacht in Los Angeles and set sail for Ensenada, a port city in Mexico, where they would dock, party, and eventually turn back around on Sunday. "For at least half a day we went and parked behind Catalina Island and just sat there on the boat because there was nowhere to go," said Max Schaefer. "It's a pretty short cruise to begin with, with half the time parked. But it was a cruise, and we were out with everyone with nothing to do but drink booze, sit around, and go swimming. It was fun."

Everyone was invited to bring along their significant others, a sort of mea culpa to partners who had suffered the residual effects of Diablo II's crunch.

"I know Pete Brevik and his wife brought booze on board; I think a couple people did," Chris Root recalled. "There was a lot of drinking going on. My girlfriend at the time probably had six Bloody Mary's before noon."

For many, a three-day cruise was not enough.

"A lot of relationships were affected during crunch times," admitted Karin Colenzo, who had a background in psychiatry and extended an open invitation for North's developers to talk with her when they needed to bend an ear. "Some people were able to reconcile; some people weren't. It was hard."

Jon Morin had trouble adjusting to a normal schedule.

"I got to work regular hours. It was kind of weird, leaving when it's light outside. You think, Am I supposed to be doing this? We actually had a downtime that was a little too long. We were just kind of messing around, playing games, playing hockey, leaving early. Obviously the bosses weren't hounding us."

Joe Morrissey, an engineer in Blizzard North's IT department, remembered one developer wandering into his office and dropping into a chair. While Joe gutted a computer and installed new parts, the developer talked idly, staring up at the ceiling where he was throwing a sharpened pencil. Every time the pencil's point stuck in a tile, it would hang for a few seconds and then drop back into his lap. He was going through a divorce, he told Joe. He was never home, and when he was home, he didn't want to do anything except sleep. He admitted that when he would sit at his desk, he would open a drawer, pull out a bottle of whiskey, and drink.

Months later, after Diablo II had launched, he returned to Joe's office and abruptly looked up at the ceiling.

"He asks me why my ceiling's all fucked up," Joe remembered. "I said, 'Because you were throwing pencils at it a couple months ago.' He said, 'Oh. Man, I was drunk as hell that whole time.'"

"People had spent months working themselves to the bone," Erich Schaefer said. "We didn't even have the brain power to think about what we should be doing. Definitely we talked about a couple of times and said, 'Let's not worry about it too much. We all [need time to] recuperate a bit.'"

BY EARLY AUGUST, roughly six weeks after release, a few developers shook off their post-crunch stupors. "Yes, we continued to collect our salaries and we were there to make fixes," said Stefan Scandizzo. "But the truth of the matter is, we weren't doing much of anything else. That was probably a smart thing. But that's when people started splintering off and asking, 'What are we going to do next?'"

Max Schaefer asked himself the same question. "The big thing was that Erich and David were going to work on a different project, and that we were going to have me and the rest of the team do an expansion for Diablo II," Max said. "It was a successful game, so when we came back, we were still kind of basking in the glow of the success of it. I think there was an energy in the office; people were ready to get back and do something. For some people, it was to keep working on Diablo II, and for others it was to try something else."

The staff looked to Dave for guidance. Dave wasn't in any state to offer it. "When you're creating a product like Diablo II, one of the lessons learned is, it's not like we're going to release this game and we're done. Because it's this live product that's serviced online, it's a marathon. It begins when you release, not ends. So we had a lot to do after it started. By then I was completely burnt out."

Like many, Dave's marriage had not survived Diablo II. He wasn't surprised. He had thrown himself into work before meeting Wendy. He loved his family. He was a father and a husband. But he also loved his games. His family was his family. His passion was his work.

Dave had teetered on the verge of burning out months before Diablo II finally spawned on store shelves. He had been as likely to escape in EverQuest as to code spur-of-the-moment ideas like Perspective Mode. Further complicating his home life, he had also fallen for one of the programmers on his team, Divo Palinkas, a beautiful and intelligent woman who matched his enthusiasm, creativity, and ambition step for step. The schedule he willingly kept made his home life nonexistent. When he did go home, his interactions with Wendy were draining. Divo understood the constraints of the realities of Blizzard North; she was there as often as Dave.

With the game out and his personal life crumbling, Dave had room to breathe, and to consider. He had the things he thought would bring him happiness: The big house, flashy cars, a Hall-of-Fame-worthy career. None of it mattered. A part of him was missing, but he didn't know what that part was, much less how to fix it.

"There were just so many changes in my life that I needed to get that together before anything work related. I guess it happened because too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Does that make sense? Life is cyclical. Once you have some success, it's really hard to keep up that passion. It's really hard to change your goals. My opinion of Diablo is not as high as other people's, so I didn't feel like I'd created something that I could never create again, or that I couldn't top it. It was more that I'd proven I could make a great game. I worked really hard at it, we did it, and it came out great. Now what?"

Chapter 21: The Seventy-Percenters

We shipped Lord of Destruction under budget and on time. For Blizzard, that's pretty good.

-Ben Boos, artist, Blizzard North

I went to Max and said, "I just got a call from this Blizzard guy saying I need to tone down the death because it's too violent." Max said, "Ignore that shit. You're doing great."

-John Kubasco, artist, Blizzard North

I couldn't go toe to toe with an engineer. I would lose, and that was just the reality of the environment at Blizzard North. It was built by engineers, and engineers ran the show.

-Joe Morrissey, writer, Blizzard North

MOST OF BLIZZARD North's staff dragged through the summer of 2000. Stieg Hedlund had anticipated a long winding-down period following Diablo II's release. With the game finished and in capable hands, he made his exit. Stieg had founded a studio, Full-On Entertainment, earlier that spring, nearly two months ahead of Diablo II's June 29 arrival. That presented a problem.

"I was always 100 percent committed to giving my all to Diablo II, and furthermore to laying some strong foundations for the expansion, and was working hard to accomplish those things, but I was exploring a new game and company. I compartmentalized pretty well, but what went wrong was that a company whose game engine we'd been looking at mentioned me by name in a press release as a licensee."

In early May, a press release had announced Stieg's intention to leave Blizzard North before he'd had a chance to give notice to Dave, Max, and Erich. When word of his imminent departure got out, he discussed the situation with the bosses and parted ways amicably. "As you can see in the credits, they kept me in as the game's designer, which they did not have to do. I didn't like how it went down, and would have liked to have stuck around until ship, but it definitely didn't impact the game, which was my main concern. I had and continue to have a very respectful relationship with Dave and the Schaefer brothers."

Stieg had other reasons for moving on after Diablo II. "The relationship between Blizzard North and Blizzard HQ was also a rocky one. I'd seen plenty of examples of studios being consolidated when there were the kinds of creative control issues that we had been having throughout my tenure. I strongly suspected that Blizzard North would be closed down, as it later was."

Following Diablo II's crunch and before the game's launch, Max Schaefer had announced that he would head up a small team to work on an expansion pack for Diablo II. "I know Erich and Dave were a little sick of Diablo and might not have been able to be enthusiastic about doing it. I was also wanting to lead a project rather than coming in under Dave and Erich."

Max was correct. Many developers who had been working on Diablo games since 1994 experienced an almost physical pain at the thought of going back to hell. After a short break, Phil Shenk and Tyler Thompson had bounced back. Phil was eager to get back to preliminary work he'd done on the expansion, to be titled Lord of Destruction. A year earlier, he had taken charge of illustrating concept artwork for characters before rejoining the main team.

Max set a loose leadership structure for the expansion. He, Tyler Thompson, and Phil, who would head up character artists, functioned well as a unit. They had become close friends outside of work, taking ski weekends in Tahoe with Dave Glenn, Erich Schaefer, and a few other guys. While Phil drummed up a crew of artists, Tyler pushed hard to recruit programmers still weary from Diablo II.

"'Hey. You wanna help me out?' That's how I did everything, just going desk to desk."

His take-charge attitude and work ethic did not go unnoticed. "Tyler wanted it," Dave Brevik said. "He was vocal about it and was dependable. That's what we were looking for. We were looking for someone who could actually do the things we wanted people to do. He was managing. Other people were like, 'I want to be a manager.' And it's like, 'Okay, so do something.' I think a lot of them felt like they should just be anointed a manager rather than proactively clinch the position."

Tyler's rise to a lead position was organic.

"I was not aware that I had the project lead title until Max told me that's what it would say in the credits," he recalled. "I saw a leadership void, I tried to fill it, I tried to get things done, I tried to ship the game. Questions were coming at me, and I gave the answers. So in the end, Max said, 'You're the project lead.' I said, 'Okay. I guess that's what I've been.'"

Tyler's peers took note of the way he spurred the team to action. "This was the first time leads had ever been designated on a new project," explained Mike Scandizzo, programmer. "This suddenly led to a new echelon within the company hierarchy. They weren't a Dave, Max, or an Erich, but they were a lead."

Aware that Diablo II's extended crunch had deflated most of the studio, Max came up with a way to encourage participation when Phil and Tyler ran into trouble motivating people to join up. "I was trying to get artists to come over to the expansion team, but they were burnt out," Phil said. "There was a little bit of a rift, kind of, 'Oh, we have to go work on more Diablo II? It'd be nice to go work on some new project. Get out of my face! Don't talk to me!'"

"There were a lot of people who didn't want to work on the expansion," said Joe Morrissey, IT engineer. "They wanted to work on the other project. So Max said, 'Whoever sticks around and works on the expansion can pretty much pick their spot on the next project' as a way to incentivize people to come together to get this out the door."

"It was reasonable to expect a degree of burnout and fatigue among the group as a whole," added Max. "You don't want to launch into anything that people aren't going to be enthusiastic about doing."

Not everyone had to be persuaded.

"At that time I was very much more interested in working on the expansion pack because it was a chance to work on a much smaller team, and work with characters and making art that you knew for sure was going to get published," said Evan Carroll, artist. It just seemed like a good opportunity to get more art into the gaming world."

Fred Vaught and Scott Petersen joined as much out of necessity as out of interest. "There were only two sound guys," Scott explained, referring to himself and Matt Uelmen. "We were able to split our time and work on both. There wasn't really a choice. The sound department, you can look at it like a service industry. Every project needs sounds recorded, and if there's only two guys or one guy doing it, especially if there are multiple projects, you're always busy, you're always working on every project."

Fred had created the bulk of Diablo II's objects, from décor such as corpses and flags to interactive actors such as treasure chests. There was no one else to fill his shoes.

"It would've taken three months to train somebody, but I've been doing it for years, and at that point it was really easy for me."

With Fred now solidified as part of the team, Alex Munn and Marc Tattersall, environment artists and friends with Fred, joined. Tyler demonstrated his leadership savvy by setting a schedule and sticking to it.

"I early on did one of our first scoping exercises that actually made a difference in our ship date, which I hadn't seen happen there before."

Tyler met with the bosses and broke down tasks and time tables. It had taken half a dozen programmers to complete tasks such as programming a monster, area, and quest on Diablo II. Therefore, he would need X number of programmers on the expansion. The bosses gave him half a dozen programmers and six months.

Tyler shook his head. He needed one year. He got it. His preparations paid off across the team.

"It felt more like a regular job than Diablo II's crunch," said Marc Tattersall, environment artist. "It was more like a normal game-company schedule where occasionally you're there until 7:00, 9:00 at night, but generally you're out by 6:00."

"We were able to do more of the whole classic Blizzard North success story," added Scott Petersen. "We were able to take stuff and run with it. We're just creating a couple new characters, and we're adding some new areas, some more story. We're just sort of bolting some stuff onto the core of the game. I don't think there was any hemming and hawing. I think it was a little bit clearer of a vision of what to do. I had a blast."

While Tyler would lead the team, Max would supervise the entire project. Phil Shenk grew dissatisfied with the hierarchy.

"When the Eye of Sauron kind of turned to the expansion set, [the three bosses] wondered who they would put on it, and they decided Max would head it. I wasn't happy about that. I love Max. He's a great friend. But I wasn't happy about that. It was like, oh, here: we'll give you this responsibility, you go lay all the groundwork, but we don't really trust you to pull it all together."

By August 2000, his two-year anniversary at Blizzard North, Phil had one foot out the door. A friend in the industry, Kevin Gliner, was at a company called WildTangent co-founded by former Microsoft evangelist Alex St. John. WildTangent managed a portfolio of smaller companies that worked on bite-sized games. Phil wanted to work at a company with opportunities for advancement. It had become clear to him, and to most everyone else, that Blizzard North was not that company.

Rick Seis had also run into what many at North perceived as a glass ceiling during Diablo II's development. He had been appointed lead programmer, only to quickly discover the limits to his authority. "I might say, 'I need you to do this. This is what I think we should be tasked on,' [but] Dave would then be talking to the person and would say, 'Well, you should be doing this instead.' That would reroute them, along with any mental scheduling that I had in my mind. That happened a lot."

Oftentimes, engineers who disliked Rick, or who knew how to exploit Blizzard North's power structure, circumvented him by going directly to one of the bosses, usually Dave, who was considered the end-all-be-all not only for programmers, but as Blizzard North's chief vision-holder.

The same thing happened on the teams of character and environment artists, helmed by Erich and Max, respectively. Guys like Phil were given a long leash, but the bosses held it. Responding to such criticisms, Max explained, "I think we were the best people to lead projects just as a matter of professional responsibility."

"There's a mix of truth to the glass ceiling at Blizzard North," Erich Schaefer admitted. "There are people who became project leads in various degrees while we were there, and there was a limit to how many people could become leads because there was a limit to how many projects there were. And really, there was a total glass ceiling at the highest point where no one could ever hit my level or Brevik's level. It was just never going to happen."

While the bosses held the real power, they could delegate. Max had willingly ceded responsibility for creating environments to Dave Glenn when he had seen clear evidence that Glenn's artistic skills were superior. "People weren't necessarily running projects, but they had a lot of authority in what they were doing," added Max. "I don't recall ever telling Phil Shenk what to do, for example. We might argue about this or that feature, but I certainly didn't get into his area of expertise."

Phil only half-agreed. Max and Erich had never stepped on his toes, true, but he still believed Max should have given him a vote of confidence by naming him the lead. "If you've got people there who are actually capable, why not? Why do you have to hold onto everything so tightly? Help people grow and help people be the best they can be. That was part of my decision to get out of there. My fear was that it was going to be a slow erosion of my responsibilities, or, worse, be a constant fight."

As his unhappiness deepened, Phil's talks with his friend at WildTangent became more serious. He wrestled with the decision for months, writing out page after page of pros and cons, posing what-if questions to himself. Ultimately, he decided to leave. "Within a couple weeks of leaving and starting my new gig, I knew it was the right thing. It was in the middle of the dot-com heyday, and everything that I was missing at Blizzard was there at WildTangent. It was super-fired-up, dot-com entrepreneurs. But making the decision was super, super tough. When the expansion shipped, it was tough. That was my baby, and I wasn't there to see it born."

Dave, Max, and Erich had several conversations about leadership during their time at Blizzard North. Tyler ended up being an example of the sort of leader they allowed to lead projects or disciplines within projects, with caveats. "Some of the people loved Tyler, and some people were having a tough time getting along with Tyler," Dave said.

Tyler's bullishness got him results, but at the expense of damaged relationships with colleagues who found him too pushy. Before he was formally named project lead, he was the lead programmer. As such, he saw himself as in charge of Lord of Destruction. In Tyler's eyes the other programmers worked for him, and he gave them marching orders.

"You know, I feel so bad for some of the tactics I used. I really do. I feel like I've done a lot of growing up since I worked at Blizzard. I didn't always make friends there. I had some friends, but there were some people who I wish I had an opportunity to change their opinion of me, because it's been a long time. I was, at that time, relentless. I could win arguments by arguing until you were emotionally exhausted, and then I'd win. It was just wrong. Very wrong. But I was young, and I had little feedback about my style, so I just kept doing what seemed to be working for the project, although it was not working for me."

The way the bosses saw it, nothing at Blizzard North needed to change. Most of the people who worked there understood the culture, and embraced it. "I think in a small studio like that, the culture is derived from the top, so I probably would not have gone to work there if [the three bosses] were not in charge," said Steven Woo, programmer. "If we think of it as just a job, then one would want to have some sort of succession plan. But that's not why I worked on video games."

Blizzard North was their ship, and they would always be at the wheel. "It was just a tough balance to reach. And again, we just didn't deal with it," Dave admitted. "We just said, 'There's no leadership. Suck it.'"

DIABLO II'S ENDING handed the expansion's team a clear direction. In the game's final moments, players learn that Baal, Lord of Destruction, survived Diablo and Mephisto. The opening to the expansion shows Baal in his true form—half man, half crab-like creature—setting out with an entourage of demons to Mount Arreat, home of the Barbarians and location of the Worldstone, a mountain-sized crystal responsible for creating the world of Sanctuary, and from which other objects of power such as the Soulstones had been derived.

The goal of Lord of Destruction was obvious: Set out after Baal, chase him through the snowy tundras, icy caves, and chilly peaks of Mount Arreat, and kill him.

Lord of Destruction would consist of a new Act. That called for new environments, characters, and, because of Phil Shenk's departure, a new lead character artist. Anthony Rivero had never jockeyed for the position. He was relatively new to the studio, having arrived after guys like Phil and Tyler. Like Phil and Tyler, he saw a void, so Anthony filled it. "I just wanted to make sure things got done, and I also wanted to get a raise. That's kind of how I approached it. I had to make sure everything got done from there on out on the character side of things. I put in a lot of work to help get the expansion pack shipped."

Anthony was familiar with preliminary work on Lord of Destruction that had been done during Diablo II's development. Phil had been working on a new character class, the Assassin. Max and the team deliberated over adding one more. "We worried over the number of classes," Max said. "Are there seven unique types of classes that you can play in an action-RPG? You're risking substantial overlap. I think we were definitely trying harder with those last two, to make them fit in."

The team envisioned their Assassin as a female, hand-to-hand combatant who racked up damage quickly by attacking with a flurry of punches and kicks. That set her apart from stronger but slower characters such as the Barbarian.

"We were also trying to solve the problem of most melee players basically smashing the same attack over and over and over again," Tyler said of the Assassin. "Wouldn't it be nice if there were more to the game?"

Their solution was to outfit the Assassin with tactical skills. One skill tree, Martial Arts, lets her do things like land several hits to charge up power, then unleash that energy in a special attack. Another tree features a selection of stealth abilities such as invisibility. Her third tree, Traps, gives players small pylons that can be placed on the ground and which shoot lightning and fire when enemies draw near. [SQ1]

Phil Shenk had designed the Assassin before departing the company. That left Anthony Rivero with the Druid. He was less than thrilled with his charge. A nature-loving priest seemed dull in comparison to the Assassin's explosive traps and martials arts moves. Then Anthony talked with Tyler about his ideas for the Druid, and the character crystallized.

"Tyler was really, really into the Druid, so he would give me some visual to run with, all sorts of idea of what it could be. It didn't have to be this boring character who loved trees and stuff."

Anthony and Tyler put together a design for the Druid that borrowed from the Necromancer and Sorceress. Tall, broad-shouldered, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, the Druid is physically imposing.

"I'm actually not satisfied with that design at all," Anthony admitted. "I wish I could get another stab at it, but that was during my early days as a game artist and I did not have the tool set I have now."

The Druid's defining skills are his shapeshifting abilities. One skill transforms players into a werewolf, a lean and fast fighter. Another turns them into a werebear, slower but able to go toe-to-toe with the game's biggest, toughest monsters. Players do not see the weapon held by the Druid when they're in animal form, but a weapon's stats influences their Druid's damage output, encouraging them to tailor their damage to their liking: high physical, or a mix of elemental and physical. [SQ2]

Early in development, the team pitched concepts for other shapeshifting forms. Phil Shenk had suggested a stag that bounded swiftly and could charge into battle.

"'That... That's fucking stupid,'" Anthony remembered responding. He argued that stags and deer were prey. Druids should morph into predators like wolves and bears.

Another concept was for a giant bird able to take flight. "I just started building this bird-human Druid character. And it fucking sucked," Anthony laughed.

"We had some pretty funny things for the Druid to turn into that didn't make it into the final product," Max added, discussing the bird of prey. "It just looked like a dude in a bird suit. I wish we had kept a screenshot of it, because he looked like Big Bird." [SQ3]

Lord of Destruction's new gameplay additions began with its two new heroes and extended to systems woven through the entire game. Players who finished Diablo II can begin Act Five right away by going to Act Four's settlement and traveling through a new portal that transports them to Harrogath, a Barbarian encampment under siege by Baal's minions. Players new to Diablo II, or returning players excited to take the Druid and Assassin heroes for a spin, have to start at the beginning of Act One. Keeping things fresh, players will find new content scattered throughout the entirety of Diablo II.

"The biggest thing Lord of Destruction offered, and what was beautiful about that franchise, is that we were able to offer new content to players no matter where they were as a player," said Tyler. "We were very careful to sprinkle new content everywhere. It gave you value right out of town, first thing, to go get stuff, or even bring in a new character. Then there was the new Act to play in for people who had already been through the core game. Then for people who were super experts, there was just stuff everywhere."

Charms, another addition, are stones that grant benefits such as increased damage, resistance to elemental attacks, and health boosts. Unlike items such as weapons and armor, charms don't have to be equipped. They sit in a character's inventory, encouraging players to reserve space for charms that boost their play style.

Gray stones called runes can be socketed in weapons and gear, like gems. Unlike gems, socketing runes in a certain order bestows additional bonuses, a recipe-like feature the team dubbed rune words. Some rune words only work when connected to Battle.net, a way to shepherd players to Blizzard's free service.

All of Diablo II's hero classes received new specialty items, too. Necromancers can carry severed heads in place of shields that boost skills and stats. Sorceresses can find one-handed wands, freeing up their offhand for shields.

"We identified the gaps as best we could and gave you stuff to fill them," Tyler added. "The value we tried to offer was, no matter what kind of experience you had with Diablo II, there was stuff there for you."

Max's philosophy of adding more blood and fire, literally and figuratively, lent an air of power and urgency to Lord of Destruction's gameplay. One piece of advice he offered to artists was that monsters should fall back when players kill them. "I thought that was a good rule," said Marc Tattersall. "You have so many monsters coming at you that it's cool to see them all falling away from your onslaught."

The key to directing, Max knew, was to offer suggestions and leave the implementation to his team. "I really liked working with Max," said Fred Vaught, environment artist. "I thought he was great. He always gave good directions. Not specific directions, but a good overall idea of what he wanted to see."

JOE MORRISSEY LOOKED forward to visits from Phil Shenk. He worked in the IT office, a room full of motherboards, memory chips, and mice and keyboards. He was Blizzard North's mister fix-it. If someone had a computer problem, Joe cracked open the case and got it running.

Phil's visits gave Joe a chance to dabble in his real passion: Storytelling. "He and I would talk about the story and what was going on, because he was across the hall and I was there, just bullshitting," Joe said of Phil.

Phil also liked bouncing his story ideas off Joe. "The story was getting more involved in Diablo II and was leading up to something, but what? What's the angels' real game? What's the demons' real game?" he said. Phil came up with the Worldstone, an object of great power that, if corrupted, would mark a point of no return for humanity on Sanctuary. "So who's going to guard this thing? Oh, the Barbarians. That makes sense," he continued.

One of Phil's objectives had been to give players a more meaningful story in Lord of Destruction. Many of the quests in Diablo II's main game were scattershot and unrelated. Phil had been the one to set Lord of Destruction in a Barbarian town populated with characters who had unique goals and back stories. He had also pushed to take Diablo II out of jungles and hellscapes and onto tundras and mountaintops caked with glittering snow and ice as a change of scenery. "Everything for the expansion was laid out. All the monsters fit nicely together, it was all designed ahead of time, a nice color palette, we had the storyline laid out, interesting gameplay mechanics that are all linked together. We weren't just making it up as we went along."

After Phil left, Michio Okamura went to the bosses and campaigned for them to pull Joe out of IT and put him in a position that took advantage of his creativity. "Joe went above and beyond my expectations because I thought he would stay more in writing, but he got more involved in the game design. He morphed from a writer into basically a game designer, and understands the differences between gameplay and writing. It's always hard to balance the two together."

Joe looked up from a gutted computer one afternoon to see Erich Schaefer saunter in. Erich said the expansion team needed a writer, but Blizzard North also needed Joe's aptitude for circuit boards. So, Erich said, he, Dave, and Max thought Joe should write, but still juggle IT. If he could. If he wanted to.

"That was a very hilarious meeting," Joe remembered. "Erich's very indirect with his conversations. Even his body language. He was kind of like, 'So, I was talking to the guys...' And I get that, because he didn't want to give me the sense that I had the keys to the castle, because I was an unproven commodity at that point. I mean, I was fixing a computer when he was asking me about this. I was over the workbench saying, 'Yeah, I can write all the dialogue for Diablo II's expansion. Let me just fix this hard drive.'"

Joe's job was to be Diablo's torchbearer at Blizzard North. He would make calls on quest progression and other storytelling elements, but he reported to a higher power outside the studio. Chris Metzen exercised final approval of Lord of Destruction's script.

"Chris loves the Diablo license. He told me before that he thinks it's probably his favorite of all three," Joe said, alluding to WarCraft and StarCraft.

Joe lived up to Michio's recommendation by showing a strong understanding of what made Diablo's story tick. He knew most players weren't there to read a narrative. The story was fine the first time around, and maybe they'd pick up details their second time through. However, most players cared about killing monsters and foraging for loot. Any text that popped up would be quickly dismissed.

"For anybody who says, 'I want to tell stories in games,' you have to say, 'What besides words can you use to tell a story?' Text is just one of the many tricks that a designer has to tell stories." [SQ4]

Lord of Destruction's newly minted writer worked closely with the art and programming teams to drive home Harrogath's beleaguered state. The town was sparsely populated, evidence that all able-bodied warriors were either fighting on the battlefield or rotting there. Those left in town hunched over fires. Malah, an elderly healer, converted her shop into a hospital where Barbarians lay bleeding on rugs and the cold stone floor.

Outside of town, players encountered Barbarians battling monsters. The Barbarians could be killed, adding urgency to a later quest that asked players to free fighters who had been taken captive. "That was really the first time you saw that in the whole Diablo series: There was someone else fighting," Max said. "That was an addition that came late in the project and was only about half a day's work. It was sort of an after-thought, just thrown in, and wow, did it make a difference. It was the first time that it really felt like there was a real battle going on. It was a big impact for such a small amount of work. I wish we'd done a lot more of that."

Joe—with support from character artist Evan Carroll and senior producer Matt Householder, both of whom enjoyed writing—started by examining the environments where players would explore and fight. From there, he either wrote new quest text to fit the milieu, or drew from a pool of quests Phil had written before his departure. "There was a handful of things we switched around and changed out. I think Phil had done up to 12 quests, and he kind of even said, 'We come up with this many so we can figure out which ones we want to get rid of; the best ones will rise to the top.' We put in Shenk the Overseer as kind of an homage to all of the work he had done."

Shenk the Overseer was a unique version of Lord of Destruction's Overseer monster, a bloated slave-driver that whipped demons to increase their attack speed. Shenk the Overseer, an overt nod to the expansion's former lead character artist, awaits players at the end of the first quest. Killing him triggers a rain of colorful explosions, a visual reward to players for a job well done. "I have a little bit of a reputation for being demanding, getting my whip cracking," Phil laughed. "They sent me an email asking me if [the boss's name] would be okay. I said, 'That's awesome!'"

Act Five's final two quests flow together. The first is a battle against the Ancients, three Barbarian deities immortalized as gold statues on the summit of Mount Arreat, where the Worldstone is kept. To reach the Worldstone and stop Baal, players must prove themselves worthy by defeating the Ancients under stressful conditions: If they open a Town Portal and return to Harrogath to restock on supplies, the Ancients will revert to their statue forms, and the battle will reset. It's an all-or-nothing fight to the finish that reinforces the urgency surrounding the Worldstone.

Mount Arreat's summit is memorable for another reason. Upon reaching the summit, all is quiet. Players can see the Ancients nearby, but the battle won't begin until players activate a pedestal beside them. If they like, players can take a moment to walk to the edge of the summit and look out at the battlefields they navigated earlier in the Act. "That was a huge step," said Fred Vaught. "All the sudden you're seeing depth in this game, which is something you hadn't really seen. It had always been such a flat game."

"Those were the kinds of things where we would go, 'Man, we just need an extra touch, here. What are the things the players care about?'" quality assurance tester Chris Arretche remembered of working on Lord of Destruction. "It was stuff like feeling like you're ascending a mountain: it's a visual medium, so being able to climb the mountain and say, 'I can see the starting town in one corner of the map. I've traveled that distance.' It was really cool." [SQ5]

After beating down the Ancients, players enter the mountain and discover Baal has reached the Worldstone and is in the process of corrupting it. To buy time, he forces players to run a gauntlet of elite monsters.

"We threw everybody at you, and the kitchen sink," said Joe. "That came out of me talking with Peter and a handful of other guys, because there was a lot of feedback about how our boss fights went in the past."

In Diablo and its sequel, boss fights are simple. Find the boss and pound it with attacks until it dies. Baal's gauntlet is different. It's an early phase, a fight before the fight. If players survive, they enter the Worldstone's chamber. In the background, the Worldstone flickers and pulses, and fragments of red crystal spin through the air. Baal summons a clone to fight alongside him and attacks players with tentacles that burst through the ground.

Mount Arreat's summit and interior are two of many areas that benefitted from flashy technical effects. Lord of Destruction's team was galvanized by their project. They were working with tools and processes mastered while making Diablo II. That freed up their time and energy to create cool monsters, environments, and quests for the expansion. Fred Vaught went all-out on objects and doodads, creating cages of dead bodies that trembled in the wind, and flags that flapped from where they hung on poles.

"I was trying to make more objects you could place in the environment that were moving. It was a continuation of the idea that the environments aren't static," he said.

The team invested hours of time animating falling snow. Periodically, a light snowfall sprinkles over Harrogath and the war-torn terrain outside its walls. Like the Barbarian NPCs fighting alongside players, falling snow is one more way to make Diablo II's world feel more alive, more active.

"That was actually a lot of fun to do, getting the proper falling of snowflakes with proper gusts of wind and stuff," Max said. "I remember that as being a particularly fun time, working on that. I pretty much spent a good couple days on that with Tyler Thompson."

Lord of Destruction bumped Diablo II's resolution up to 800x600, letting players see more of the game's beautiful environments and monsters. Increasing the resolution was one of the community's most asked-for features, and one of the team's tallest hurdles.

"Since it was a sprite-based game, you're not moving the camera in and out," explained Marc Tattersall. "You just have more visible space. In every level we designed for Diablo II that had gotten cut off by the screen, you could see edges everywhere. We had to go back and adjust a huge amount of art throughout Diablo II as well as the expansion."

Not every task involved so much heavy lifting. Besides mountain summits and tundras, players go through caverns coated in ice. "I did the ice caves, which are kind of a rehash of the Diablo II caves," Tattersall revealed. "We actually took those and rehashed them to be ice caves. If you look, the cave itself is there, and we hung ice all over it."

Caves and tundras are inhabited by new monsters such as Imps, sickly yellow goblins that cast fireballs, teleport out of danger, and hitch rides in baskets set atop Siege Beasts, another new foe that attacks with hooked, boney appendages on his arms. "The Imp was something that just needed to be done quickly," said Evan Carroll. Imps needed to be whipped up in record time because Tyler and Max wanted a spell-caster enemy small in stature and able to zip around the screen. "I threw that together using components from the goat men and the Necromancer's head. That was one of the most enjoyable monsters to create, partially because there wasn't much thought put into him. We needed him so quickly, so there weren't many opportunities to sit there and worry how he looked. So I rigged him and went ahead and just animated him. The entire time, I had in mind an annoying flag football player, and kids on the playground from my childhood."

Matt Uelmen set out to one-up himself as well. In the past, he had composed soundtracks from a selection of samples and live instruments. For Lord of Destruction, he wrote music for a live orchestra. "My skills had a way of growing with our resources. Even if I'd had the ability to record a full orchestra and choir at a beautiful studio and had every sample library and synth out there at my fingertips back in 1995, I would have had no clue what to do with them."

Uelmen began researching orchestras in the spring of 2000, after he had wrapped production on Diablo II's score. His research led him to the Slovak Radio Philharmonic in Bratislava, Slovakia; the group would be led by composer Kirk Trevor of the famous Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Uelmen wrote and revised a score through the fall of 2000.

"It was a pretty short soundtrack. A lot of it was fairly derivative of Gustav Holst and Richard Wagner, which for me was kind of a safe thing to do in terms of, if you know a certain sound works, then your first time out recording with an orchestra, it's pretty dumb to try reading at the wheel, and I definitely didn't try to read at the wheel in terms of my approach."

The following January, Trevor and the Slovak Radio Philharmonic recorded Uelmen's music. Uelmen was pleased with the results. "It was good for me to just get out of the sample-and-army-of-guitars-and-synthesizer world and expand my musicianship by putting it on paper. I really made it a point the first couple times I went to Bratislava to just to do things strictly on paper without any kind of midi preview file, just so I could learn as much as possible about the process."

ANTHONY RIVERO SCANNED the whiteboard along one wall. He was in Irvine, convening with Blizzard South's cinematics team to brainstorm videos for Diablo II's expansion set, Lord of Destruction, when a bit of text on the board caught his eye.

Amid charts and drawings was a word bubble that said Come on, Blizzard North, get your fucking shit together.

"Something like that," Anthony said, paraphrasing. "And I'm looking up at this and I made a comment, like, 'Oh, that's nice. What's that about?' Matt Samia looks over and realizes they totally forgot it was there. He goes, 'Fuck. Somebody erase that.'"

Per gossip that Anthony and other North developers picked up on, Blizzard South's team had begun referring to North as the seventy percenters.

"Because we would take something seventy percent of the way, and they would finish it up," he said.

Max Schaefer upheld the bosses' usual policy of communication between his team and Blizzard South. Any directives South wanted to pass on would go through him. Anything he and his team wanted to do, they did. He would not have his team disrupted or manipulated. On one occasion, a manager from Blizzard South called North's office and told John Kubasco, one of the studio's character artists, to change the death animation for the Overseer, a demon introduced in Lord of Destruction that whips other monsters into a frenzy. When the Overseer dies, its guts spill onto the ground. The manager from South decreed the animation too violent. Max Schaefer overruled him, and told Kubasco to keep doing his thing.

Evan Carroll preemptively resolved what he knew would become a similar incident. The Succubus, a sexpot demon nude from the waist up and drawn by Kelly Johnson for Diablo, returned in Lord of Destruction. Evan made the call to tone down his take on the Succubus before it triggered an incident between the two Blizzards. "I think there was a sense that Blizzard South was probably going to say something. I don't think it was a big deal, but there was something of an awareness of Blizzard South as kind of a parent in the relationship."

Tyler took his leadership role seriously. He joined Max on monthly trips to meet with South's leaders, or went alone. On the rare occasion when the studios got together, each organization tended to stick to one side of an invisible dividing line. Those glimpses into the Other Blizzard, combined with rumors around each respective office, informed both team's views of one another.

"I went to one picnic but the Blizzard North guys all stood huddled together in one area," recalled Fred Vaught. "We always heard the rumors: they were more corporate, we were looser; they were more organized, we were more disorganized. They seemed to be more organized than we were."

If Blizzard North's seventy-percenter nickname from South held any truth, the Lord of Destruction team shattered it. Diablo II's expansion arrived in stores on June 29, 2001, exactly one year after the base game's release. Blizzard North sold over one million units less than a month later, making it the fastest-selling expansion for a PC game.

"Six months previous to release, we predicted what date we would ship, and we were within a week of that day," said Tyler. "I ran that one. I was the planner, and things were different. I didn't estimate or have all those other management techniques, but I was much more rigid about scoping things out early and making sure we didn't grow it too big, and that we'd make it on time."

To a person, everyone who worked on Lord of Destruction viewed it as the pinnacle of their time at Blizzard North. "I think Lord of Destruction was a well-conceived expansion pack," said Max. "I think it had the right amount of new stuff and it tied fairly well into the old game. It was also released quickly enough to strike while the iron was hot. While Diablo II was still wildly popular, we came out with a nice big expansion, and that was one of the fastest projects we'd completed. It was well-conceived, so the players really took to it."

"Working on it was really awesome because we all knew what we were doing," Fred Vaught agreed. "I probably had more fun working on that than on Diablo II. I liked working on Diablo II, but there was a lot of struggling with that project. By the time we rolled on to the expansion, we knew the tools so well that we were able to focus on making things as we wanted them to be."

"The expansion was especially fun because everything was laid out," said Cheeming Boey, a character artist who worked closely with Anthony Rivero. "Everyone knew what we could and couldn't get away with in Diablo II. That one year was probably the most fun we ever had. That I ever had, at least."

Joe Morrissey was riding high. Lord of Destruction marked his foray into published writing, and set the table for the inevitable Diablo III perfectly. "We wanted to have people walk away from the expansion who were into the story and lore of the game go, Holy crap; what's going to happen now? What's this world going to be like? I think we did an excellent job of establishing that." [SQ6]

Chapter 22: X Factors

It was a lot of fun coming up with ideas, but we could never get anything that would really stick. I think we were just looking for something to make Dave go, "Ah ha! There's the game."

-Mike Huang, IT administrator, Blizzard North

We were still managing the company like we were ten people, but there were sixty-five of us. That just doesn't work.

-Dave Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

OVER THE FIRST weekend in July 2000, Eric Sexton met up with friends outside of Blizzard North to give them a very late Christmas gift.

"By the time we launched Diablo II, I got to see my friends again for the first time in two years," Sexton recalled. "I hung out with them for a while, and gave them all Diablo II. I said, 'Hey, here you go. Happy birthday, Happy Christmas; whatever. Enjoy. I will not be playing with you.'"

Sexton had been working on Diablo games nonstop for six years. He was ready to work on something else, and he was not alone. Michio Okamura, Rick Seis, and Kelly Johnson had been at Blizzard North longer than Sexton. They, too, were desperate to refill creative stores that had gone dry months ago.

Dave Glenn had been part of the team for a shorter period of time, just over two years. Still, Diablo II had consumed his life. He'd thrown himself into the project by choice, but he still needed a break.

"Half the company didn't do a whole hell of a lot for the whole next year. I totally thought it was great. Some people complained, saying, 'Oh, we're not working hard enough.' But when you work that hard for two years, you deserve a year off."

Dave Brevik and Erich Schaefer were perhaps most eager to part ways with Diablo, at least temporarily. Dave had had devils and procedural dungeons on the brain since college. Erich Schaefer had been Dave's earliest collaborator on Diablo at Condor. The two had spent hours brainstorming ideas long before the bosses had pitched the game to Blizzard South six years ago, back in the hazy days of 1994.

"Max and I couldn't really work on the same thing together, just because we had too much of a brotherly rivalry, so we definitely wanted to work on different projects," Erich said. "There was a large group in the office who wanted to do something besides Diablo, but we also knew we had to keep going with Diablo. So we decided to split into two teams."

Dave was more than burnt out, and Diablo was far from the only cause. He and his wife, Wendy, were going through a divorce, and his relationship with Divo Palinkas became the subject of office gossip. Mike Scandizzo had been Divo's officemate. He idolized Dave, but had a crush on Divo. When Divo and Dave began a relationship, Scandizzo was doubly hurt.

"I definitely let people down. There's no doubt," Dave admitted. "The leader wasn't the leader, and so people were lost. But I was lost as a person, so first and foremost I've got to solve my own issues before I can help anybody else. Was I feeling badly about that? Not really, because my stuff took priority. As crass as that sounds, I felt broken, and I needed to solve that before I could help others."

Dave still spent lots of time at the office, but as far as the staff could see, he was consumed by EverQuest. Erich was on shaky ground as well. His honeymoon had lasted three weeks. Months later, he was still glassy-eyed and exhausted. He left again, this time for six months.

"It didn't feel like we should [lose momentum by taking] six months off, which I actually ended up doing. We were supposed to buckle down and work hard again, but how do we do that?"

Erich's decision to take a lengthy absence didn't sit well with many employees. "He went on a sabbatical," said Jon Morin, programmer. "I was like, 'What's that all about? We worked a lot harder than you.' I was always there way longer than he was. Why is he going on a sabbatical? Can I go on one? Oh, that's right: I'm not a millionaire. Maybe he had his own personal reasons. Maybe he needed to go away, wanted to recharge."

Dave was not a hermit. He would attend meetings for the new game he and Erich were supposed to be directing, codenamed Project X. The name fit. X was a variable that changed every few months depending on the whim of Dave, Erich, or employees who attempted to steer the rudderless ship.

Project X's team set up shop in the smaller wing of the L-shaped office. The kitchen was in the middle, demarcating the teams working on Project X and Lord of Destruction. Two walls were covered from top to bottom in paintings of dragons, spaceships, aliens, soldiers, and weapons from science fiction settings.

Meetings occurred several times a week, often several times a day. Twenty to thirty developers piled into a conference room. Artists spread illustrations out on the table, and everyone discussed them. Most meetings ended without any resolution, rendering them show-and-tell sessions between artists.

"The way Blizzard North functioned in terms of direction—and this is terrible to say now, but it is true—is we'd have a two-hour fight," said Stefan Scandizzo, artist. "He who was willing to wash Erich's car the most times, or he who spoke the loudest, or he who happened to have gone drinking with Dave the night before, would frequently get heard. Then we repeated the process."

"Sometimes you'd say, 'Okay, well, back to the drawing board to get some new designs. Hopefully something will stick next time,'" said Lee Dotson, an artist hired to the Project X team. "There would be attempts at making some sort of forward progress, but a lot of times it wasn't particularly satisfying progress."

Mike Dashow grew frustrated after a few weeks of meaningless debate. He had joined Project X and pushed to lead as art director, both to help chart Blizzard North's course as well as to provide much-needed direction. Every now and then, he saw light at the end of the long, dark tunnel through which Project X meandered.

Dave Brevik gave the green light to design a game tentatively called Iron Monkey. According to a memo written by Erich Schaefer in early June 2000, Iron Monkey would be a more story-driven RPG than Diablo, and would revolve around fights between characters versed in martial arts. The pitch caught Dashow's interest. "It wasn't going to be like a Street Fighter game. It was going to be a whole world to explore. Everything we looked at was always a whole world to explore."

Joe Morrisey, fresh off writing dialogue and flavor text—descriptions that add color to a setting and its characters—for Lord of Destruction, put together a story. Iron Monkey would be a 3D game—per the memo, the bosses wanted every game they designed going forward to be 3D—set in a huge world where players embarked on epic quests, learned new skills, and acquired weapons. The bosses had batted around ideas for Iron Monkey for years. They saw it as an update to Karateka, a fighting-adventure game and the first release from Jordan Mechner, who went on to design Prince of Persia.

Programmers and artists worked together to get a character walking around on the screen in a gray box, development lingo for a placeholder area until artwork can be integrated.

Then Dave cancelled Iron Monkey. He had changed his mind, and wanted to do something else.

Later, Dave came to the group and asked them to pitch any game they wanted. They agreed on Titan City, an RPG in which players created and customized a superhero who protected a city. Heroes would battle villains at comic book-inspired locations such as warehouses and skyscrapers. Themes were mashed together as well: part fantasy, part far-flung-future. "People had these robes with weird mechanical parts," recalled Dashow. "One guy had a mechanical arm. But it didn't feel like a very high-tech Star Wars or science fiction world. It was rusty metal and kind of low-key. It was just this really neat mix."

Dashow drew pages and pages of portraits and silhouettes for Titan City. Some characters exhibited sun-like traits and powers, such as beings that wore white and yellow clothes adorned with sun emblems and carried gigantic, golden shields. Other characters wore red and black armor covered in spikes. Meanwhile, designers brainstormed gameplay. Players would outfit their heroes with powers of their choosing, like selecting skills in Diablo II. Game Points, a currency, would be awarded as players won fights, and could be used to upgrade powers, buy new abilities and equipment, and upgrade their headquarters.

A few months later, Dave cancelled Titan City. The team bristled. When pressed to explain why he had accepted their pitch if he was going to cancel it after a few months, Joe Morrissey remembered Dave glibly replying, "'Because I thought you'd come up with an idea I liked.' Okay, well what game do you want us to make? He'd say, 'It's hard for me to explain it to you.' That's when we all went back to our offices and played Counter-Strike, just waiting for greatness to come."

Other pitches came and went. One concept was for players to collect characters, like monsters with different powers in Pokémon, and assemble them into squads that could battle other player-controlled squads in multiplayer arenas. It was dubbed Head Hunter, a mashup of Tomb Raider and Bladerunner, set in a massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) where players controlled either a Hunter, a member of law enforcement, or a Criminal. Hunters hunted Criminals while Criminals attempted to avoid Hunters and carry out missions. Pitches for MMORPGs were encouraged because players had to log in to servers to play, making the games virtually impossible to pirate.

Dave and Erich approved some pitches. Work would proceed for a few months, and then Dave or Erich—usually Dave—would cancel it.

Dave's oscillation left Project X's team spinning its wheels. Meetings either devolved into arguments, show-and-tell sessions, or pie-in-the-sky bull fests where developers pitched games that would never work. Without any leadership, programmers and artists splintered off and went in their own direction. Without programmers invested the project, artists had no way to get something running on a screen, the proving ground for any project at Blizzard North. "There were certain things about developing games that we were going to try to keep in place because we felt they were the right way to go about making games," said Kenny Williams, producer and office manager. "For example, making sure builds of games could be played often during development, and developing games organically."

"Eventually I got disgusted and I stopped going to meetings. They were very frustrating and accomplished nothing," said Stefan Scandizzo. "I stayed in my office. By this point we'd switched over to Maya [what is Maya? Tell us briefly in brackets]. I taught myself Maya, I taught myself scripting and a whole bunch of other skills I was able to use later on."

Froilan Gardner used his abundance of free time to his advantage as well. "I'd never done concept art before, I'd never done illustration before, so I just started painting. It turned out to be the direction I wanted to go all along in my career. It was a good time. It allowed me to experiment with what I wanted to do with my career."

Project X's lack of direction had no bearing on Blizzard North's finances. That, too, posed a problem. In the lobby, someone had posted a top-ten list of the bestselling games. Diablo II sat at or near the top for months. Stone Librande, a programmer-turned-designer on Project X, recalled looking at the list and thinking, Look how much money we're making this week. "There's not a lot of pressure, I guess, that we immediately have to ship something else. We have the money and resources to experiment and undergo a lot of preproduction. And if one idea's no good—whatever. Throw it away. Who cares."

Whether the team was working or not, whether Dave and Erich were leading or not, employees collected salaries and cashed royalty checks that doubled or tripled their salaries. "People weren't sure where things were going, and some people weren't exactly pushing themselves because they could get away with that. They were riding the gravy train, as people say," agreed Lee Dotson.

Scott Petersen and Matt Uelmen talked Brad Mason, a manager who had been hired on full-time after supplying the studio with IT solutions since the Condor days, into buying a pool table. "Matt and I played a lot of pool basically until they needed sounds for some of the tests [for Project X]. We'd sub in the music and put in some sounds and so some work, then everybody'd go off and try to make another game. I think we had like six or some ridiculous number of different prototypes. We'd do a bunch of audio work on prototypes, and then play some pool, maybe some Ping-Pong. It was ridiculous." (Author's note: Brad Mason is my uncle, and was instrumental to referring me to ex-Blizzard North developers and managers for interviews.)

"Nobody ever told us, 'Uh, hey, you guys have been playing pool for two hours," added John Kubasco, artist. "Maybe you should go do something.' Like, that never happened. If somebody walked past and saw you playing pool, they'd say, 'All right, I've got next game.'"

As office managers, Brad Mason and Kenny Williams were happy to indulge the employees, but only to a point. One day, a female employee came to Brad in tears. Embarrassed, she said she was trying her best to work with all the guys but had been upset by a developing situation. One of the developers had turned his monitor to face the hallway and was watching pornography. Brad immediately told him to stop. The employee resented him for months afterward. "So by putting an end to that, now I'm the porno Nazi. I was the email Nazi, I was the network Nazi, I was the porno Nazi. They never grew up, or they didn't really think about it too much because they were a bunch of really young, talented guys, heads down and doing what they did. Everything else around them was just noise."

Long-time employees realized the Condor style was incompatible with a company the size of Blizzard North post-Diablo II. One problem was the team that had made Diablo had been small, scrappy, and tightly knit. "There's a certain kind of trust that comes from that long-term development," explained Michio Okamura, artist. "One of the goals of game development is the product, and another that's really important is the team you build while you're working on that game. You get that game out, and you have a team that works really well together."

Dave, Max, and Erich knew the importance of decompressing by playing games. Stone Librande looked forward to long lunches playing board games with friends at work. Tyler Thompson joined in. So did Divo Palinkas, Lee Dotson, and Max and Erich Schaefer. They played card games and dice games, often indulging in games that took days to resolve. Some cards and game pieces sat on a table for weeks, an open invitation for anyone to jump in and play.

"In a lot of ways, those lunches were maybe the best part of the Blizzard North experience for me," Lee said. "I learned a lot about game design in a manner I didn't expect. It also ties into getting to know Erich and his view of game design through those interactions."

"In some ways the highlight of working there was lunchtime," Stone added. "You'd go to the game room and look around at all these cabinets, and say, 'How about this one?' And you'd just play it."

Erich struggled to get invested in Project X even after his sabbatical. He and Dave had been in sync on Diablo and Diablo II. For the first time, they were having trouble getting together. Erich was spending as much time relaying Dave's thoughts and orders to the team as he was trying to co-lead the project, whatever it happened to be on any given day. "I think both of us at different times would have doubts as to how things were going," he admitted.

Another issue was the developers on the X team wanted to make a game as different from Diablo as possible, despite Blizzard North having no history of building a unique property that was not Diablo. "They hadn't really figured out what the next thing was," said Lee. "A lot of their design process is very iterative. They had to do something and see it, and then evaluate it. That was opposed to having a larger idea that's a grand plan you can start implementing."

Not only was Project X supposed to be the company's first homemade project that wasn't a hack-and-slash RPG, it was going to be a 3D rather than 2D game. That one-two punch put the team in a difficult position of trying to learn new software such as Maya, which was supposed to streamline the integration of 3D artwork, and new technology, all without steady leadership.

"We did not have a culture that knew how to design something new, other than iterating on the last thing," Tyler admitted. "We didn't have designers. We didn't have design documents. We had a group that was used to making stuff the way we knew how to make it, and then keep making it better."

Long-time employees were also shaken by the three bosses splitting their focus. "I felt like part of the reason things didn't work out was that those three weren't actively managing together," said Evan Carroll, artist. "Those three kind of needed to be together to get something out the door."

"We all have strengths and weaknesses that complement each other well, so take that apart and you're left with nobody to fill those roles," Dave admitted.

"It felt like, at the time, it was something we really wanted to do," Max added. "You get into a rut after a while. Everyone kind of does the same role and the same thing, day after day after day. And you do want to do something else."

DAVE BREVIK CALLED the Project X team into a meeting in 2002. This was it. This was the moment they had been waiting for, again. The moment when Dave came to them, again, with a specific direction for a game, again.

"Dave asked us to come up with a story for a high-fantasy game, and what he meant by that was dragons, essentially," recalled Joe Morrissey, writer.

Everything about the "dragons" game felt different. Unlike with Titan City, Dave seemed intrigued, if not invested. "He wanted to plan out the story and where things were going before we released the first game so we had this overall beginning, middle, and end to it," Joe added, "so he sat down with me for a while to talk about what he wanted to see. He said, 'I want to have dragons.' He kept saying that. 'I want you to use dragons.'"

Dave's excitement stemmed from his interest in an emerging game format, episodic content. "You would buy the game, and every month or so we'd release a chapter of the story broken up over nine chapters," explained Eric Sexton, artist. "So every two or three months at least, there'd be a new chapter."

The dragons game appealed to Eric Sexton as well. He expressed his interest to Joe, and the two met daily to spitball. At first, Joe had trouble mustering enthusiasm. Titan City had developed far enough for him to look forward to coming into work every day, only for Dave to pull the rug out from under him. As he talked with Sexton, his excitement grew. They called the game Dragons, and set it in a world where dragons had ruled before disappearing. Eons had passed. The dragons' offspring, dragonkin, ruled in their place. Centuries of breeding with humans had thinned the dragonkins' dragon blood and all but weeded out dragon features such as scales and yellow, reptilian eyes. Over time, humans came to believe dragons were the fodder of myths. According to those stories, an ancient dragon had sired nine offspring. One of those dragons was female. Jealous of the attention paid to her by their father, her eight brothers banded together and killed her. The blood that ran from her body hardened into the earth, and her father's giant tears spread far and wide, becoming oceans.

Humans were the offspring of the ninth dragon. They were also slaves. Surviving dragonkin still held humanity in bondage. At the beginning of the game, players would assume control of a female slave who would rise up to become a hero among humans. There would be dozens of quests. Most would reveal more of the story of the eight dragons that had killed their sister. Each dragon was associated with a sin: gluttony, lust, and so on. As players progressed through episodes, they would learn their character's background as a dragonkin able to tap into ancient powers. As her powers grow stronger, the eight male dragons awaken from their slumber and seek her out to kill her, finishing what they started millennia ago.

Sexton and Joe brainstormed and wrote for six months. Each day, their friendship strengthened as their enthusiasm for Dragons grew. When they reached a point where they felt comfortable sharing details, they sent out a company-wide email outlining the game's backstory and goals. Feedback from one developer was immediate and harsh. "There was a love story in there at one point," Joe explained. "The person said, 'You're trying to make me a fag because you want me to play a girl who has a love story. So basically you're saying I have to play a chick who makes out with a guy.' To which I could only respond: 'Wow.' That was the environment I worked in at the time."

Joe was shocked and saddened by the response. He was also irritated that anyone would get hung up on the romance angle when the design was packed with so many cool features and ideas. Dragons, for example, perform acrobatics in the air as they soar around breathing fire. Each dragon carries a slave bound by hooks and chains, and fastened to a glider. Slaves ride on the backs of their dragons. When they get close to an enemy dragon, they jump off, sail through the air, and use their hooks to scale the enormous body of the enemy dragon while it loops and flips.

"It was totally, completely, fucking bat-shit insane," Joe gushed. "I thought it would be awesome. Imagine this guy jumping from one dragon and latching onto another. All this crazy shit. We had no idea how we were going to do any gameplay. But it was a cool idea."

Complaints about playing as a woman who fell in love with a man grew vocal enough that Dave and Erich asked Joe and Sexton to pivot. They replaced the female with Brand, a human male and a dragon rider, the highest station of a slave. His backstory was that he had fallen from a dragon's back into a pit of amber and was encased for hundreds of years. In the future, members of his guild found him, broke him free, and were amazed to find a man dressed from head to toe in legendary armor and weapons, and who had once fought dragons.

Dave Brevik checked in on Dragons periodically. The character and story ideas were neat, but he felt the game mechanics were not coming together. His other issue was with the game's concept art. It just didn't grab him. After close to a year, he pulled the plug.

Sexton was annoyed but not surprised. He had never adjusted to the idea of writing a game with a male lead. "I think the downfall of that idea was, they wanted it to be very heavily story-based, which, okay, that's fine. You want an episodic thing? People have to be engaged in the story and have a reason to pick up the next episode. Well, the fact that the character was female was actually kind of an integral part of the story, so just swapping her out for a guy broke so much. We spent weeks trying to fix it, but in the end we just tried to write something else. At that point, our hearts weren't in it anymore. What we had was spectacular, but everything else we wrote after that just never felt as good."

Joe took the cancellation hard. "I was looking at this fantasy game and going, 'This is awesome. This is an epic story. It's got your classic hero who dies and comes back to life, the dragonkin. If we do this right, this could be the next big thing for us.'"

"[Leaders] have to make tough calls," Dave said of his decision. "When we first started Condor, one of the things I talked to Allen about all the time was, 'I want to be the Ferrari or the Porsche of the industry. I don't want to be the GM of the industry. I don't want to make crap-loads of cars; I want to make awesome stuff.' If I felt like there was no chance for something to be awesome, then it was time to move on."

Joe disagreed. He never recalled Dave articulating his issues with Dragons' gameplay direction to him. The real problem, he believed, was the studio's growing culture of negativity. Anytime someone got far with an idea, those who wanted to do something else, or who belonged to a political faction that did not like the person leading the idea, would tear it down.

To Condor veterans like Kelly Johnson, that culture was antithetical to the company he had started with in 1994. "At Condor, we supported people because we were all nobodies. We supported people no matter what. You support your team. If they're doing badly, you help them do better. You don't sit back and watch them fail."

Had any of the bosses put a stop to the negative talk, Dragons or any number of other ideas may have stood a chance. Instead, Dave admitted he contributed to that culture. "I wasn't around very much," Dave said. "There was a lot of seagull managing where I would swoop in unannounced, squawk a lot, crap over everything, and then leave."

That, Dave maintained, could not be helped. "I dedicated so much of myself to Diablo II and at the end, I had a meltdown. I never really recovered from it. It was a mess. I didn't want to make the same mistakes I'd been making. But that meant that Blizzard North suffered because I wasn't there as much as I should have been. We all have priorities in life, and at that time, I needed to get my personal life rebuilt."

"Dave was never a taskmaster," said Rick Seis, programmer. "Nobody would ever say that. He divvied out tasks, but he wasn't a taskmaster. He led by showing. That's his style. And when you saw this disinterest, it was chaos."

By January 2003, Project X's developers were fed up. Diablo II and its expansion had been a hot commodity for going on three years. Meanwhile, X had started and stopped over half a dozen times in that timespan—years of wasted time with nothing to show for all their hard work and sacrifice except sports cars, flashy motorcycles, and other toys they'd bought with bonus money gleaned from StarCraft, Diablo II, and WarCraft III, released by Blizzard Entertainment in the summer of 2002.

Mike Dashow had joined the X team galvanized to create something fresh. By the early days of '03, he just wanted to create something. "My stance became, 'Why don't we just fucking do Diablo III? Clearly everyone here likes Diablo, knows Diablo. Everything always comes back to Diablo. Just fucking do Diablo III in 3D and be done with it.'"

Then Erich Schaefer dug up an old proposal: A Diablo-style game, but with aliens, spaceships, guns, and other sci-fi trappings. The idea was to re-skin Diablo and roll in some new ideas.

"We jokingly called it Starblo because we knew that name would not get shipped," Joe Morrissey said.

Dave's and Erich's eyes lit up. Here was a concept they could get behind. "We started talking about it amongst ourselves, and people on the team seemed to be on board with the change," Erich said.

"I liked Starblo because I thought we'd finally made the right decision," said Marc Tattersall, artist. "We tried so many things that I'd thought, Maybe we really are a one-trick pony. We don't have the vision to create a new title. So instead of fighting that, let's embrace it with Starblo. We know how to make Diablo, so we know how to make Starblo."

Mike Dashow wasn't crazy about the idea, but it was something. "After just throwing out Dragons, okay, now what? A science-fiction version of Diablo? Okay, whatever. And that's how Starblo was born."

Starblo would be similar to Diablo in terms of mechanics, but different enough in visual direction and setting that it would stand apart from Diablo III. Stone Librande would lead design, answering to Dave and Erich.

Stone had started as a programmer who dabbled in game design out of necessity. Programmers controlled the code, so they were always in the right position to tweak or invent a game's inner workings. For Starblo, Stone was able to step away from programming and design full-time. He had thought about his philosophy as a designer, and viewed himself as an architect. "Most architects, they don't draw whatever crazy thing they want and then give it to their client and say, 'Here, build this. This is the thing you want to build.' They listen to the client, they find out what the client wants, and then they draw up plans for the client that will stand up when the contractors get around to building the thing later on."

His job, as he saw it, was to gather feedback from the X team and help the cream rise to the top. "That kind of constant loop of presenting, listening to feedback, refining, presenting... That, to me, is what a designer's role on a team really is, not from on high telling people what to do," Stone continued.

Starblo was like Diablo, yet different. It was shaping up to be a full 3D game that would run on a proprietary engine called Axe. The camera would be positioned at an isometric angle, but could be rotated and zoomed in and out. Instead of going to towns and traveling across a continent, players fly around in their mobile command center.

"You had a spaceship that you flew around and served as a home base, kind of like a mini town," said Erich Schaefer. "You would land on a planet, go explore the planet, and then go find monsters and artifacts and stuff like that."

"As you went through the game you would level up your spaceship, add new features and space to it," Mike Dashow said. "So all the NPCs you have in your town in Diablo, you end up either having them in your spaceship, or as features on your spaceship."

Dashow's enthusiasm grew as his illustrations went from paper drawings to in-game models. "We'd built out all these spaceship designs of how they would work," he said. "We had vehicles. We actually had this giant vehicle you could ride around. It was mocked-up really rough, basically a model that was attached to your character. I built the whole model, and I'm like, 'Just stick it in the game so we can see how it looks.' But for a long while, you're basically wearing a dress that's the size of a car."

Planets would take the place of Diablo II's Acts. Terrain would be procedurally generated, and would have visual themes to make them stand out. Most combat would take place on land as players explored. "I remember we wanted to capture monsters at one point, bring them back to the ship and experiment on them and breed them. I think that might have been the beginning of a playable class, but I don't really remember," Erich continued.

"We got pretty far on that," said Marc Tattersall. "We actually had a playable game. There was a build of it and everything. There were skills, there were powers. That's the farthest I think we got with any of our Project X games."

Dave's interest was Starblo's litmus test. By late June of 2003, he was still intrigued. Starblo wasn't the radical departure from Diablo many on the team had pulled for, but at least something was coalescing. That was more than enough to galvanize the Project X team.

"We still didn't know exactly what Starblo was," Dave explained. "Did it involve a degree of spaceships flying around and exploring planets, or was it all about missions? So we weren't sure about the game's direction, but we knew there was a game in Starblo. There still is. We knew there was a good idea there, and morale was better overall toward the end, strangely enough."

Chapter 23: Shadows on the Wall

We wanted to keep the gameplay the same, just with more people, shared towns, big overland areas, the same camera angle and pace and feel, so there would be no reason why someone who likes Diablo wouldn't like Diablo III.

-Max Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

I think for better or for worse, Max was the guy that everyone liked, but not everyone saw him as a true boss. Erich was even more so like that, where he was this easygoing guy.

-Joe Morrissey, writer, Blizzard North

People were being hired without necessarily knowing the rest of the company, and depending on who they started off hanging out with, each one of these divisions started to grow.

-Mike Scandizzo, programmer, Blizzard North

AS PROJECT X drifted, the Diablo franchise continued to gain momentum. After shipping Lord of Destruction in June 2001, Max Schaefer and most of the developers who had worked on the expansion formed the core of the team for Diablo III. Blizzard North had gone on a hiring spree beginning in the fall of 2000 that continued through the following summer. The goal was to fill out two teams. Project X would need developers eventually, and the bosses wanted Diablo III up and running sooner rather than later.

Lord of Destruction's developers were allowed to choose what they wanted to work on as a reward for stepping up to help on the expansion. Evan Carroll, Anthony Rivero, and Cheeming Boey took one look at Project X's progress and practically ran to the Diablo III side of the building. "It felt a lot more solid," Evan recalled. "It felt like it was a good time to start plugging it and putting in concepts and ideas right at the ground floor so you can see them grow and become part of the core game. So that seemed more interesting to me. As an artist, I felt like I was guaranteed input into the game. Certainly it was going to be shipped."

Max Schaefer mapped out a loose hierarchy for the project. Mike Scandizzo would be the lead networking engineer. Tyler Thompson would complement him as lead engineer of tools. For Max, the concept of assigning developers to specific purviews was necessary, if foreign and a bit uncomfortable: "We had definitely reached a point where we had very specific things that people did. That was something we kind of grudgingly got dragged into. We always favored the guys-who-can-do-anything approach, but that was becoming less and less doable given the company size, project size, technical requirements, and the standards that everything had to be at to run profitably and correctly."

With Diablo III, the franchise would take its next evolutionary step. From a single-player title with hack-infested multiplayer, to a sequel running on client-server architecture, to capitalizing on the growing popularity of broadband Internet by evolving into a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).

The bosses had discussed fashioning Diablo III as an MMORPG as early as June 2000, weeks before Diablo II shipped. They did not hold to any conventional definition of MMORPG, because there was no conventional definition. World of WarCraft was early in development, and Ultima Online and EverQuest were the only go-to examples: big worlds, lots of quests, lots of fighting, places for players to interact. Diablo III would be massively multiplayer in terms of dozens or hundreds of players inhabiting the same world. In every other way, it would be classic Diablo: lots of monsters, lots of loot, and frenetic gameplay driven by beating mouse buttons into submission.

"I think it was because of the excitement for the MMOs coming out around the time, and the possibilities that that new style of game held," Max said of the three's decision to build Diablo III as an MMO, "plus a desire to continually update and improve the Diablo franchise rather than just keep making it in the same sort of style."

The general thrust was to develop another large world, bigger even than Diablo II's five Acts, and one that felt more alive than anything Blizzard North had created so far. Joe Morrissey wrote story documents for encampments of Fallen, the cowardly goblin-like monsters that attacked in numbers but scattered like startled birds when their friends started dying around them. "I said, 'Wouldn't it be cool if there were towns, and there were fallen villages outside of towns? They would amass fallen, and when they got to a certain number, they would enact raids on neighboring villages and capture NPCs, take them back to their village. Then they would wait a certain amount of time and capture the person, eat them, whatever.'"

If players let Fallen ransack the town unchecked, the town's population would dwindle, and the enemy encampment would grow from a hastily-thrown-together bivouac into a giant tower able to open a portal through which bigger, tougher demons could invade. "One of the things you'd do is go around and make sure that didn't happen," Joe continued. "There's this whole organic world. You'd see towns that were there before but were now completely desolated."

There was a flaw in his plan, and Joe knew it. Most players would love the idea of letting monsters sack the town and build their tower, open portals, and unleash demons, because bigger monsters would be more fun to fight and more likely to drop better loot.

Much of Diablo III's design was conjecture. The game's engine was in an embryonic state, so the majority of ideas never progressed past idle conversations in the break room or documents on computers. "I think we'd decided on a persistent overworld with random dungeons. I don't think the plan ever deviated from that, not that I recall," Dave Brevik admitted.

That didn't stop the developers from making plans. In late October 2001, Mike Scandizzo wrote a proposal for factions and hero classes, and sent it to Max Schaefer and Michio Okamura. The faction players chose would determine which hero classes they could play. The Zakarum was a group of religious extremists whose leaders imposed militaristic rule. Every Zakarum hero would have access to auras, many derived from Diablo II's Paladin. There was the Crusader, a holy knight based almost entirely on the Paladin; the Inquisitor, an assassin who killed targets using auras and magic; and the Priest, a healer and magic-caster.

The Vizjeri clan of magi stemmed from Diablo's Sorcerer hero. They believed all humans held the potential for greatness, and must strive to tap into it and take their place as one of the three great forces of the universe, alongside angels and demons. Vizjeri heroes included the Rune-warrior, a fighter whose body tattoos granted passive bonuses such as increased speed and damage, as well as shapeshifting powers; the Summoner, who raised demons and elemental creatures; and the Wizard, able to blast enemies with elemental magic.

Scandizzo's proposal was rounded out by the Resistance, a cabal of down-and-dirty survivalists fervent in their belief that humanity must prepare itself for another war against demons and win at all costs. Their heroes spanned the Slayer, who harvested demon organs and body parts to wear as armor, and whose attacks dealt greater damage against demons and other types of monsters; the Exorcist, who wore demon body parts as totems that increased their powers, and commanded spells such as mind flay and heart burst; and the Beastmaster, who controlled creatures ranging from golems made of trees or clay to griffins, spirits, and chimera.

Diablo III's factions and classes were in constant flux over the next several years. Max Schaefer like the idea of three factions with three hero classes apiece, but some employees expressed doubt that they had the resources to design nine unique heroes. Other developers worried that three classes per faction may not be enough. Players would expect more variety between factions. In the months after Lord of Destruction's release, there was a push to get busy defining each faction: what made them cool? How would players easily recognize a class belonging to one faction or another? Where would they be based in Sanctuary's geography? What were their motivations, their culture, their history, their religions?

By November 2001, the factions and heroes had changed. The Order devoted itself to the way of the light, employing Crusaders (a knight-in-shining-armor archetype), Archer (ranged attacker evolved from Diablo's Rogue), and Wizard (an old-school, D&D-style spellcaster who lobbed fireballs and healed allies) to its cause. The Progeny were descended from the Barbarians who had guarded the Worldstone and were now hellbent on redemption after failing to protect it from Baal's corruption and subsequent destruction. Their heroes were the Slayer, covered in scars; the Elementalist, master or mistress of fire, lightning, and ice, similar to Diablo II's Sorceress; and the Shaman, an evolution of Lord of Destruction's Druid who commanded animals. Finally, there was the Dark, a motley crew of Mercenaries (fighters), Warlocks (a magic class), and Summoners, who brought forth demons instead of animals.

Creative types like Michio Okamura and Joe Morrissey had ample time to dream up factions and heroes, which were disassembled and remade as months dragged on. The Legion was made up of Legionnaire fighters, Archons who cast magic gleaned from divine tomes, and the Bowman who picked off enemies from afar. The Highlanders faction collected the Juggernaut, a brick wall of a fighter influenced by Marvel's Hulk superhero; a Shaman whose magical abilities came from the earth; and the Shifter, able to assume the forms of wolf, bear, and snake. The Outsiders came from the Dark faction. The Slayer was joined by the Infernalist, wielder of dark magic, and the Shade, an Assassin-like character who turned an enemy's strengths against it.

Throughout the team, technology and opinions fluctuated. The bosses and many senior artists embraced 3D graphics as the industry's future. They could build radical new dungeons that incorporated features such as height and layers to change up gameplay. "It was an experiment," explained Dave Glenn, artist. "Now that we're dealing in the third dimension, how can we use that to enhance the click fest? Because it starts to get tricky when you have monsters that don't recognize that you're right above them. We ended up in a boss arena that had a couple different levels."

"I wanted to go 3D big-time," said John Kubasco, artist. "For me, modeling is... How do I say this without sounding like an ass? Modeling, to me, was something that kind of came really easily. Modeling was like, oh, okay, let me model this thing and kind of get it out of the way."

Not everyone was convinced. "I was kind of resisting the 3D workflow. I wasn't comfortable with it because I'm a fairly messy artist," said Evan Carroll. Evan dragged his feet when Blizzard North switched from 3D Studio to Maya. Modeling and rigging (adding a skeleton-like framework to characters) required exponentially more work than painting and animating sprites. "I didn't realize the level of discipline involved. Your models had to be structured a certain way, and you had to pay attention to polygon count, something I felt almost genetically incapable of doing. It was just a working method I was having a lot of trouble with."

Other artists raised practical considerations. The two Blizzards had sold millions of games based on their reputation for two things: addictive gameplay, and appealing to as many consumers as possible, not just those with the latest and greatest PC hardware. Many developers also pointed out that the first wave of 3D consoles such as PlayStation and Sega Saturn blasted out ugly, muddy graphics. "I had reservations about going 3D, and they were partially based on the fact that many 3D games of the day looked great, but most tended to have a blurry texture quality," said Ben Boos. "There was a sharpness to 2D that I liked."

At meetings, Ben and other artists proposed the team design Diablo III as the most elaborate and detailed 2D game ever. Their reasoning was logical. Creating 3D games mandated that artists design every square inch of polygonal terrain, because there was no way to predict how players would control the camera. "I didn't think Diablo benefitted from examining the world at all angles," Ben continued. "The isometric view was conducive, I thought, to the sprite system. Why go through all this trouble to go 3D if you're really not going to be running around in first-person like in Quake?"

For Anthony Rivero, who headed Diablo III's character artists, there was one simple reason to switch over to 3D graphics. They were the future. Blizzard North had to embrace standards and trends. He also pushed for the team to specialize, assigning artists to tasks based on their strength rather than everyone touching every part of a character. There again, his reasoning was straightforward. Animators were excellent at animating, so why have them waste time modeling and texturing? "That's how big studios work," he argued. "Their modelers are modeling, their animators are animating. There's a reason for that. You have to do something every day to get good at it."

Other meetings revolved around the subject of business models. Some argued that Diablo III should charge a monthly subscription, like EverQuest. A perpetual revenue stream would enable Blizzard North to fund servers, perform maintenance, and keep a team assigned to rolling out content as a way to encourage current players to keep up with the game and new players to jump in and take advantage of a steady supply of things to do. Other developers pointed out that Diablo and Diablo II had carried a one-and-done cost, so the third game should as well. "I think you have to go with one business model and run with it," Max said. "Free players, paying players—you're splitting up your community. It makes each group think the other is getting treated better, and everyone's resentful. It's a nightmare."

Most developers left meetings in low spirits. Every gathering was a waste of time during which camps would shout and argue over what a growing majority felt were pointless decisions. Once, someone made an impassioned case for spelling magic with a c instead of a ck. "Looking back on those meetings, they were fun, but I remember that in particular," said Evan Carroll. "We got into a half-hour discussion about that topic, and it had no relevance to what we were actually doing."

Most meetings repeated the same discussions and arguments. In an ideal world, someone would have taken notes to keep meetings on track and moving forward. That wasn't the bosses' style. "Max was kind of like that," Michio explained. "He likes things to be organic. He's the Bay Area guy, right? He didn't want to have structure and follow certain kinds of rules. But to a large extent, unless you're having a brainstorming session, you've got to know what the meeting's for."

Diablo III presented an opportunity for Max as a leader. He was friendly and quick to laugh and joke around. He afforded his developers the freedom to experiment and iterate. However, one reason his style had worked on Lord of Destruction was because the team had been small and well-versed in Diablo II's content-creation pipeline. Diablo III was different: new tech, larger team, more egos and in-house factions.

To Max, Diablo III was still in preproduction. They could take their time freewheeling. Big decisions that locked in ideas would come later. "There probably were quite a few meetings where we discussed things that would have to be decided later, because it was good to discuss them early and we had to have people thinking about something. Maybe it didn't resolve any concrete decisions, but it wouldn't be appropriate to really make a concrete decision before you can act on it completely. But that's maybe a fair criticism, though."

There was also the fact that, to most of Diablo III's developers, Max was a cool guy, but not the boss of bosses. "Max would bring the hammer down when he needed to, but it always kind of felt like it was Dave's show," Joe Morrissey said. "If Dave said, 'This is what we need to do,' then everyone fucking got in line behind him. It was crazy how much respect that guy would command even though he kind of checked out for two years. We were still waiting for him to bring down the greatness that was Dave Brevik."

Dave Brevik's deeds spread through the office to new employees like legends passed down from generation to generation. "This is something on which I can't speak authoritatively, but I heard it referenced a number of times and I know enough about the time period to comment on this," said Bruno Bowden, programmer. "I understood that a lot of the success of Diablo 1 and II came because of Dave Brevik. He was very dedicated to making those games successful. [But after those games,] Dave went through a divorce and spent much of his time playing EverQuest. It seemed like there wasn't much of a driving force in the studio after that by the time I arrived."

Max was aware of how the bulk of Blizzard North's staff viewed Dave. He viewed his friend and business partner the same way. Even so, he didn't think Dave needed to swoop in and wave his magic decision-making wand. "We got Lord of Destruction out on time and it did extremely well," Max said, "so I don't think [Dave's lack of leadership] really affected how we were working. I would say that maybe we could have used more technical acumen on the product and just some of that force of will that Dave could summon when necessary. But at the same time, we were trucking along and it wasn't like he had a ton of ideas and input that he wasn't able to do because he just didn't have time."

Joe Morrissey alternated between frustration and resignation. "It's funny when I think about it because I felt like I was always really busy: working, coming up with stuff. But I hadn't realized then that a lot of what I did as a writer for Diablo III was a lot of shadows-on-the-wall [puppetry]. Unless somebody built it or coded it, I might as well be in a room by myself having conversations with the walls."

MAX'S FREWHEELING STYLE left a void in Diablo III's team. As on Project X, that leadership void started the size of a pinhole that widened to a Worldstone-sized rift. Developers saw the void, and moved to fill it.

"The stronger a personality was, the more they could garner support from people," explained Joe Morrissey. "The belief was that you could then convince Dave, Max, and Erich to do what you wanted to do because you had the support of a large portion of the team, and they weren't necessarily directing. In a lot of ways I think they kind of checked out after Diablo II. They were kind of just burnt out along with everyone else."

Cliques ran rampant. There were smaller groups: artists and programmers who worked together every day, friends who always took lunch together. On a larger scale, cliques became factions. Mike Scandizzo thought of one as the old guard, developers who had been Condor's earliest hires and who often expressed resentment that other, newer hires had cut in line, and that the three bosses had not made good on their promises to take care of them after selling Condor. Some employees who'd joined after the sale sympathized with them, making them a de facto part of that group.

Another party, which Scandizzo dubbed the ambitious, was composed of developers who had been hired during or soon after Diablo II's development and who pushed themselves to make their mark on the company and its products. "They saw that now there was this channel by which people were being designated by leads, and when an opportunity presented itself, you take it. By showing yourself as being self-motivated and highly productive, that was how you moved up in the company; seniority meant nothing. Sitting around for five years doesn't make you worthwhile. Going out and making a bold move was what moved you forward."

Anthony Rivero made moves as bold as his character designs. During the development of Diablo II, he had been desperate to break away from the herd. For hours each day, Dave Glenn and Max Schaefer, close friends but political opposites, wrote lengthy emails proselytizing their beliefs—a means of communication only marginally less grating to Anthony than the old office in Redwood City, where Glenn and Max had shouted across the hall for hours. "I can remember reading these email threads and thinking, Oh my God. We're never going to ship anything with this fucking crap going on. These guys are writing dissertations," Anthony recalled.

Anthony clicked with artists who were as hard-working as he was. Along with Cheeming Boey and Evan Carroll, Anthony found an empty conference room near Karin's area at the front of the office and moved in, designating it the art pit. It was their base, a place where they could shoot the breeze while they worked.

"I think toward the end of the project, a lot of people were really not pulling their weight anymore," said Boey, who was even more outspoken in his belief that everyone at the company should work hard and take every opportunity to make their projects shine. "The art pit was like the last frontier. It was basically a group of character artists that were still very invested in the game."

The art pit was also conceived out of practicality. Artists who worked on the same project were more efficient if they shared the same space. "I looked at what other companies were doing at the time to see what worked," Anthony said. "I do like to be efficient. I don't like to work extra hours if it's unnecessary. If you work smarter, you don't have to work ridiculous hours all the time. That's part of the solution [to solving development crunch]."

The artists in the pit devised a routine. Everyone would draw concepts of characters, and Anthony would choose the best one to be integrated into the game. Developing a workflow was one step in his push for greater efficiency. "Boey was a stronger animator than I was, for instance. I would have him animate characters that I built, like the Druid's werebear. He also did all the werewolf stuff."

John Kubasco wandered in and out of the art pit. He was friends with Anthony, Boey, and Evan, but he had his own office. Anyone viewed unfavorably by the art pit's inhabitants learned to steer clear. "There were certain guys who wouldn't go into the art pit, because those guys were very cliquey," said Kubasco. "There was a lot of shit being flung in the art pit. If you weren't friends with the art pit guys, you didn't go in there."

"It wasn't that we wanted to be negative, but because we were constantly questioning why the rest of the company wasn't working," Boey explained. "When you question enough, that becomes a statement very soon. Because nothing is happening. A question of 'Why?' can turn into the effect when you keep asking the questions you ask."

Scandizzo designated Blizzard North's third major faction as loyalists, developers whose pay and position in the company hierarchy was determined to an extent by their friendships with the bosses. Bill Roper seemed like a nice guy to Joe Morrissey. Although Bill had come from Blizzard South, immediately making him suspect to many, Bill played board games with Stone Librande and other late-night dice-rollers, worked with Joe on fleshing out ideas for characters and histories on Diablo III and Project X, and had received nods of approval from the big three.

Other developers resented Bill. "I don't think he had the best relationship with some of the older employees because they felt like they felt like he jumped in front of them in line, since he started as a peer to Dave, Max, and Erich," Joe said. "You had these guys that had been around for a long time who thought, 'Dude, you're just a guy who recorded sounds for WarCraft, and now you're trying to tell us what to do?'"

The art pit was one example of Scandizzo's political classifications. Others recognized those parties—if not explicitly by Scandizzo's titles for them—and deemed it necessary to throw in with one or risk being ostracized by all. "Because I came in knowing Mike Scandizzo, I immediately fell into one of the groups," said Tom Ricket, programmer. "Here were these eight people who were, at least some degree, in a faction, and we're against these guys. For half of any given day, factions wouldn't make a difference. But you could definitely see when you came in that there were several different groups all in their own orbits."

Politics extended to disciplines. During a trip to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, Alan Ackerman bumped into one of the character artists. "He walked in and said, 'Oh, you're a new guy,'" Alan remembered. "I said, 'Not that new. I've worked here for a while. I'm on the environment team.' He said, 'Oh. A background artist.' And he left. What the fuck?"

Dave, Max, and Erich knew about the factions, and alternated between wringing their hands or ignoring the chaos. "I think the cracks were starting to show when Blizzard North's size got big enough that we started to see factions of people just by virtue of geography," Max said, referring to locations in the office. "That was something that we, on a managerial level, weren't ready to take care of. And while we were trying to keep all that together, we were literally splitting into two teams. That's an almost natural faction-maker structure, but it was something we wanted to do, also. I don't think growing larger worked to our advantage."

"We got into smaller cliques since most of us would only work with half the company," agreed Steven Woo.

Rampant politicking and inertia across both projects widened rifts. "When you start to have morale issues, you then have to step in, make some changes, do something about it," said Anthony. "I don't think Max, Erich, and Dave were good at that. That culture works when everybody's firing on all cylinders, but I don't think that was the case with everybody."

None of the bosses wanted to be the bad guy. "I never like to fire people, but we probably should have looked at those guys a little bit closer," admitted Erich.

"To be extraordinarily blunt about it, I think we should have let some people go," Max said. "I think we probably should have let some people go that seemed to always be the troublemakers and negative influences. It was always our instinct to try to work through things and make people like each other and end the problems. But you really can't do that all the time. If you have seventy people in an office, you probably have one or two that need to get fired."

As 2002 wore on, Blizzard North's size bothered Erich Schaefer. Too often he found himself passing employees he didn't recognize in the hallway. He, Dave, and Max had never daydreamed of building an empire. That was Blizzard South's vision.

"We should have kept it around the Diablo II size," Erich said. "But it's easy to say 'In retrospect...' We made a lot of attempts to try to make leadership positions for people and try to get more than one project going. Those things make good business sense, but to me, we should have just kept it small. Our management styles weren't good for that. We couldn't manage that many people too well, so our attention to the projects and the team got diluted because of the breadth of teams and projects. If I have a regret—which I don't really; I have to say everything back then was pretty cool—but if I could go back and redo it, that would be my big change: Keep it small."

Chapter 24: Axes and Cyclones

At that time in the company, X person goes into their office, and who knows what they're doing? We were a bit rudderless.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

The engine situation was resolved in that Jason was working on one of the projects and Rick was working on another, and two engines were formed. A brilliant move by management: "Let's not deal with the politics of the situation. Instead we'll just make everybody happy." Nobody was happy.

-Dave Brevik, co-founder, Blizzard North

I pushed everything. I pushed really hard back then.

-Tyler Thompson, programmer, Blizzard North

FOLLOWING DIABLO II's launch in June 2000, employees went in three directions. Max Schaefer and Tyler Thomson cajoled and badgered developers to join a team to work on Lord of Destruction; afterwards, most members of that team formed the vanguard of Diablo III's production. Another flock of employees drifted to the opposite side of the office and ran through iteration after iteration on Project X.

Anyone uninterested in continuing Diablo II or joining a project that seemed unable to find a creative foothold were given implicit freedom—by way of Blizzard North's egalitarian culture—to follow their own muses. "People took it upon themselves, semi-unauthorized, to start working on this stuff," Dave Brevik explained.

Jon Morin came to Steven Woo with an idea. He had gotten his hands on a development kit for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, a full-color portable system that ran games reminiscent of the 16-bit Super Nintendo. The kit resembled a game cartridge. Programmers and artists could write custom software to the kit's microchip by compiling code, writing the data to the kit, and plugging it into the GBA as if it were a regular cartridge.

"Jon asked me to help out," said Steven, programmer. "I got [a kit], too. They were only like 100 dollars when official development systems cost a lot more. It was something at a scale that one could conceivably finish without the huge teams that PC and full-size console projects were, then and now, sucking all the air out of the room."

Jon and Steven asked Alan Ackerman if he'd like to lend his artistic talents to their project, a full-fledged Diablo title for GBA. There would be multiple character classes and oodles of treasure to loot and monsters to kill. Alan agreed, and in turn recruited his friend Stefan Scandizzo. Kenny Williams joined as a producer, and the ad hoc team wrote up a proposal, which they pitched to Dave Brevik.

"I thought it was great idea," Dave said. "Hell, a Diablo-lite game with a town and lots of dungeons? I'd eat that up."

Blizzard South's managers read the proposal and pushed the team to develop the game for Nintendo's classic, black-and-white Game Boy. The GBA was newer and more powerful, but the old-school Game Boy had a much larger share of the handheld market. Jon Morin was the point man on the project. He christened the game Diablo Junior and wanted it to appeal to kids, Nintendo's target demographic for Game Boy. Diablo's action-heavy gameplay was simple enough for kids to grasp. The idea that electrified the team was Jon's suggestion to incorporate a trading element similar to Nintendo's Pokémon games. Released in red and blue cartridges for Game Boy in 1998, each edition of Pokémon contained exclusive pocket monsters that players had to trade by connecting their handhelds via the Game Boy Link Cable. Diablo Junior's editions would include unique items for players to swap.

"We had a lot of really cool ideas, and I think it would have done well," Jon said. "For one thing, it had the Blizzard name on it, and it was a Diablo product, and you had the whole trading concept which was so popular back then."

The team came up with several story ideas before deciding that Diablo Junior would be a prequel to the first game. There would be three major cities, each leading players toward the center of the world and encounters with hordes of monsters and bosses. "The original idea, I think, was there were going to be three or four classes, and which class you picked determined which city you started in," Alan recalled.

After leaving their starting city, players would enter one of two common areas. For example, a knight and spellcaster might enter plains reminiscent of Diablo II's first Act, while another class would set foot in a desert. "So you could play as the knight and you start in a different city. It's a unique area for you, but then one area is shared after that, and then another area is shared," Alan explained.

Jon and Steven created a development environment on their computers. Alan and Stefan created art assets for characters, items, and dungeons that resembled the cathedral stages from Diablo. They committed to nothing. Early assets were meant as experiments, quick and simple tests they threw together just to get the hang of developing for Game Boy and following the Blizzard North model of getting a prototype running to see how it looked and played.

The team had just hit a major milestone, getting a character roaming through a dungeon, when Blizzard South contacted the bosses with concerns. "From what I remember the Blizzard South guys ran it through the accounting and determined that it was too risky financially," said Steven.

Developing and selling software on cartridges for Nintendo hardware was like trying to hit a moving target. Nintendo charged so much money per cartridge, and cartridges had to be ordered through Nintendo. That meant developers had to predict how many units they believed they would sell long before a game was finished.

A cartridge bearing the Diablo name was almost a sure thing, but almost wasn't good enough for South. "Blizzard Entertainment looked at it, and they were kind of like, 'Well, we've never done a Game Boy game, so we've got no experience marketing that type of game,'" said Alan. "When you do a Game Boy game, you buy the cartridges from Nintendo. If you think your game's going to sell 50,000 units, you buy 50,000 cartridges from Nintendo and they make a profit on that."

Selling more units than the estimate could be an even bigger financial headache. If a cartridge game sold out, the publisher had to order more through Nintendo. Cartridges were shipped by boat and could takes months to arrive. From there, they had to be manufactured, boxed, and sent to retailers. If a game's appeal had faded by the time the next batch of software hit stores, they might not sell, eating into profit made from selling the first round.

"There was lots of risk in this project because there's lots of ways you can lose money doing console games," Alan continued. "On the other hand, we thought the Diablo franchise might do well. They got back to us and said, 'It's your call. You know all the risks. Are you that keen on this that you want the company to take that kind of risk?'"

Jon, Steven, Alan, Stefan, and Kenny laid out their predicament for Dave Brevik. He left the decision to move forward or cancel in their hands. Undecided, Alan met with a friend in the industry who had worked on console games, and who ran down warning signs to look for before committing to a project. Was it the first time a team had worked together? Were they working on an unfamiliar platform? Although they'd worked together on Diablo II, the Diablo Junior project was their first time as a group. More troubling, this was the first time anyone had worked on the Game Boy platform.

They decided to move on. "I kind of look back and regret that we didn't say, 'Let's do it,'" Alan said. "But at the same time it was probably a good call. If I hadn't know about the whole cartridge-profit-margin thing, I would have said, 'Sure.' But having to guess how many cartridges was going to sell? You're kidding me. Why does anyone even make cartridge games?"

Elsewhere in the office, another nascent team was in talks with Capcom. The Japanese publisher wanted to develop a console version of Diablo under Blizzard North's supervision. Unlike the port of Diablo to PlayStation, released in 1998 by developer Climax and publisher Electronic Arts, Capcom pitched a prequel that went back thousands of years to when demons first invaded the world of Sanctuary.

The bosses liked the idea, and a small team came together. Bill Roper would serve as producer, with Michio Okamura directing the art side. Joe Morrissey worked with Capcom on the story, and Mike Scandizzo and Pete Brevik advised on engineering. "[The game with Capcom] was on-going," Pete said. "When there's time, you work on it, but you're also working on the expansion for Diablo II and stuff like that."

Michio was involved because he had been responsible for establishing the vision for much of Diablo's world and denizens, and for his fluency in Japanese. He attended meetings and translated back and forth between Japanese developers from Capcom Production Studio and his English-speaking peers. "It was really exhausting, having to be part of a meeting where you're not just translating but you're also involved in it. When you're just translating, it's easy; you're just going back and forth. But if you have to translate, and while you're translating you have to think about and contribute to the meeting..." He shuddered at the mere thought of the workload he'd taken on. "Oh, God."

Per early story documents for the game, Sanctuary had been created by angels and demons, but kept off the grid so no powerful entities could find it and manipulate the world or its populace. Eventually, demons sent word of Sanctuary to Diablo, who co-opted it to build a gateway to hell.

Capcom wanted to develop its Diablo game for PlayStation 2, and fill it with more diverse characters and locations. "There was going to be more of an Asian theme to it," Joe said. "We were working with Capcom, so we thought we'd do some Japanese stuff with it."

Meetings were held at North's office in San Mateo, or out in Japan. Blizzard North's team played a supervisory role. Joe Morrissey kept tabs on Capcom's story. Michio made sure the characters and areas they pitched were in line with Diablo's themes and flavors. Mike Scandizzo shared all the knowledge he had learned architecting Diablo II's multiplayer components to assist with Capcom's networking models.

The North team's excitement grew with every concept illustration and story document Capcom sent. When the first gameplay demo arrived, Blizzard North's five-man team convened in the game room and booted it on a PlayStation 2 imported from Japan. The silence was deafening.

"It was crap. It was comical how bad it was," Joe said.

Michio grimaced. The animations were jerky and amateurish. The combat had no weight, no follow-through behind sword swings and magic spells. "It just wasn't fun," he remembered. "We thought everything was good, but when they actually started executing it, they just couldn't. Either they couldn't or they just didn't want to."

After playing the demo, Bill Roper sent an email that politely but firmly severed the relationship. Both parties moved on.

Over time, the five-man team arrived at a conspiracy theory.

"The impression was they weren't going to quit our relationship because that would be bad form," said Joe, "so they would deliver something that would make us break up with them, so to speak." [SQ1]

RICK SEIS WAS one of the employees content to occupy a middle ground between Project X and Diablo III.

He had been with Blizzard North over six years, and had played integral roles on every project. He had received raises along with sizable royalty checks. Those checks never quite amounted to the amount he believed the bosses owed him, but that was a battle to be fought—yet again—another day.

There would be no battle on this day late in the summer of 2000. For the moment, he was done fighting Blizzard North's fight. "In general, once Diablo II was done and Destruction was moving, I kind of didn't want to have a part in it. I was done with the Diablo universe for a while. I didn't want to jump from one project to another. I had earned time to relax."

For a time, Rick did nothing. He came into the office, played games with his friends, took long lunches, then went home. He and Karin Colenzo began dating, and were married in 2005.

By 2001, what Rick was interested in doing, what he had earned the right to do, was pick and choose how to spend his time. He knew just the thing: Program an engine to run 3D games. Fellow programmers Ted Bisson and Jon Morin.

Rick wrote a proposal to the three bosses outlining his plan. He, Jon, and Ted would write a 3D engine that would power Blizzard North's games… eventually. "We weren't meant to be working quickly or anything like that," Rick explained. "We were going to do this in a methodical way, and ideally we'll develop an engine that could be used on projects. That was the high-level goal: one, for letting us learn; and two, for a long-term engine for everyone."

The bosses agreed that Rick had earned both time and autonomy in choosing his next project. "He'd been there for a while and he wanted to do it, and we didn't say no very often," said Max Schaefer.

A new hire to Blizzard North's programmers, Bruno Bowden, saw the lethargy on Project X and asked if he could throw in with the engine team. "Initially when I joined, the reason for Rick, Ted, and Jon working on their own engine was for learning. I was working with them, so I thought, Okay, that's reasonable. I can learn as well."

Jon Morin was excited about the engine, which the group dubbed Cyclone. They sat together at work to swap ideas, notes, and experiments. At night, Jon took his code home to continue working. He put together a software renderer that output polygonal shapes on the screen, and delighted in his progress.

A game engine is like a container able to hold many things: physics calculations, collision detection, playback for audio and music, networking protocols, animation routines, managing memory. Cyclone's team had a clear vision for what their engine would do, and what it would not. "You have your game engines like Unreal 3.0 and Gamebryo and Unity," Rick said. "Those are full-fledged engines. They give you tools, authoring, even ways to handle events and objects and everything. From our point of view, we were the rendering engine. That's all we were."

Bruno's job was to write an exporter that pulled character models and other graphics data from Maya and imported it into Cyclone. Bruno quickly ran into a problem. Artists on both teams—Project X and, after Lord of Destruction shipped, Diablo III's MMO variant—were busy drawing concept artwork because neither team was in a position to know precisely what type of game they were making. Diablo III would be an MMO, but there seemed to be disagreement over whether it would be 2D or 3D, and those in favor of 3D graphics were still learning how to make them.

A second problem reared its head after several months. A second engine, Axe, sprung up. Months prior, Jason Regier squirreled himself away in a far corner of North's office. The farthest corner one could reach, in fact. To find him, one had to venture down a long hallway. His isolation was intentional. He had worked at Bungie Entertainment, maker of Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox and myriad PC games such as the Marathon series of first-person shooters for Apple's Mac computers.

Like Rick and the Cyclone engine, Jason had help. "When we were doing the real-time strategy heroes game, we went in and came up with a way to build terrain," recalled Marc Tattersall, artist. "This was all new because we were working in 3D. It was all new technology, all new code. We were building tools on the fly as we were working. And our team was amazing. I think I was on the best team."

Artists from both Project X and Diablo III seemed to prefer Axe. "They could import their work into [Cyclone], but it was clear when you compared our engines that Jason's was ahead," Bruno said. "Artists care a lot about how things work. They like their stuff to look good, and it looked better in Jason's engine."

The Axe team consisted of Jason Regier, Marc Tattersall, and programmers Jon Stone, Tod Semple, and Jeff Gates. Tod and Jeff were friends of Jason's who had followed him from Bungie. "At that time I really wanted to do something really new, and something really different than what I'd done before," remembered Jon Stone. "3D was just an obvious direction to take things going forward. It was really an easy decision for me. Having spent so much time in the Diablo universe, the idea of working on something new was really appealing. It was an easy decision for me."

Jason, Tod, and Jeff worked as a unit. Someone on the team would have an idea in the morning, and they would have it up and running later that night complete with artwork supplied by artists. "It was really awesome," Marc continued. "Those guys were 'Let's drop everything and do this right this second. Go-go-go!'"

Their alacrity benefitted the Axe team's morale. At first, the understanding was that Axe would power Project X. Every time the project direction changed, the Axe team took artwork and wrote code to produce playable demos so the team could get hands-on with their experiments. Every time, the demos were thrown out when X shifted, becoming some other type of game. Fortunately, code could be recycled. While many of Axe's developers were new to coding a 3D engine, Jason and his friends caught on quickly.

Axe's team had different goals than the Cyclone group. For one, Jason never intended to produce just a renderer. He wanted tools, AI—the whole shebang. Rick knew of Axe's existence, but had no problem with it. The three bosses knew he was writing an engine as well, with the primary goal to learn. Rick's problem was with Jason's attitude. "Jason was difficult during the crunch because, since he had engine experience, he was sort of assigned the Diablo engine bugs."

There had been a process on Diablo II for handling bugs: Blizzard South's QA team banged on the game to test it, and any bugs they filed were assigned to Rick, who, as the lead programmer, distributed them to the North programmer in charge of specific areas. Bugs related to graphics went to Jason, since the graphics renderer in Diablo II's engine was his responsibility. Rick had monitored the status of all bugs through a task program. Time and again, he had watched as Jason's bugs were closed or reassigned to another programmer.

Jason's methodology for handling bugs had not endeared him to the other programmers. Citing a specific incident involving Jon Morin, Rick remembered watching over Jon's shoulder as a graphics bug that had been put on Jason's to-do list was reassigned, by Jason, to Jon. Jon bounced the task back to Jason. Seconds later, Jason offloaded the bug onto someone else. "That was sort of indicative of the frustration of some people who got a lot of bugs from Jason."

There had been other complaints. According to Mike Scandizzo, Ted Semple, a junior programmer whom Scandizzo thought of as one of Jason's acolytes, had thrown his weight against Karin Colenzo soon after he was hired. By Scandizzo's account, Semple had told Karin that he was a programmer and she was just in human resources, so she should fall in line when he spoke. "Since Karin was part of the old guard, that led to bad feelings among the old guard. No one gives Karin crap. She works hard, she keeps to herself, she puts in more than her share of hours, and she takes care of all of us. She was referred to as the den mother. You don't tell her off on your first day as a junior programmer."

On another occasion, Stone Librande, a designer who came from a programming background, asked Jason for consent to implement a color-picker in one of Axe's tools. Programmers were used to seeing everything as numbers. They would as soon as input the hexadecimal value of an RGB (red-green-blue) color as use a graphical interface to click, say, the right shade of purple and paint on the screen. A color-picker would make selecting colors more intuitive for artists. Jason brushed off the request as a waste of time.

"I'm like, 'Well, the artists want to use this tool. They're going to want to look at the colors,'" Stone said. "And his reply was, 'If the artists can't type in RGB values, then they shouldn't be in the computer-gaming business.' That always struck me as, wow, pretty hardcore."

Not only did Jason get under the skin of his peers, his blatant disregard for Rick's authority as lead programmer on Diablo II demonstrated how easy it was to undermine anyone other than the three bosses. According to several programmers, Jason never asked for permission to write his engine. He had just decided to do it. Many developers shared rumors that Jason bounced bugs off his task list because he was busy working on his engine while the rest of the programmers were focused on Diablo II. "Enough people liked it that it sort of had momentum, and nobody was going to shut it down. So eventually it got blessed," Rick said.

"There's a lot of internal politics as to what people should be doing versus what they're actually doing," Dave said.

Rick was fine with the fact that artists and programmers could get builds up and running faster in Axe than in Cyclone. Jason and certain members of his team had been working on their engine longer than Cyclone's engineers had been working on theirs. There were even rumors that members of Jason's, Tod's, and Jeff's clique had taken code they'd written at Bungie to Blizzard North. But Cyclone had been conceived as a learning project first and foremost. There had been tentative discussions between Rick and the bosses that Diablo III would run on Cyclone, but only when the engine was ready.

What did not sit well with Rick was that Jason had elbowed his way to the front of a line. "I think in effect, what it did was shut other people out of things," Rick explained. "Either they were going for a lead, they wanted to learn engine architecture, or they wanted to lead something and it was their time. Jason came in fairly late, and now he's leading the engine team when nobody else was given an opportunity."

The bosses were aware of the bad vibes between the Axe and Cyclone teams. To a degree, they even encouraged the competition. They were less enthusiastic about the acrimony that resulted. "I thought that the competition of two distinct engines would have been good for the company in some ways," Dave said, referring to Blizzard North's long-standing tradition of pitting ideas against one another and letting the best come out on top. "But mainly, I just didn't want to deal with all the politics. There's the one guy that's kind of gone rogue, but he's actually making great progress, and then there's the guy who's not. I should have been more on top of it and said, 'You two need to get together; you two need to be working together. There's going to be one engine.' If I had to do it over again, it would be much different. The fact of the matter was, the end of Diablo II just killed me. I was just so, so burnt out that it took a long time for me to recover."

Dave had another reason for throwing up his hands. He had had his own run-ins with Jason, many boiling down to ideological differences. Jason wanted Axe to push out state-of-the-art 3D graphics. Dave supported that to a degree—the industry was moving in that direction, so it was prudent that Blizzard North do so as well—but insisted that graphics never interfere with gameplay. That had always been Blizzard North's secret sauce. Jason and some members of his group seemed less concerned with writing an engine that would facilitate development of Project X than with creating the most sophisticated, shiniest piece of tech possible.

"I had trouble relating to the team," Dave admitted. "A lot of them were fresh out of college and wanted to do 3D games and all this stuff. I wanted 3D to make it easier for us to create graphics, but I didn't want it to be 3D for the sake of being state-of-the-art. There was a lot of trouble communicating my vision and direction to a team that was not very interested in doing anything but the most high-resolution graphics."

What Dave had trouble admitting was that Jason had appointed himself the engineer of a train that was going too fast, and carrying cargo too important to the company, to be stopped. "I don't think Jason would have stopped even if I told him to stop. You run into this situation sometimes in business and game development: You'll have someone important to the team in some ways. Jason had experience creating 3D engines, a technology that did not exist at Blizzard North. We needed his expertise."

Rick and the rest of Cyclone's engineers soon found themselves facing roadblocks from other groups. Tyler Thompson's brashness during development of Diablo II and Lord of Destruction had rubbed Rick and many others the wrong way. Now Tyler was a lead programmer on Diablo III, in charge of the tools team. That put him on equal footing with Mike Scandizzo, head of networking, and Rick, leader of the engine that would bring Diablo III to life.

The tools and Cyclone teams often squabbled over minor differences. When the tools and Cyclone teams needed to share resources, a developer on the Cyclone side would send code. A tools programmer would modify it as needed and send it back, only for a Cyclone developer to notice that the tools engineer had changed things to match their preferred practices.

Bruno Bowden could not believe his eyes the first time he read code that had been altered in such a way. "It doesn't matter which practice was right. What was important was that they both agree on a standard, and that lack of agreement, I think, was symptomatic of broader challenges in collaboration between the teams."

"I think one of the bigger things is there were two leads," Rick said. "There wasn't a programming lead that could make the call and go, 'No, constant variables are good' or 'No, they're stupid.' I don't know that that slowed things down, per se, that grain of sand. I think the problem there was is there was no one manning the rest of that stuff."

Tyler relished a good debate and would argue his case for hours. According to his teammates, Rick tended to be more measured and diplomatic. Tyler's confidence could be misinterpreted as brashness, though Tyler himself admitted he never shied away from pushing as hard as he needed to for his ideas to prevail. He had gotten ahead at Blizzard North by pushing, so he pushed.

Joe Morrissey had his own opinions of Tyler after working with him on Lord of Destruction. Just as programmers and artists on Project X had to go hat in hand to Jason and ask for what they needed, Joe, who needed a programmer to integrate his writing for quests and dialogue, had been subject to Tyler's strong will and opinions. "At the time, Tyler kind of seemed like a pest," Joe said. "In hindsight, he was the person that actually wanted us to be making games. He was trying to drive the ship, but no one really respected him because it wasn't really his position to do that. That was a huge issue for me. I recall very specifically what I would have to do to get an engineer to do any of the work I felt needed to be done for the game. It was very much glad-handing and politicking the entire time."

AFTER MONTHS OF directionless meetings, Diablo III's developers found a new object for their irritation.

"I know the artists were getting frustrated by our speed of getting animation for them quickly," Rick admitted. "Artists need a pipeline; they need to start generating artwork, and if you know Diablo, it's got a fuck-load of artwork in it. It's got to start getting generated early. The longer the engine team takes, the longer it takes them to get their artwork done. So I know they were getting frustrated by it."

Rick was irritated was well. There had never been a timeline for milestones on Cyclone. Besides, the engine was coming together. It had reached a point where artists could see character models on the screen complete with keyframe animations. Watching keyframe animations play out was like paging through a flipbook: The animation was convincing, but missing steps between pages. What artists needed to see were boned animations, the movements of characters with skeletal riggings.

"It always felt like there was this competition," Rick said. "Like for me, I felt like I had to say, 'We are the rendering engine. We don't do anything without other components. Otherwise our thing just sits there waiting for triangles and shit to process.' I felt like I had to keep on repeating that all the time. We were a very senior team; I had Jon and Ted, who were very senior dudes like myself. We want to focus on the rendering; that's what we do."

Many on Diablo III's team understood the Cyclone team's objective to take their time learning. At the same time, years had gone by. Cyclone was becoming a bottleneck. "That was a key point of frustration to me, professionally, personally," said Tyler. "I don't want to be pointing fingers or anything along those lines, so I'm trying to be very kind about it. But it was not progressing well. If it had progressed well, whether there were two engines or not would not have been a problem."

Dave, Max, and Erich agreed. There had been an understanding that Rick's pet project would morph into a functional engine. "There were some people working on exporting technology, but the engine, the rendering itself, wasn't really happening," said Dave, "and that became a problem. Now eventually they ended up making something that you could actually see and play and stuff. But it was kind of a long time coming."

At long last, the Diablo III developers were gathered to witness Cyclone's grand unveiling. Rick battled a mixture of excitement and nerves. "Max called an all-team meeting so everybody could look at it, because he was excited about it. That was the way we wanted to prove that we were farther along than everybody thought we were."

Together with his team, Rick loaded up a short demonstration. A castle materialized on the screen, viewed from Diablo's familiar isometric camera angle. A knight walked around the castle. Cyclone's programmers watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation. They had hacked together a demo with spit and bubble gum. Collision detection was spotty in many areas, nonexistent in most. Characters could not walk on certain parts of terrain or the demo would crash.

None of that mattered when the Diablo III team expressed their enthusiasm. Rick was euphoric. "Just like how Diablo started: Get a guy on screen bashing something," he said of the demo. "It generates momentum. This is the same thing. That was our idea. Like, 'Listen, this can be done right now, with our engine.' Max said, 'Good job, guys,' and it was kind of a high time for our team and the game. Yet I think people wanted more of that from us, but that wasn't us. That wasn't our charter."

Months after the demo, Cyclone stalled out again. The bosses pulled the plug. That was the last straw for Jon Morin. "It was a much better engine; I admit it," he said of Jason's work. "But that was the third project I'd lost. I was sick of it. That led me up to getting ready to leave. Like, okay, fine. Just give me something to do. That's what I was doing the rest of the time, just odds and ends. I ended up working for Jason, and I just wasn't happy."

Rick, too, was angry. "If you look at it and evaluate it as a business person, having two engines was a dumb idea. You had some of your senior programmers on their own engine, when they should have been working on the engine that was much further along and learning 3D from that."

More than anything, he was resigned. "The annoying part was I think there was this perception that the engine closed because it was the engine's fault. While its progress could have been faster for sure, we weren't as far behind as I think people thought. I had already resigned myself to the way things were moving along in the company. I was waiting for its next rebirth into its next thing, because it was floundering at the time, trying to figure out what to do next."

BY EARLY JUNE of 2003, Diablo III was taking shape. It was still embryonic, but after nearly two years of stagnation, any progress was good progress.

Powered by Axe, the developers were able to create characters and run around environments. The team was rejuvenated. "It had a long way to go, but it showed pretty well. The guys down south were satisfied."

"We switched to [Axe], and then we started to see some real progress with things on-screen, which is what we valued as a culture," Tyler said. "We started seeing monsters and things like that, which was good."

Mike Scandizzo and Tom Ricket, a programmer hired to help Mike code network protocols, ran a test server from Mike's office. "At one point Tyler got a sample dungeon up and running," said Tom. "Mike and I had some networking stuff going. We could all jump into a dungeon with some stones, some torches. You could shoot a bow or use a weapon. Everyone said, 'Yes, that's going to be Diablo.' But nothing of what the character classes [were finalized]."

Project X and Diablo III were crawling forward. Slowly, morale began to climb.

Blizzard North was back on track.

Chapter 25: Bluffing

Dave's brother didn't even know, and I was pretty good friends with Peter at the time. I think he might have been the one who told me something big was going down on Monday, and Dave didn't tell him. He was his brother, and he wouldn't tell him.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

Things had just gone on and on, and we were like, "Well, the next step is to threaten with resignation. I mean, they can't have us leave. We just have to make sure they know how pissed we are."

-Erich Schaefer, co-founder, Blizzard North

ON AUGUST 7, 2002, the Wall Street Journal dropped a bomb on the two Blizzards. According to the paper's report, Vivendi had put its Vivendi Universal Games division on the auction block: Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard North, Sierra, Interplay, and its other development studios would be sold to the highest bidder.

The rumored sale was part of a plan by new Vivendi executive Jean-René Fourtou. Selling off the company's games division as a single unit could fetch as much as two billion euros, or $1.96 billion in 2002 dollars. Fourtou had dismissed the division as expendable almost immediately after joining Vivendi. His chief objective was to sell off $13 billion in assets by the end of 2004 in order to reduce over $20 billion in debt. The sale likely wouldn't happen soon, however. Fourtou would wait for the right price.

Almost six months later, he seemed to have found his match. According to sources who spoke to the New York Times under condition of anonymity, Microsoft was in talks to purchase some of Vivendi's game studios for as much as $1.5 billion.

Which studios? No one could say for certain. What the anonymous sources could say was that Microsoft, over eighteen months into the lifecycle of its first Xbox console, was willing to cut a large check based on the value of Vivendi Games properties such as Diablo, Half-Life, and StarCraft in an attempt to improve their first-party offerings and compete with Sony and Nintendo.

Either Microsoft's numbers were exaggerated or Vivendi expected more. Either way, reports of the purported deal fizzled, and news of the prospective sale of Vivendi Universal Games faded with them.

That summer, news reported suggested that Vivendi had been close to finalizing the division's sale for $800 million, only for the company to express dissatisfaction at the amount and continue searching for buyers. Pundits whispered that Microsoft was back in the running, as was Take-Two, parent company of Grand Theft Auto III developer Rockstar Games. The two juggernauts would split VU Games, with Microsoft taking PC and educational assets.

Respected games business site Gamasutra published its report on June 23, 2003, a Monday. Blizzard North's three bosses had watched the saga unfold over the past year like everyone else in the world: slowly, in dribs and drabs published by newspapers and gaming outlets. "For a year or two, Vivendi had been putting off discussion with us," Erich Schaefer remembered, "saying, 'We're trying to sell Vivendi Universal Games. Just bear with us until we figure out what's going to happen.' We just got fed up with waiting, and fed up with not knowing what was going on. We wanted to be more involved in those discussions."

Dave, Max, and Erich read every article with increasing trepidation. They had firsthand experience with parent companies wheeling and dealing while leaving studio managers in the dark: Stock worth millions one minute, thousands the next.

They had other concerns. "Almost the worst thing, though, was that they could be selling us to someone who wouldn't leave us as an autonomous studio who does whatever it wants," said Max Schaefer. "If they sold us to a games company like EA or Microsoft, they're going to have people who want to get into our business, for sure. It just seemed very weird and irrational to us about how we were reading about being sold, yet no one had ever talked to us about it. And that is scary."

"We didn't have golden parachutes or anything," added Dave Brevik. "What somebody could do is buy Blizzard, get all the IP, fire all the management, make a bunch of crap on the cheap, and soak all the money out of it, [then close the studio] which some people will do. So we wanted a little security."

Dave, Max, and Erich, along with Bill Roper, met to discuss the situation. Their best bet, they agreed, was to resign. Sales charts did not lie: Of all the companies in the VU Games portfolio, the two Blizzards were the most profitable. Diablo II and StarCraft sat perched at or near the top of bestseller lists, swatting away all comers including Sierra Entertainment's Half-Life (another member of the VU Games family).

Dave, Max, Erich, and Bill, along with Blizzard South's Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, shared positions of power, and the common goal of having more control over their destiny. If all the heads of Vivendi's most profitable games studios went so far as to tender their resignations, their corporate overlords would have no choice but to listen.

The bosses were confident in throwing their weight around. For years, the two Blizzards had thrived in spite of the constant turnover and scandals committed above them. None of Blizzard's founders even had contracts. They had remained installed at the head of their respective companies because they had held the positions when Davidson & Associates had purchased their studios in the mid-'90s. Those positions were tenuous, based only on the merit of their performance at market thus far.

It was settled. Bosses from the two Blizzards would get Vivendi's attention by threatening to walk. Once the fat cats began to sweat, the bosses would negotiate for a collective seat at the table: A "yay" or "nay" vote before their company was sold, as well as more money flowing into their studios. "The fact that there was any money leaving the loop was weird to us, because what are they doing?" Max said. "Why are we owned by these people? Why are they getting some of the money? Because several years ago they bought a company from Bob and Jan Davidson?"

The following Friday, Allen Adham made the first move. In an email that looped in Blizzard North's bosses, Allen tendered his resignation. Bill Roper and the bosses followed suit. Abruptly, Allen pulled his letter before anyone at Vivendi had responded. Dave, Max, Erich, and Bill quickly withdrew their resignations. For their bluff to work, they had to go all-in. Anything less would be perceived by Vivendi as hesitation.

Bosses from the two Blizzards mulled over the matter that weekend. North's leaders understood Allen's and Mike's reluctance to follow through on the threat. "I think there was a perfect storm of events at North, whereas that perfect storm didn't really apply to Blizzard South because they were knee-deep in World of WarCraft," Dave said. "Where they were—their state, their mentality—was just a lot different than Blizzard North, which was at the beginning of two new projects and had just finished Diablo II and the expansion. All of this uncertainly created a much different atmosphere at Blizzard North than it did down south."

"We didn't begrudge them not joining us because we did understand their own reasons for not wanting to," Max added.

By Monday, the last Monday in June, North's bosses reconvened and admitted they all felt the same way. As one, the three re-submitted their resignations. North's bosses knew there was a chance Vivendi would accept them.

"We knew was a possibility because it's pretty drastic for the whole group of directors in a division to say, 'We're threatening to resign,'" Erich admitted. "But we thought we were asking for very, very little. Just a promise to talk about things. We thought it'd be easy for them. On the other hand, for a variety of reasons, all of us were aware that they may well call our bluff, and that this might be the end."

Dave, Max, and Erich had reason to believe the bluff would work. Two reasons, in fact. "We'd threatened to resign before," Dave said. "In order for us to make any noise—because a lot of people above us didn't understand video games at all—we had to put some weight behind changes that we needed. Sometimes we'd do things like, 'You've got to do this or it doesn't make sense for us to work here anymore.' It was just giving weight to negotiations more than anything else."

The first time they had resigned had been a bid to get the ball rolling on Blizzard's royalty-sharing program. Managers from both Blizzards had formed the committee, but they'd had to present a united front to Cendant, their parent company at the time. Cendant's executives had seen the sense in their demand and had acceded.

The second time had been to negotiate a higher percentage of royalties through the program as the two Blizzards changed hands from parent company to parent company. After all, there was no guarantee that new owners would accept the same or similar terms. "It was deal-making," clarified Erich, "like, 'We've got to get a better percentage of these games into everybody's hands, or we should just quit and go do something new.' And they'd usually say, 'Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Don't quit, we'll make a new plan.'"

Both times, their bluff had worked. This time, they had less to lose. "There wasn't anything we were close to finishing, yet," Dave explained, "so we said, 'This is right for us. This will throw weight behind our cause.' We didn't have much to lose at that point. We were at the beginnings of these projects, so it'd be easier for us."

Later that week, Vivendi called their bluff and accepted their resignations.

Max was shocked. They were out—from Blizzard North, from Condor, a company he had co-founded. It was like he was watching events unfold through someone else's eyes. "When they were accepted and we realized that this was it—that's a very, very strange feeling. You know that you're going to leave. You have to tell everyone. It might screw up the company, it might screw up the jobs of your friends. There's a lot of adrenaline right after something like that happens, and you start thinking about how you tell everybody and what's going to happen now."

Dave's numbness melted away to surprise, which gave way to helpless anger. "Like, really? This is what you want to do? Really? Do you know what we've done for you guys?"

RICK SEIS ARRIVED early to the party at Joe Morrissey's house on Saturday, June 28. Cars clogged the driveway and lined the curb. The office was so large that the Project X and Diablo III teams hardly saw each other except when friends from either team went out to lunch or met in neutral territory to play games, so Joe had decided to throw a party for everyone to get together

Inside, Rick grabbed a plate and cut off a serving of a huge fish on a platter. He found a seat, then went in search of something to drink. Joe kept beer and soda in the basement, so Rick ambled down the stairs. As he reached for a beer, he caught movement out of the corner of one eye.

Dave Brevik was in a huddle with a few guys from work. Their backs were to him. Rick slowed and listened. In a low voice, Dave said something big was going to go down on Monday.

Rick fished out a drink and walked slowly back upstairs.

"Maybe it's the time Blizzard South is going to come in," he said. "And sure enough, they were there. I had a room by the window so I could always tell who was coming in, and sure enough, they were coming in. I thought, Okay. Let's see what happens."

Chapter 26: The Bosses

Some people thought it was a joke at first. It was totally out of the blue. From the looks on everybody's faces and the gasps, I don't think anybody knew they were going to be leaving.

-Karin Colenzo-Seis, office manager, Blizzard North

Honestly, my first groggy thought was: What a great April Fools' joke!' Then I realized it was June.

-Matt Householder, producer, Blizzard North

The floor dropped out from under me. That was Armageddon. That was the end of everything.

-Stefan Scandizzo, level designer, Blizzard North

I knew the night before. I think we went to dinner and they said, "We're gone."

-Chris Root, technical artist, Blizzard North

TOM RICKET PULLED into Blizzard North around 9:30 on Monday, June 30, 2003. He was an early bird. Most of his peers rolled in no earlier than 10:00. He was surprised, then, to notice extra cars in the parking lot. Taxis idled at the curb by the entrance.

Inside, Tom glanced at the glass walls of the conference room. The blinds were drawn. The door was closed. By the time he got to his seat, word was getting around. Blizzard South's bosses had flown up for a meeting. Something was up.

Many developers remained oblivious. Stone Librande was in his own world, putting the final touches on a presentation he planned to give later that day. "I had just prepared this gigantic map of the Starblo universe. I'd marked all these missions and everything with little pins. I'd just finished putting it together and was so excited to show it to everybody and to talk about it, this whole mission system."

Inside the conference room, Dave, Max, Erich, and Bill Roper talked with Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham, Frank Pearce, and Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment's chief operating officer. Everyone was on edge. No one knew quite how to proceed. "We talked about employees and any advice we had about how they could keep things going," Erich Schaefer said.

"It was an amicable parting from the South guys. We weren't resigning from them, and they understood everything that was going on," Max Schaefer added.

The PA system crackled, and Karin Colenzo asked everyone to gather outside the game room. Employees lined the walls, sat in chairs and beanbags. The room was quiet. Dave, Max, and Erich stood against one wall. Max's stomach was doing flips. "I was pretty freaked out. I'd never had to do anything like that."

Dave stepped forward and began to speak. The bosses had wanted a say in the possible sale of the two Blizzards. They had threatened to resign as leverage, and Vivendi had accepted. They would be gone by the end of the day.

Gasps rippled over the room. "Everybody was completely blindsided by Dave, Max, Erich, and Bill all leaving," said Scott Petersen, audio designer. "It wasn't even like, 'Oh, we'll be gone soon.' It was, 'We're out of here today.'"

"It's like knowing you could get into a car accident at any time," said Tom Ricket, programmer. "It could happen, statistically. Someone's going to pull out and it won't be my fault. But it's not going to happen. Blizzard was the same thing: Something weird could happen with Blizzard South, but it's pretty unlikely. Things are going to keep being the way they've always been."

Mike Scandizzo took the news as hard as many of the studio's longest-serving developers. "It's quite like waking up and hearing that the Twin Towers fell and saying, 'Well, that's just not true.' There's that disbelief."

After the announcement, Bill Roper and the bosses reconvened in the conference room with the visitors from Blizzard South to go over last-minute details. By the end of the day, they had packed up their desks and, per company policy, been escorted off the premises of the company they had built.

Each man was lost in his own thoughts. "It was positive and negative, just like any situation," Dave said. "I'm still very, very disappointed that I don't get to work on Diablo. Even to this day it's very disappointing. So in that way, it sucks. It's really terrible. Plus we built something very special. When you're there and it's the first time you're a part of something so special like that, you don't realize how special it is until later. Hindsight's 20/20. Everything we'd created, all the work we'd put into it the company and games, the money... We were coming up on ten years, and all of that went away, and it was a big blow."

Max Schaefer reflected on the legacy he and the team had built. "If anyone says their game is a 'something killer,' that's good if you're that 'something.' "If people still want to have a Diablo killer, as long as they're talking about that, I'm happy. I think Diablo II endures in part because an insane amount of work was put into it, and we made a lot of correct decisions and approached it from a consistent sensibility that the so-called Diablo killers—which to some extent are trying to be Diablo, yet something different—tried to replicate. I don't think that's ever a particularly good way to go about dethroning a game, copying it. People tended to copy the wrong things: Everyone had mana and health balls all the sudden. It would take a pretty talented group, well-funded, and a long schedule to equal [Diablo's] polish."

Erich Schaefer felt ready for the next phase of his life and career. "Leaving didn't feel like that strange a step to me. I've always owned my own companies, and Blizzard North was feeling more and more like it wasn't my company. I still liked working there, but it felt for some time like I was going to be moving on. I have no regrets at all. In fact we sometimes thought, We're kind of dumb for staying at Blizzard North because we can start up another company, and we don't even have to do as well, just pretty well, and we'll have a huge success. So we were pretty confident. Actually overconfident, because Flagship Studios didn't go that well. The only downside was leaving many friends behind, and the fact that it was a comfortable place to go into every day, and to work at a place I liked. That's what kept us there for so long, because really, in retrospect, we should have left right after Lord of Destruction."

Before Dave left, Mike Morhaime slipped into his office and closed the door. He and Allen really liked Dave, Morhaime said, and wanted him to stay on. Just Dave. Dave balked. "They put me in an impossible situation. That's too much to ask for somebody. It's just kind of a slimy approach."

While Dave viewed his parting from the Blizzard entity as cordial, he wondered what would become of Diablo III. "This was kind of a fight between us and Blizzard South all along. They had a lot of positive input, and some stuff that wasn't very positive, for Diablo and Diablo II. Feedback that was good, and feedback that wasn't so good. I think they felt like now they can take Diablo the direction they wanted to see it go. I don't think they really believed in our vision for Diablo III. I'm sure there were some people who were very, very hungry to get in there and work on the Diablo IP. But I don't think it was nefarious on their part."

Despite his mixed feelings on his long relationship with South's managers, Dave, like Max and Erich, looked back on North's legacy with pride. "I'm definitely proud of what we did there. Even if I can't stand to play the games," he added with a laugh, referring to his aversion, shared by many creators, to having anything to do with his creations after turning them over to the world.

Of the three bosses, Dave was the most candid regarding the mistakes he, Max, and Erich had made at Condor and Blizzard North. The culture they had fostered was a powerful motivator for dozens of people who had been given carte blanche to come up with the coolest ideas possible and then realize them: no need to ask permission, no need to cut through red tape. At the same time, they had held the reigns of their culture too loosely. They were the foundation of their studio, and had created many of the cracks that weakened it—a combination of ego, of not having a fallback plan when one or more of them could not or would not take charge, and an aversion to creating and enforcing rules.

"I mean, it's kind of a shame in a lot of ways," Dave continued. "It's not a tale of happiness. It's a tale of woe at the end. The fact is, I needed to get my ass kicked, and I think as a collective group, we may have been a little too big for our britches. So in that way some of it was probably self-inflicted. At the same time, we'd done some good stuff. I think that speaks for itself."

Chapter 27: The End of Everything

Paul and Mike pulled us into a room and told us who was no longer going to be with us. It was hard, because you couldn't say anything, couldn't react in any way.

-Karin Colenzo, office manager, Blizzard North

We're all sitting in our offices talking to each other on speakerphone: 'Did you get the email yet? Did you?'

-Marc Tattersall, artist, Blizzard North

The bosses were the iron curtain, and once the curtain was down, the flood came in.

-Rick Seis, programmer, Blizzard North

ON JUNE 30, 2003, the same day Blizzard North's bosses and Bill Roper left the office for the last time, Blizzard Entertainment issued a statement confirming their departure.

Outside, the gaming world read the announcement in a state of shock. Inside the studio, the dust had no time to settle: Blizzard South's bosses called another meeting and explained what would happen next. Over the next couple of weeks, every Blizzard North developer would meet with a manager from Blizzard South to discuss their position and find out where they fit in the next iteration of Blizzard North.

Rick Seis crossed his arms as he listened. Around him, IT gurus from Blizzard South crept from office to office like ninjas. "It wasn't like, 'Finally, we got those fuckers out,'" he said of Morhaime's speech. "It wasn't anything memorable, but certainly the results were, 'We're going to have to let people go. We're going to have interviews, and see who stays. You guys are going to just work on one project, now.' IT's locking down everything on your machines. Yet it's supposed to be this nice transition. No. We were interviewing for our jobs at Blizzard North again. You essentially were now an untrustworthy employee."

Morhaime ended his announcement by instructing everyone to stay in their offices until they received a summons to their interview. North's developers scattered in a daze. Working was out of the question. Nobody could focus. Froilan Gardner passed the time playing WarCraft III. Employees who still had access to their computers surreptitiously inserted blank CDs into their computer trays and copied over files from Project X and Diablo III for their portfolios.

Over emails, lunches, and video games, everyone had the same conversation. "We were still being paid at that point and didn't have anything to do while we were there," said Tom Ricket, programmer. "You were pretty much just focused on talking with your other team members about what was going on and how it would affect everyone."

"That's when you realize how much of your life was involved in the development process, how much you personally invested in this thing," said Chris Arretche, head of quality assurance. "That's part of what makes or breaks a game. At least for me, I realized how invested everybody was. It was nerve-wracking to say the least."

"Many people had been working for Condor and Blizzard North for a very long time, so the thought they might no longer work there seemed very alien to them," added Bruno Bowden, programmer.

Within the first hour of the bosses' departure, the atmosphere in the office darkened. "When the guys left and it came time for our interviews, and we learned that Blizzard South would be cutting some staff, everybody was out to save their butts," remembered Kelly Johnson, artist. "Anybody they had issues with, that was the time to stick it to them."

"I was like, I guess I should go talk to other people. That's when I realized how bad things were," said Fred Vaught, environment artist and expert in drawing and placing objects. He made his way to the art pit where Anthony Rivero, Cheeming Boey, and a few others worked. The moment he stepped into the conference-room-turned-artists'-lair, the pit went quiet. Rivero, Boey and the others glared at him until he backed out.

"For a second I thought, I'm going to try to reach out to the people I know," Fred continued. "Then I realized that everyone was making lists of people they wanted to see fired. It was like, wow. This is the end. This is how it all goes down. Everybody's in their corners, making lists of who they want to see fired. We were always off in our own worlds. It was very sad."

Alan Ackerman discovered he was an island unto himself. Like Fred, he had kept his head down and worked. Now he found himself without allies. "I was friends with Stieg. When Stieg left, I thought, Okay, well I'm friends with Bob Steele and a few other people. Then Bob left. When all the horrible stuff went down, I thought, Should I have been more political? But it just wasn't my style."

Phil Shenk wasn't content to hole up in his office and play games. He pounded pavement like a politician days away from November elections. "I was vying hard. I was going around to everybody that I thought had any kid of influence, that was likely to stay. I went to Michio, I went to Rick, I went to Anthony, I went to Boey, to all my art cronies and basically said, 'This is what I want to do. I want to be studio head. Would you guys support me?'"

Their responses were blunt. If they backed Phil, what would he do for them?

With Dave, Max, and Erich gone, what little check they'd had on politicking cracked open like one of the Chaos Sanctuary's seals. Eric Sexton witnessed it and was as dismayed as Kelly Johnson, Michio Okamura, and other Condor vets. In fact, he said, the bosses had left behind such a miss—bickering factions, projects in limbo—that he thought Blizzard South should have installed leadership of its own rather than promote someone from within North. No matter who they chose, that person was likely to have an agenda.

For many developers, the absence of North's bosses left a gaping hole in their stomachs and hearts. To others, their departure left a gaping hole in the studio's defenses. "There was a lot of ill will from many people in the company toward Dave, Max, and Erich," said Mike Scandizzo, programmer. "People saying, 'The reason this is all happening is because they abandoned us. If we were a family, they were our family, and they abandoned us.' That's how some people saw it."

Some developers acknowledged those ill feelings even if they did not share them. Dave, Max, and Erich had been the Iron Curtain of Blizzard North, shielding employees from any and all interference from Blizzard South. "A number of us saw the writing on the wall and went, 'Oh, shit,'" agreed Stefan Scandizzo. "They were the magic. They were the ones that were holding back the deluge of bureaucracy that was Blizzard South. We knew that without them, Blizzard North would be very different."

"Beyond their personalities as individuals, they had experience dealing with Blizzard South. No one else had that because they weren't founders of the studio," said Dave Glenn, artist. "Dave, Max, and Erich had extra leverage because of that, and a title couldn't replace that."

Blizzard North's crew had other problems that stemmed from the bosses leaving the company. "When that big layoff came, Allen, Paul, and Mike came up, and Allen didn't really have a clue as to who anybody was," explained Brad Mason, North's IT manager. "Mike had an idea, and Paul had an idea, but they didn't really know who anybody was or what their roles were. They would be very surprised when they found out the level of the skill sets of some of these guys and what they did. They only knew Dave, Max, and Erich."

Without knowledge of an individual's talents and contributions to projects, Blizzard South's managers had only recollections of conversations and a list of names in instruction booklets to go by. They also had the word of other North employees, many of whom were plotting to stab those they didn't like in the back.

"I think the biggest problem after they left was, some people are good at talking, and some people aren't," explained Eric Sexton. "They came up and they had very little exposure to us. They had seen our names, but they had no exposure to us. So they had to come up and basically interviewed everyone cold, without really knowing us. I think part of that ties back to what I said about how the bosses at Blizzard North kept us segmented from Blizzard Entertainment. Even though I didn't believe it, somewhere psychologically, I probably felt like they were the bad guys, and they were gonna screw us over regardless."

Other developers had no issue with Dave, Max, and Erich choosing to leave. "I know there were some people who were angry and bitter about things," acknowledged Marc Tattersall, artist. "But it's always been my take that Blizzard North was their company. They're the presidents, and I'm an employee. I figure that if I don't like my job or like my leaders, I can leave."

"I had mixed feelings," Mike Scandizzo admitted. "To some degree I understood that there might have been extenuating circumstances like fear for their own future. On the other hand, due to a variety of factors that had been going on in the company building up to this, I and many others had lost our faith in Dave as our designer. He had done a variety of things on a work level that undermined our ability to continue to believe in him as our creative lead going forward. He showed kind of a burnout and a lack of decisiveness."

PETER HU SAT down for his one-on-one interview. He knew from talking with colleagues that these interviews went one of two ways. Either a manager from Blizzard South would ask him about his work at the company, or ask him about the work of others.

When his interviewer asked his opinion of others, Hu opened up. "Blizzard South wanted my opinion of pretty much everyone. I was stupid and gave them my opinion, mostly. I'm not sure exactly why, except I tend to talk too much sometimes. I feel sorry about it even today, to some extent, like I'm some sort of narc."

As the interview progressed, Hu got the impression that the manager was asking him for his take on his colleagues for one of two reasons: because he, Hu, was trusted and could offer a valuable opinion; or because they knew so little about North's staff that they had to rely on opinions to build their knowledge base. Regardless, Hu had already made up his mind. He was the chief architect of Diablo II's upcoming 1.10 patch, which would usher in major changes to skills and gameplay. "Immediately after the announcement, I told Dave that I wanted to join him in whatever, but had to finish Diablo II's 1.10 patch first. I told [Blizzard] I intended to leave after I finished the patch, and not to make any plans around me."

Fellow programmer Colin Day had been keen to work on the Diablo franchise since developing the Nox action-RPG inspired by Blizzard North's games. As he sat down for his interview with Mike Morhaime, Colin was under the assumption that, if he successfully re-applied for his job at Blizzard North, he would be working on Diablo III. To his surprise, Morhaime asked him questions about MMORPGs, namely Blizzard South's upcoming World of WarCraft. "I specifically remember telling him, 'Actually, World of WarCraft's not really my thing.'"

Colin remembered Morhaime seeming taken aback by his answer. Morhaime explained that management preferred their developers be interested in games they work on. Colin said he assumed he'd be working on Diablo III, a project in which he was very much interested. Still, he continued, he saw no reason why his lack of interest in MMOs would prevent him from being a positive influence on World of WarCraft. He liked roleplaying games. He didn't like the grindy nature of EverQuest and Ultima Online, but that didn't mean he, as a programmer, would be unable to contribute. Morhaime reiterated his concern.

"Now that I look back, they were definitely trying to figure out whether to close the studio, and whether they wanted to move these people down, and if they would be a good fit."

Michio Okamura received a similar line of questioning: If he were to open a game studio across the street, who would he want to take with him? Michio, normally quiet but known for candor, told the interviewer he might want to redefine the question. "The people I would take with me to launch a start-up aren't the same people I would keep for a big project like Diablo III. Those are two different considerations."

Michio knew plenty of developers around the office who were qualified to work on a blockbuster. However, their attitudes and personality would not be a good fit for a startup. "There were a lot of people who came to Blizzard because it was a success. For them, it was a goal: Being hired at Blizzard was their success. To do a start-up, you need somebody who wants more than that. You need somebody who actually wants to create and contribute to something new."

When South's managers summoned Phil Shenk, his candor matched Michio's. "I remember being pretty straight up with them. I would definitely tell them who I thought might not be worth keeping." Moreover, he added, he was the guy to lead Diablo III as creative director. He had spearheaded the creation of characters on Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack prior to his departure some years ago; since returning, he had reinserted himself back on the frontlines of the third game.

Mike Dashow went into his interview with a plan: Save Starblo. His resignation at working on a Diablo clone set in space had shifted to a firm belief in the project. It had momentum, he explained. The team was seasoned, excited, and invested. "And they summarily shut it down," Dashow said. "Basically: 'Thank you for your opinion. We're shutting it down.' And that was it. I'd fought long and hard for them to keep it, but no. They wanted everyone on Diablo III."

"Some of us got the sense that they were swooping in, you know, a little excited," added Dave Glenn. "You could tell that they were like, 'Diablo's ours! The precious is ours now!' Not in a super-sneaky way, but I think there was a little bit of conflict between North and South. They'd had ideas, like, 'This is how we think you should do it.' And it was never super negative or anything, but I could pick up that they were kind of like, 'Now we get this from the spoiled-kids camp. We're going to be able to make this into a proper Blizzard title' sort of thing."

The bosses were gone, but their influence hung over the staff. Phil Shenk, Tyler Thompson, and Dave Glenn were close with Dave, Max, and Erich, and had to weigh whether they should stick it out at Blizzard North, or leave now and join their friends in their next venture, whatever that may be. Peter Hu, also friends with the bosses outside of work, stated his intentions to leave upfront. Dave Glenn, Phil, and Tyler were still undecided. Phil even went as far as accepting an offer, only to change his mind. "This was kind of a sucky thing for me to do. I was there until they said, 'We're going to make you creative director.' I said, 'Okay,' but I was still on the fence about it."

Later that week, South's managers gathered North's staff for another meeting. Mike Morhaime announced Phil Shenk as North's team lead, and asked Phil to come forward. North's developers exchanged awkward looks. Phil was gone.

Tom Ricket found the situation amusing. Phil had told his close friends he'd decided to follow the bosses. Blizzard South's dignitaries seemed the last to know. Tom had gone through both lines of questioning during his interview: Who should stay, and where did he see himself at the new Blizzard North? He suggested he'd be a good fit as a network programmer, the role for which he had been hired. When he had been asked who he'd recommend to lead the studio, he'd named Rick Seis. The manager had thanked him for his opinion and sent him on his way.

Blizzard South's leaders weren't the only ones caught off-guard by Phil's departure. After he'd been offered the position of studio director, Phil had changed his mind, and had gone to Rick Seis and Michio Okamura. Rick and Michio were expected to stay on, and had planned on Phil being an integral part of the next iteration of Blizzard North. His eleventh-hour decision to leave blindsided them. "They were understanding but also a little bit upset. I think one of the things South got out of the interview was that the three of us would probably work pretty well together. We had pretty good rapport with each other, so they were probably thinking, Well, what the fuck now? Who's going to be the creative director? It was a little sucky that I went through the whole process, then said no."

The atmosphere in Tyler's interview with South's managers started out warm and pleasant. They talked of employees, and of Diablo III. The manager asked Tyler how he would feel about taking a leadership position. Tyler politely explained he would prefer not to lead. The atmosphere chilled. Tyler was thanked for his resignation and told to leave the building. "I was shocked and didn't know how to handle that, and left. It was a very challenging day for me. I had a lot of emotion built up from working there for six and a half years. I went out to a lake and went on a walk, and had a lot of strong emotions."

Dave Glenn went from conflicted over leaving the Blizzard family to confident in his decision to follow Dave, Max, and Erich. "I was with my team, the guys I'd been working with for six years. I felt like there was a lot of mutual respect. Coming off of Diablo II, it seemed like a no-brainer as far as starting a start-up [with this crew]. And it was. We had trouble picking from the offers. In hindsight, there's a lot to learn, there. But most of us had come off of a few good years, so it wasn't a financial burden to walk away from the paycheck and take a risk."

KENNY WILLIAMS STUCK around to help Karin Colenzo-Seis square away unpleasant details. Karin would stay on in an administrative position. They had been planning Blizzard North's ten-year anniversary since March. The party would take place in September as scheduled, only Kenny would not be there. He would be leaving to co-found Flagship with his friends.

"Leaving was sort of bittersweet. I was sad about leaving the company I'd watched grow, and also leaving behind the people who remained. But I was excited about new opportunities and being part of developing a new, successful company. I was actually very proud of what we built at Flagship. It didn't turn out well, but I actually felt we built a better, stronger team. That's part of the risk of going independent."

On the morning of Friday, July 11, Paul Sams and Mike Morhaime called Karin, Brad Mason—North's IT manager—and a few other higher-ups into an office to announce that they had finished interviews. Karin and Brad would be staying, and helping with the process to come.

"I believe out of courtesy, Paul and Mike shared with us who they were going to ask to stay," Karin said. "I think it was hard to hear the names being read, certain names more than others. Like, really? That person?"

The process would be clean, efficient, and unpleasant for everyone involved. Developers would be sent to their office to await an email. Each email would direct the developer to one of two rooms: the kitchen, or the main conference room. Everyone in one room would be invited to stay on. Everyone in the other room would be let go.

"It was a really sad day," said Brad. "That was one of the crappiest days of my life, having to be part of that."

Leaving the briefing, Brad instructed Michael Huang, an IT administrator, to cut network connections until 11:00. No messages should come in or go out until that time. Around 11:00, the PA crackled. Karin's voice resounded through the office as she instructed everyone to wait for an email with further directions.

The office sat quiet except for the sounds of mouse clicks refreshing email inboxes. Developers called offices and asked in a murmur if so-and-so had received an email yet. While they waited, the staff reflected on their wild ride. They had grown up at Blizzard North. They had met significant others at Blizzard North. They had started families. Divorced. The most solid friendships in their lives had started at Blizzard North.

Whether they had been part of the company since the days of pushing pixels on Sega Genesis and Game Boy, or worked with Max Schaefer to develop a 3D football game on 3DO's doomed M2 console, or pushed themselves to their breaking points and far beyond to make Diablo and Diablo II, shoulder to shoulder with colleagues who had been more than coworkers, each and every one of them had been a part of something special.

Now, regardless of who stayed or who left, that something special was ending. Blizzard North would never be the same.

Stefan Scandizzo was one of the first to arrive in his appointed location, the office's main conference room. His heart sank as more people walked nervously through the door. "By the fourth or fifth person, I knew which group I was in. As more people funneled in, we just watched the expression on new people's faces: it was, 'Oh, shit. I'm in this group.' We'd all kind of go, 'Ohhh.' It got louder and louder as more and more of us came in."

Kelly Johnson remembered being shocked at some of the people who would be joining him in looking for work elsewhere. "A fair amount of artists and programmers were great and still got laid off. Steven Woo and Fred Vaught for example both got canned and no one knew why. They knew their shit and were hard workers."

Kelly stood quietly as his fate became clear, and quietly packed away his things. "After nine years, that's how I exited Blizzard North: Quietly. But you know, I don't know what would have been worth staying for. I loved the Diablo series and really wanted to work on Diablo III, but I don't know if I had the confidence that we could do that with the three guys gone. Those guys built the company from nothing. They'll always have my respect because they led us into making something amazing. I got to witness that. I saw what they went through, what we went through. There were a lot of challenging times. They survived an employee revolt. I've got to give credit to those guys from building Blizzard North from an eight-person studio with no money to one that made the Diablo games. That's an accomplishment you can never take away and they deserve credit for doing that. They needed us and we needed them. That's how it all happened. I look back on my Blizzard North days and most of them were good. Some weren't, but most were good. The best part was building up from nothing. It was a rollercoaster ride, and it was a great ride. Those are my memories, and those memories aren't about the negative, but the good."

Fred Vaught joined Kelly, Stefan, and others in the conference room. "It was pretty depressing. Actually, when I walked into the room, I saw a certain person in the same room I was in, and I thought, Yep, I'm gone. There's no way they're keeping him."

What bothered Fred the most was that none of the talking heads from Blizzard South were there to break the news. Representatives from a human resources firm had been brought in to handle departures.

"I said, 'Give me my paperwork,' and I just left. During the last week, I foresaw my departure. I was like, 'I'm gone,' because I wasn't in any of the political groups. The problem with not being in any political group is nobody's going to fight for you. I was just a guy who worked a lot, and nobody was going to go out on a limb, like, 'Oh, I want to keep him.' I was kind of pissed. I had always worked so hard for that fucking company. Practically almost every object in Diablo II's expansion is mine. I worked my ass off for Project X. I was pissed. Whatever."

Like Fred, Stefan Scandizzo was angry at how the departures went down. "I really didn't have any feeling that they were going to get rid of me. I knew I'd been a very constructive member of the team. I knew what my value was. Unfortunately, the other person who knew what my value was had already left, and that was Max. So there really weren't a lot of people to stand up for me. I really didn't realize how much heat Dave, Max, and Erich took off the team to let us do what we did. And granted, a lot of what we did, we shouldn't have been able to get away with. But that's the way we did things, and somehow we managed to be successful, so just don't kill the team. Irvine did that."

Chris Root wasn't surprised to find himself in the conference room. He had been one of Max's and Erich's closest friends since childhood. They were gone, and Chris expected he would be gone too.

"I actually couldn't get everything in my car, so I had to go back the next day and get it, and then I still couldn't fit everything in the car. Actually they threw my futon out and bought me a new one, had it delivered to my house. It was okay. It was a job. It wasn't the first time I was laid off and it wasn't the last."

Bruno Bowden felt much the same way.

"In a way, I'm glad I was laid off because I didn't feel things were working out well at Blizzard North. Being laid off meant I could reassess a lot about my motivations and goals. I went on to do much better things afterwards, whereas if I hadn't been laid off, I probably would have stuck around much longer, hoping and trying to make things better."

Michael Huang had been off-kilter throughout the whole process, and was still reeling days after being let go.

"I hadn't expected any layoffs because I thought then—and I still think now—that the Blizzard North guys are the best of the best. So I was just completely surprised that they had chosen to lay off effectively a third of the studio. Everyone in that room was awesome at what they did. At first I thought, Oh, they're basically trimming out most of the old guys in the company, the ones who had been there long enough to be considered a loyalist or an old-timer, I guess."

Brad Mason would stay on in a management position. Despite his sympathy for many who had been laid off, and despite his admiration for the Diablo games, he confessed amazement that the company that had grown from Condor had remained standing for so long.

"That was kind of a bad time for a lot of people, because they took it as a real personal..." He paused. "I mean, these are all friends. I was friends with a few of the guys there at Blizzard North, and while it was a real cool, laidback environment, it was probably one of the most difficult environments I'd had to deal with. It was political: in-fighting, this guy being friends with this guy, this guy in charge of this group got to have more say, therefore they were the haves and the people who were left were the have-nots. It was just this giant pool of crap that constantly went on. It was just dumb. None of these—and here's where I say kids—none of these kids understood how lucky they were to work for Blizzard, how lucky they were to have a paycheck. I mean, Blizzard didn't necessarily pay the best, but because they were so successful product-wise, when those shipped, they shared the wealth with their employees."

THE FIRST FACE Eric Sexton saw when he stepped into the kitchen was Mike Morhaime's. Blizzard South's president wore a small, sad smile. "And I was like, Oh, fuck. I think I just got cut."

Familiar faces drifted in. Michio Okamura. Stone Librande, Project X's designer. John Kubasco. Cheeming Boey and Anthony Rivero. Mike Dashow. Roughly two-thirds of the team filled the room. The kitchen was tense and quiet until Morhaime began to speak. Marc Tattersall, who was still contemplating whether he would be better off at Blizzard North or with his old bosses and friends, fought the urge to burst out laughing. "It was kind of a funny talk. It was about how we were all going to be ninjas. He was saying not to necessarily feel bad for the people who got laid off. He said he had someone call him years before to thank him for laying him off because now he was working at eBay or AOL, something like that."

Outside their meeting, friends were packing up their desks and being escorted to their cars. "I remember what was weird was having a security guard there," said Chris Arretche, who would stay on. "He was for people who may come back. I thought it was pretty insulting, but I guess that's a standard practice. Not a normal Blizzard practice, but a thing that's done after layoffs, I guess. I found that a little bit weird; everybody did, I think. Especially because you know everybody and know, 'Well, that dude wouldn't do anything weird.' I guess they were just being cautious."

"There was always a lot of control by Blizzard South to make sure they weren't stealing assets they didn't have privilege to," added Tom Ricket. "It was weird and very bureaucratic."

Marc Tattersall sympathized with everyone who would be going home. "It sucked. It was horrible. Even if some people... I don't want to say deserved to get fired. I generally don't think people deserve to get fired. But it still sucks. You don't want to see people lose their jobs. It was a very sad and depressing day."

Froilan Gardner felt differently, at least in some cases. "I thought they cut a lot of the right people, but not all of them. It was cool because I didn't really know a lot of the people that got cut, and what I knew of them, I just felt it was about time. It sucked that they lost their job, but I didn't want to carry people who are sucking up budgets, sucking up time, just sitting in their offices doing practically nothing. We had a guy there who was working on one character for about five months. We joking called it the fifty-thousand-dollar monster. We all kind of knew what each other was making salary-wise, and it was kind of ridiculous. There were people there with skill sets that were horribly outdated. It got so bad, it got to the point where that sort of thing, the layoffs, needed to happen so the company could grow. There were a lot of problems there, and they all stemmed from the way it was managed."

As Morhaime talked, Eric Sexton struggled to come to terms with the fact that some faces he believed deserved to stay on were conspicuously absent. "Certain people got let go that I think were poor choices on Blizzard South's part. I don't know what prompted some of their decisions. I'm sure some of it was, some of the people that they let go were kind of bad at communicating. Maybe they didn't interview well. Certain people were like, 'Why did they let that person go?' And other people they kept just didn't make any sense at all."

Joe Morrissey, who would remain as a writer and designer on Diablo III, understood the pragmatism behind the decision to let go of so many developers, even if he disagreed with some of South's decisions. "We had about sixty people, and twenty of them were on Project X. That was when they laid off around twenty people because they said, 'We don't need sixty people to get Diablo III off the ground.' It hurt to see a lot of good people go, but from a business standpoint it completely made sense. And they did try to set us up to succeed as much as possible."

Evan Carroll, a character artist who would be working on Diablo III, was not so sure. "I didn't see how we would actually maintain a consistent vision for any of the projects. Not that the guys who were there at Blizzard North weren't good designers, but guys like Stone Librande, he hadn't gone through an entire development cycle and shipped a game. Dave, Max, and Erich were the only guys I'd known as project managers, as presidents, as kind of the figureheads of the company. That was my only understanding of how the whole process worked. I didn't think we had a design team that was anything like that. We probably had one that was way more rational. We had a group of people that were smarter, I think, in terms of production; but I don't know if there was that same spark, that intensity and experience and having designed and shipped several games."

As the meeting wound down, Blizzard South's managers invited everyone to take a long lunch and unwind from the emotional day. They could collect their things when they got back and head home to rest up over the weekend for a fresh start on Monday.

"However, when we came back [from lunch], the doors were locked and we couldn't get back in," recalled Joe Morrissey. "It was pretty shitty."

Epilogue: Predictions

DAYS EARLIER, BEFORE the employees had been summoned to one room or another, Rick Seis had stepped into the conference room and taken stock of the faces sitting around the table.

Mike Morhaime sat at one end. Tyler Thompson caught Rick's eye then looked away. Phil Shenk sat near him, a conflicted expression on his face. Mike Dashow was pale. Mike Scandizzo looked ready to fight or bolt for the door.

Rick took a seat as Mike Morhaime explained why they were there. He and the other dignitaries from Blizzard Entertainment were in the middle of interviewing Blizzard North's employees to decide who would stay on and who would be sent home. Everyone in this room was up for the big job: Development team lead of Blizzard North.

His explanation of Rick's sent the message Rick suspected it was meant to. Blizzard North would no longer be South's equal, if it ever had been. The team would answer to Mike Morhaime—to Blizzard Entertainment.

Morhaime distributed pieces of paper and told everyone to write the name of someone in the room. The name with the most votes would be given greater weight when the time came to appoint a director.

Scandizzo was under no illusion that he was there for any reason other than to fill a seat. "I had no desire to leave Blizzard North. But for many reasons, South saw me as their number one problem to deal with. Not only had I been an adversary all along in our relationship with them, not only was I connected with Dave last they had known, but they also didn't need a lead network programmer for such a small project. They didn't have a good place to put me."

Scandizzo didn't hesitate before writing a name down and folding his paper. There was only one person who could hope to fill the shoes of Dave, Max, and Erich.

On Friday, July 11, Scandizzo joined Alan Ackerman, Kelly Johnson, and others who were being dismissed in the conference room. When he was called for his one-on-one exit interview, he was asked who should fill the role of team lead. Mike gave the same name he had written days earlier. "I tried to give them the logic rationale on why they should go with Rick. I said, 'For publicity's sake, you've lost your founders, but if you promote your first employee from Condor, you've got a sense of continuity. You can say, 'He's been here since day one.'"

Mike's second reason boiled down to simple logic. Rick was a team player. Those who remained at Blizzard North came from different eras: Old guard and new blood. When a fork in the road came up—and it would, if the past few years were any indication—Rick would be the ideal adjudicator, able to see new and old perspectives and reach a compromise. "I thought he was honest, someone who could be respected, and I thought he had the patience to deal with interpersonal relationship issues. Not to mention that he had earned his job, which was one of the political tenants of the old guard: If you earned a position, you should have the position."

After a few misfires—notably appointing Phil Shenk after he'd left—Rick Seis was appointed as Blizzard North's lead. On the day of the departures, Rick fought back tears as approximately two-thirds of Blizzard North—many friends he'd worked alongside since near the beginning of Condor—drove away for the last time. He had received twelve of the fifteen votes. A landslide victory, but a hollow one. Morhaime and the other managers had used votes to take the temperature in the room, nothing more. Blizzard Entertainment had made the final call.

As the last car pulled away, Rick took a deep breath. Despite the differences that had created a rift between him and the bosses, he believed he was the right choice to carry on Diablo's legacy. He did his best to put on a brave and confident face to his team on their first day as a new company. Blizzard North 2.0.

Privately, he was terrified. "I'm not trying to boast, but I'm a team guy. And sometimes those guys don't work in certain situations; they are not good people to be leaders of certain teams depending on the team make-up and whatever. But the bosses did not groom anybody to even understand from them upwards in the chain of command. You knew what was being done downwards, below them. But from them upwards, they were the iron curtain, and that meant they didn't tell you about any of the noise that happened at that level. So when I got to that level, it was foreign. I had an idea what I wanted to do below me, but above me was a whole different story."

Outside of Blizzard North, those who had left said their goodbyes, not only to the friends who would stay, but to the studio.

"We were saying, 'They'll shut us down to thirty-some people,'" Alan Ackerman said, "and then at some point they'll say, 'It's too hard to work with a team located in the north when the rest of us are in the south. We're going to move you south.'"

"We left," said Dave Glenn, "and I remember saying, 'As soon as the lease is up, they're going to shut down Blizzard North and take everybody down south.' That's exactly what happened."

END OF BOOK II

Side Quests

As with Stay Awhile and Listen: Book I, I accumulated far too much material to include in the book's main chapters. Doing so would have bloated and confused the story and themes. Yet I couldn't let go of my findings completely.

You'll find them rounded up here, as Side Quests. All "SQs" are sorted by chapter. You can read them in order if you like, or, if you've found your way here while reading the main chapters, touch [Return to Chapter] after a SQ to jump back to where you left off.

Chapter 1

[SQ1]

Dave Brevik was too wise to the inner workings of game code to be as impressed by Battle.net as some of his colleagues. "What was more magical was the very first time I wrote something that networked," he said. "Being able to play the game with a bunch of players in the office over the LAN [local area network] was very exciting the first time it happened. People were all gathered around. It didn't last long. It lasted less than a minute before things got out of sync, and I said, 'Damn. Well, that was fun for about thirty seconds.'"

[Return to Chapter]
Chapter 2
[SQ1]

Other April Fool's pranks elicited stronger reactions. One year, Karin, a frequent co-conspirator, installed a time clock. Staff were required to clock in and out. A few grumbled, but complied. On another occasion, they issued a memo decreeing mandatory drug tests. "That got some good responses," Erich said. "I had one employee, one of our artists who obviously had stuff going on, he came into my office with that memo and just threw it at me and said, 'What is this shit?' I just kind of smiled, and he realized it was an April Fool's thing. That worked really well. That's the reaction we wanted."

[Return to Chapter]
Chapter 3
[SQ1]

In 1979, Synergistic followed up with Wilderness Campaign, a crawl similar to Dungeon Campaign that took place outdoors instead of in a dungeon. That same year, the company bundled the two Campaign games as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure. The package was released on floppy disks, the successor to cassettes as a storage medium. In both games, players are given a glimpse of a level's map right before their adventure begins, giving them precious seconds to sketch out terrain on paper before they're dropped into the world and left to find their way through it. The company's growing catalog caught the eye of Sierra On-Line.

Sierra had prospered thanks to a string of successful adventure games such as the King's Quest series designed by Ken's wife, legendary game designer Roberta Williams, as well as Ken's eye for spotting promising external studios. When Sierra outgrew its home in Oakhurst, California, the Williams opened a second office in Bellevue, Washington, close to Synergistic's Seattle-based headquarters. Over time, Bob and Ken became friends as well as business partners. "Ken rather artfully navigated the more successful middle ground," Bob said. "He got venture funding without losing control. He grew quickly and had many of the pitfalls of that, with personnel problems, moving, and such. But, overall, he managed the hazards well and kept Sierra strong for many years. I admired what he achieved greatly and sometimes wish I had had the nerve or skill to do the same."

Several times each year, managers from development studios under Sierra's publishing umbrella converged on the Bellevue office for meetings. Bob Clardy likened those visits to walking through a Dilbert comic strip. Sierra's programmers and artists clustered into cube farms or squeezed into storage rooms overflowing with boxed software. In comparison, Synergistic was cozy, yet big enough for most developers to have their own offices. That was by choice. Bob admired his friend's flourishing empire, but made a conscious decision to run a smaller, more intimate outfit. He enjoyed being able to pitch in on development, something he knew he wouldn't be able to do as often if he had a huge company to run.

That was Ken's predicament, Bob observed. Ken loved the semi-regular get-togethers with managers because he loved surrounding himself with people crawling through the trenches of development. The Williams had started Sierra at their kitchen table, Ken writing code while Roberta penned scripts and drew characters for Mystery House, their first megahit. Now his wife spearheaded design teams while he sweated quarterly sales and profit margins. He was too busy to join his developers pushing pixels and writing code, so he lived vicariously through them.

Bob's admiration for Ken grew during each visit. Sierra's co-founder never belittled an idea or the developer who had proposed it. Instead, he praised aspects of the proposal he liked and offered constructive feedback where he thought it could be tightened up. It was, Bob guessed, his friend's way of taking a hand, however small, in product design.

Since Synergistic and Sierra were practically neighbors, Ken made a habit of popping in to visit Bob's team and hear Bob's pitches. In 1996, he stopped by to make rather than entertain an offer.

[Return to Chapter]
Chapter 6
[SQ1]

When his dad brought home a Super-8 camera, Harley began making short films. Some starred his friends. For others, he used stop-motion animation, a popular technique where moviemakers build models of a character, move the model slightly between taking hundreds or thousands of pictures, then splice the film together to give the illusion of fluid movement--like a flipbook. Setting his sights on Hollywood, Harley got a job at a TV station when he was fifteen. The gig served as a crash course in studio production, editing, and producing shows. After college, he entered the freelance circuit, mostly stringing together public relations videos for colleges to use in recruiting. On the side, he dabbled in graphics software like 3D Studio 1 and learned how to render animations. When he wasn't tinkering with graphics, he got hooked on point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

Harley took the job because he had played Diablo and was intrigued by the prospect of working on games. Blizzard's growing reputation was less of a factor. "Blizzard was just another computer-game company."

[Return to Chapter]
Chapter 8
[SQ1]

Early on, Blizzard North contemplated designing two versions of each hero class: one male, one female. Male and female versions would play slightly differently from one another. "Originally we were going to have Rogues being Sisters and Rangers, Warriors being Templar and Berserkers, and Sorcerers being Sorceresses or Necromancers," said Eric Sexton, artist.

The team decided against designing multiple versions of each hero, an approach that boiled down to economics. "I was for using archetypes," said Michio Okamura, who had been the artist behind most of Diablo's characters. "I wanted to have a Paladin, an Amazon, and a Necromancer. There was a lot of argument over whether we should have male and female variations of characters, but for me, because I was doing most of the character art, having to do male and female versions was, ah..."

"If we're going to do more classes, up to five, we can't do ten renders of each character," Erich Schaefer put in.

Besides saving character artists dozens of hours of work, there was a design advantage to assigning each hero an immutable gender. Without needing to worry about how male and female versions of the same class should differ, artists could pour all their energy into defining one specific look for each hero.

[Return to Chapter]

[SQ2]

Phil got his start in the industry creating graphics for pinball games—most notably the Space Cadet table of Full Tilt!, packaged into every version of Windows beginning with Microsoft's Windows 95 Plus! add-on pack and ending with Windows XP—at Cinematronics, a studio based in Austin, Texas, and later acquired by SimCity developer Maxis. Champing at the bit to draw something besides flippers and springs, Phil taught himself 3D Studio Max and partnered with two other designers to make Crucible, an action-roleplaying game and one of the motivators behind Maxis's decision to acquire the studio in 1996.

Crucible could best be described as a Diablo clone. Touchpoints such as frantic combat and droves of items and spells were obvious and intentional. Phil and his coworkers had discovered Blizzard North's genre-defining game and played obsessively, mashing mouse buttons until three, four in the morning, having as much fun playing Diablo as they were scrutinizing it to understand what made it tick. Inevitably, they compared it to what they were building. Crucible ran at a higher resolution, 800x600 to Diablo's 640x480. Their game's artwork had layers, so artists could create advanced constructs such as platforms raised above the ground. Crucible's biggest difference, and a brass ring in game development at the time, was a persistent online world where players could meet up day or night to comb through dungeons.

At E3 in June 1997, Crucible caught the eye of senior producer and headhunter Matt Householder, who handed out his Blizzard North business cards to the developers on hand to demo the game. Phil filed the card away. He was optimistic about Crucible's prospects.

That same month, Electronic Arts purchased Maxis in a stock swap for $125 million and announced plans to shutter Cinematronics and relocate the team from Austin to Silicon Valley, where they would work on SimCity games. Uninterested in modeling roads and buildings, and aware that Crucible still had a long way to go, Phil dug out Householder's card.

"We didn't know what we were doing," he admitted of his action-RPG project. "We probably couldn't have made that [persistent] multiplayer game. We hadn't even started the multiplayer component."

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[SQ3]

Messing up the rendering system's order of operations often led to hilarious results. "Because we had to do the whole component system of different body parts, sometimes their order would get screwed up," Pattie Tougas laughed. "So, you'd have a head for a leg, a torso for the arm, an arm for the body. And you could walk around like that."

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Chapter 12
[SQ1]

Naturally, the boss of the game's second Act should be harder than Andariel, boss of the first Act. Duriel ended up being an order of magnitude more difficult thanks to clash between creativity and technical resources. Duriel was so large that many computers froze for a few seconds just as players entered his lair. "Duriel alone, all by himself, his art alone was one megabyte, which was huge," admitted Eric Sexton, artist and designer. "By himself I think he was bigger than some of the other main monsters. It took so long to load him that by the time he was loaded, he was already hitting you and doing all kinds of damage. It was a little bit of a mess."

"There's things in Diablo II that, hindsight being 20/20, people will tell you we shouldn't have put in," said Marc Tattersall, environment artist. "Like Duriel's lair where he'd kill you before his level even loaded. Things like that. It was hard to polish a game that large."

Duriel's lair posed another issue. It was a plain, square room, too small for players to break away and regenerate resources in the middle of the fight. "We definitely wanted big monsters, but we had to make sure their level worked," Phil Shenk explained. "That was an issue with Duriel, because he was really big and oddly shaped, and his level turned out to be not as interesting as it could have been."

Blizzard North solved the issue by rolling out a patch that pre-loaded Duriel's graphics before players entered his lair.

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[SQ2]

Every skill required extensive testing. One elusive element to each skill was its "click" factor. Each click of the mouse translated to one sword swing, one arrow loosed, or one skill triggered. Players had developed the habit of mashing mouse buttons frantically in Diablo's heated battles because the game required them to do so, but Diablo II let players click and hold either mouse button to attack. Even so, frantic clicking was still allowed.

"Does it work for both of those styles?" Tyler Thompson asked himself while programming and testing skills. "If I do Frozen Orb, does it work if I super-click? If I click and hold, does it repeat-fire? Every skill had to be tested for that."

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Chapter 13
[SQ1]

The ability to raise and command the dead was an obvious branch of skills for the Necromancer. For other abilities, Blizzard North's developers took a different tack. Poison Dagger lets players coat a weapon with poison so they can dart in, stab a target, and then retreat while the enemy's life ticks down. Curses are spell-like effects such as Iron Maiden, which causes players and monsters to harm themselves whenever they land a hit on the Necromancer or one of his minions.

Phil agonized over how to manifest many of the Necromancer's skills, especially those with vague descriptions. "The first spell effect I did was Teeth," he remembered. Teeth, a glowing missile that inflicts minimal damage until players invest several skill points, was positioned at the top of the Poison and Bone tree so players could access it early, giving them a ranged attack for occasions when their Necromancer preferred to stay out of melees.

"That was hard to make look good, because the description was just 'Spray of teeth' or something. We already had trouble with things being too small; tiny things just end up being a pixel and they look bad. I was like, 'I can't imagine that looking cool. A spray of teeth?' So, I went with that swoopy, glowing missile design."

After Phil animated a curse for the Necromancer, he teamed up with programmer Mike Scandizzo to facilitate their implementation. Phil's initial take on many curses were missile-like projectiles that flew across the screen and struck monsters. Scandizzo cut out what he viewed as the middle man, the projectile. To cast a curse, players simply pointed at a monster and clicked. A sparkle effect—colored differently for each curse—shimmered in the air over the target, a visual cue to players that their curse had taken effect.

That way, Scandizzo reasoned, curses were guaranteed to land, whereas a monster or another player might be able to dodge a projectile. "I basically abused his artwork the way that programmers do. I think I kind of upset Phil because I basically cut out a great deal of the work he'd done in designing those curses. But as it turned out, Dave liked it better with just the instantaneous sparkle that I applied, so it stayed."

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[SQ2]

Act Three's sewers, collectively one of the largest spaces in the game, was so big it had to be loaded into memory in blocks. To map it out, Stefan Scandizzo sketched it on graph paper. He had to erase and redraw his work each time he tested the area only to discover a block of the sewer hadn't loaded as intended.

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[SQ3]

The bug lair became formally known as the Maggot Lair, a region of Act Two that was as frustrating for the developers to build as it ended up being for players to navigate.

An area on the game's critical (main) path, the Maggot Lair is made up of cramped warrens that glisten with slime and teem with bugs such as beetles that spray lightning when struck. The developers thought players would appreciate ducking into caves as a way to break up the monotony of running across sand. However, the Maggot Lair garnered infamy as one of Diablo II's most tedious, frustrating zones. Its tunnels are so narrow that Necromancers often can't shove through their ranks of minions to shimmy around the next turn. Enemies have to advance one at a time, but so do players, making the area even more burdensome to explore online.

"That whole tile set was always on the verge of being cut because it was so challenging," Stefan said.

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[SQ4]

Diablo II let players employ mercenaries in the game's first three Acts. In Act Two, players may employ guards armed with spears. Diablo's Sorcerer's guild appears in Act Three as hired hands known as the Iron Wolves. No two mercenaries are the same. All Rogues in Act One fire arrows, but some shoot arrows tinged with fire or ice, for instance.

"I presumed that some players would want to play solo, and this was a way for them still to have a group," Stieg Hedlund explained. "It was also intended to balance some of the summoned creatures that the Necromancer in particular could have."

Originally, mercenaries stayed behind when players left the Act in which they had been employed. Diablo II's expansion pack, Lord of Destruction, fleshed out mercenaries by letting players equip them with items, giving them their own statistics that leveled-up over time, and by having them stick around until players either traded up, or the mercenary's death, which could be reversed by a vendor in each Act—for a costly fee, of course.

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[SQ5]

Photoshop was Alan's tool of choice. Sometimes he pared down existing artwork and touched it up. For other area, finished backgrounds served as points of reference: He would examine a background, then build a custom miniature version from scratch. Working on maps required him to stay in close contact with level artists to stay aware of special topography such as the caves in Act One, which often trailed off into dark corners that showed up as blank spaces on his map. In that instance, he requested a special tile he could plug into the map so it appeared whole.

"They told me there were going to be four acts, all of them different styles," he said. "At one point far along, Peter Kemmer said, 'I could probably have set up something to do that through programming.' I said, 'I'm going to kill you. Now you tell me this? I'm going to kill you!'"

Not even the automap mitigated Act Three's laborious design. The map was so small, the Act's paths so sinuous, players would have to stop and study it for several minutes just to get their bearings. "By the time we got to making Act Three, people said it's too linear and you should have more to explore," said Dave Glenn, environment artist. "But by the time we shipped, people would get lost in Act Three. They'd circle back in a loop."

Not even Act Three's town, a port made up of winding docks—many of which trail off to dead ends—was safe from the chapter's circuitous nature. "In the original version, your town is the ship there on the coast," Eric Sexton recalled. "You actually have a ship there with people on it, and you go right off into the jungle from the ship. That would've probably would have worked out better than the horrid spider-webbed catwalks that we used for the town."

The developers narrowed down Act Three's main problem to a river almost halfway into the Act, where it branched off in a "Y." If players headed right, they would make their way to the city of Kurast, and the way forward.

"The other branch would take you nowhere," Erich Schaefer recalled. "It might take you forty-five minutes to realize, 'Uh-oh, I've gone to the wrong place.' Even if you did find the waypoint then logged off and logged back in, the game would regenerate the level, so you had the 'Y' problem yet again. That was a big pain in the ass."

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Chapter 16
[SQ1]

"This behavior was already established in Diablo, and we thought it was a fun short-term goal: a quick, but rewarding objective for a group, which I think is essentially the forerunner of the MMO raid," Stieg said of farming bosses for top-tier items.

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[SQ2]

Every developer had ways of keeping creative juices flowing. While character and environment artists expanded Diablo II's denizens and the world they inhabited, Dave Brevik and the programmers evaluated the original game's technical pedigree to determine what could be improved. One of the sequel's most substantial changes was one of its least obvious.

Diablo II was a tile-based game like its predecessor. In the first game, every level was broken down into tiles, and every tile could only be occupied by one actor. Diablo II's grid allowed for tiles within tiles. Diablo's characters had moved in all eight compass directions, but nesting tiles allowed Diablo II's characters to move smoothly and sinuously in sixteen directions.

Expanding the grid also made adventuring more dangerous. More enemies could pack into nested tiles, allowing for situations where players could be surrounded. "The collisions were very complicated, but still boiled down to a grid where you occupied spaces," Dave Brevik explained. "Because of that, a diagonal was like a fifth of a ground tile when you're moving. So you're still moving on a diagonal, but it was much smoother than it was in Diablo. It doesn't feel like a grid."

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[SQ3]

Nearly every artist at the studio lent his vocal talents to the Hell Bovine, with Scott Petersen directing them in the recording booth. "'All right, you have to come in and moo,'" Scott remembered explaining to each colleague. "They would ask, 'Do you want me to moo like a cow?' I had to say, 'No. Just say "moo." It's gonna be funny, man! People are gonna love it!' It was the ability to do things like that, that I think was brilliant about Blizzard North. It's hard to do that kind of stuff these days. I've worked for a bunch of different companies, a lot of different game designers, and that was an environment where you could mention or come up with an idea and really run with it."

Accessing the cow level involved a series of steps the developers assumed would be esoteric: Beat the game, then start a new session on the next difficulty level, drop a book of town portal scrolls and the pegged leg of Wirt—an NPC from Diablo whose leg could be looted from his corpse in a return to Tristram—into the Horadric Cube, in the Act One town, the Rogue Encampment. If players followed those steps, a portal would open.

They underestimated their fans. "People found it, like, the second day the game was out," Mike Dashow said. "We had put it in there figuring it would take people a little while. The only thing we were surprised about was how fast people found it, not that people found it."

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Chapter 18
[SQ1]

Whirlwind posed problems in implementation. It was movement based, which meant the developers had to weigh considerations such as how fast players would move while in the throes of the skill, how much damage they would inflict, and how much damage would be inflicted to them by monsters who landed hits before inevitably being cut down.

"High-level skill balance feedback was hard to come by, that was legitimate and really could move the direction of balance in the right way," explained Tyler Thompson, one of the programmers who worked with Mike Dashow to implement the Barbarian's skills. "Whirlwind is another excellent example: nearly every inventory item on a Barbarian and every trait you could imagine would affect the skill's damage."

The Barbarian's Leap and Leap Attack skills can be offensive, defensive, or both. Leap allows players to jump a set distance, the perfect panic-button when they're surrounded. Leap Attack sends players the full length of the screen in a single click, and they perform a critical attack when they land. Like Dave Glenn's staircases, Leap and Leap Attack were visual tricks: Diablo II was a 2D game, meaning that characters could not actually go airborne. Rather, the game—and players—had to believe they were in the air so that skills' perks and rules could be obeyed and disbelief could be suspended.

"It's a 2D game with a 2D collision system, so for his leap skill we would say, 'The Barbarian looks like he's on the ground, but he's in the air so you can't hit him,'" said Tyler. "Or, 'The poison killed him in the air on his way to the ground. But we have to wait to have him die when he lands, so let's make sure to keep track of that.' Oh, but what if he levels up in the middle of all that? Okay, well, then, don't give him the health back that players receive upon leveling up if he's about to die in midair. Okay, how do we do that?"

If dual-wielding appealed to players who wanted to kill monsters as quickly and violently as possible, the Barbarian's third skill tree, Warcries, attracted those who preferred to approach combat more tactically. Each Warcry grants a boon, such as scaring nearby monsters or increasing the health, stamina, and energy of both the caster and his or her allies.

"As someone of Nordic descent," said designer Stieg Hedlund, "I've always thought all the harping and singing that Vikings are supposed to have done were a bit humorously incongruous with their reputations for cold-blooded mayhem.

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[SQ2]

With Diablo's design nailed down, Dashow and Rick put their heads together to devise his attacks. Slashes that tore free chunks of the player's health were a must. Another invention, and the enemy's most infamous offense, was a wave of crackling, rippling lightning able to drain the player's health in seconds. Players who throw down a Town Portal to escape to the Pandemonium Fortress where they can repair equipment and restock on healing potions are in for a surprise when, more often than not, they return to find their portal surrounded by a bone cage. To escape, they must waste precious seconds destroying the prison while Diablo batters them with attacks.

"The character artists were given about four attack slots for every monster, and no one used [all] of them," Mike said. "But Diablo maxed out every slot that we could possibly use. We used everything for Diablo. He had the cages that came out of the ground, shooting the lightning..."

"Mike and I would go back and forth," Rick said. "He would tell me something about Diablo and I'd try to make it happen in code. I'd tell him, 'I can't do this. Can you give me that?'"

The duo thought up more than attacks and devilish traps. Diablo would not leave the grand hall where his pentagram was kept. Players could take advantage of that by sprinting away to collect themselves and then return to the fight. There was a technical reason for Diablo's reticence to step out of his comfort zone. "The reason why is, if you remember, there are two paths going up to his big circle," Rick explained. "If Diablo gets out onto those paths, he can't maneuver very well because he's so big and the paths are so small. The pathing's terrible there. He's just jerking around and you're killing his ass while he's trying to figure out what to do."

Confining Diablo to his hall was a reasonable solution that introduced another problem. Players who realized Diablo wouldn't leave the area could lure him to the edge of his pathing and then attack him from afar with impunity. Rick and Mike decided that when Diablo reached the outskirts of his zone, he would run back toward the pentagram and regenerate a small amount of health, just enough to discourage players from trying to exploit his limitations.

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Chapter 19
[SQ1]

"I think there were going to be NPC merchants as well," added Erich Schaefer. "It was going to be kind of like the town of Lut Gholein: All the players, maybe up to fifty people, would be going in and out of games from there. That's kind of the size I imagined in my head."

Battle.net Town never progressed further than sketches on paper. While later online games would add functional locations and vendors such as auction houses where players could bid on items using real or in-game currency, and banks where they could deposit gold once their character's inventory was full, Diablo II's developers thought of the online hub as more of a visual representation of the original Battle.net chat room.

Technical restrictions cropped up as well. "The biggest reason for doing that was memory," said Phil Shenk. "To have that many characters on screen at one time, all wearing components—it was not really going to be feasible. It would have taken a lot more time, too."

"All the MMOs have taught us things in later years," added Pat Wyatt, vice president of research and development at Blizzard Entertainment. "If you ever played Guild Wars, which I worked on, and you want to form a party when the game launched, you sort of run around and yell, 'Hey everyone! LFG [Looking for Group] Warrior Level 51, looking for monk, looking for healer.' It's kind of chaotic. That stuff can work, but you've got to spend a lot of effort building something like that. Does that effort extend to other games? Or you've done all that work for Diablo and it's not useful for any other game?"

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[SQ2]

Mike O'Brien had invented Battle.net, and had worked with Jeff Strain to implement it. After O'Brien and Jeff moved on to other projects within the company—O'Brien to WarCraft III, Jeff to StarCraft—Pat Wyatt appointed Scott Coleman, one half of the team that created Kali, a subscription program that fooled computers connected to the Internet into thinking they were connected to a local network, to maintain Battle.net. "Scott was really struggling on Battle.net," Pat Wyatt admitted. "I forget whether he was leaving or what happened there, but in any event, he left, and another guy called Jay Pattel, who used to be the technology director of Interplay, took it over."

Over two weeks, Jay tried and failed to carry Battle.net's load by himself. Pat Wyatt stepped up and was immediately daunted by the scope of his task.

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[SQ3]

Max was one of Blizzard North's most passionate supporters of PVP. He would get into heated debates with players on Diablo fan-sites and forums. Tension and danger were staples of their game, he reasoned, like the corpse run in Diablo. PVP, whether through duels where both players agree to fight, or through PK-ing, was another pillar Max was determined to see return. "For a while, you didn't even have to retrieve your corpse in Diablo II," Max recalled. "For me, it was getting too milquetoast-y. My position was that we had to get some tension back into the game just so your positive interactions actually meant more, and when you survived something, it was actually exciting. That was something I felt was kind of being lost."

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[SQ4]

Boey's traps grew more elaborate as Diablo II took shape. One time, he noticed a red glow around another player, a sign that one of the player's items leeches life from enemies every time he lands a hit. Boey had no idea what the item was, exactly, but his victims didn't know that. After ambushing someone just outside of town, he would stand over their body while the player revived in town. "At this point, I couldn't loot their body yet," said Boey, explaining his setup. "But when you die, you spawn inside the town, and all your items are left on your corpse. So when you go collect your stuff, that's when all your gear goes back on your character."

Players in a party had to give consent for other party members to loot their corpse. Boey would type, Nice life-leeching ring, implying he was examining the body and could see one of the rings they had been wearing when they died. The player, believing "Amigo" was looting them, would panic, typing back, I didn't give permission for you to loot my body. Boey fabricated an explanation that the latest update had changed looting so it could be performed without consent. You have to turn it off and then back on, he typed.

The player did as he said. Boey acted quickly, stripping the corpse of its weapons, armor, and jewelry, and then leaving the game. "I remember I told a programmer about this," he said, "Ted Bisson. He basically told me that that was a very evil thing to do. He made me feel so bad about myself."

Boey's guilt didn't last long. He didn't con players to steal their items. He was a Blizzard developer; he could have any item he wanted. "It was about being able to outsmart people. I realized that the Internet is full of people like that. It took PK'ing to a whole new level, because I am now griefing people not just in the game, but in real life as well. It was fun. The game was a lot more complex than I thought."

"I liked Boey's PK'ing exploits because he tested out the problems in our game, but I also sort of liked the way he played, you know?" said Erich Schaefer. "I thought that was clever playing. He was into pulling people into traps."

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[SQ5]

Dave, Max, and Erich were the filter through which all communication from Blizzard South flowed.

"We were trying hard not to be too WarCraft-ish in the game's art style," Alan Ackerman explained. "We got some pushback from Blizzard South about wanting us to use their artists to make assets. We didn't want it to look like a weird hodgepodge of Diablo and WarCraft, so we were kind of resistant to that."

Bob Steele, the artist who had taken charge of illustrating Diablo II's weapons and equipment, had adopted a historically accurate art style.

"That didn't go over too well with Blizzard South. I kind of dug in my heels and created what I thought we should have. It was one of those things where, thanks to having a loose structure, I could do that."

Bob and Alan heard about South's resistance to the look of Diablo II's weapons, but never firsthand. Either the three bosses—and, later, Bill Roper—would attend a meeting in Irvine, or one or all of them would jump on a conference call, or they would respond to an email chain, each reply a link in the strand of communication. Afterwards, the bosses would disseminate verdicts and ideas to their team. While their phrasing varied, their reports were almost always spirited, and with a subtext no one had trouble discerning.

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[SQ6]

Water was another impassable hurdle in creating Diablo II's cutscenes.

"Part of a cinematic showed the Wanderer and Marius traveling across an ocean," Harley Huggins said. "They were on a boat, and there was going to be a big storm. That was one of those things where, when we came up with the overall storyline, we put that in there. Then I started writing the scripts and thought, There's no way we're going to be able to do that."

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[SQ7]

The Wanderer was both a secondary protagonist and an antagonist of sorts. Players would know his true identity, but figuring out what to do with him before he could morph into the gigantic, flame-red demon was more difficult. One artist floated the idea that the Wanderer would join a traveling freak show. He would be out of his mind and kept in a cage to prevent him from harming others. In one cinematic, there would be a demonstration: the Wanderer in his cage, and a chicken. The Wanderer would use his growing magic, courtesy of hell, to make the chicken explode in a shower of blood and feathers. The crowd would respond with gasps of delight. The impresario, wanting to up the ante, would select an unwilling participant from the crowd for the Wanderer to blow up next.

Enter Marius, who would be spared, and then become the Wanderer's steadfast companion.

"This was discussed over a lunch where we were drinking and laughing our asses off, talking about all the things that would happen in a traveling freak show that featured Diablo," Harley said.

Diablo II's cinematics pulled double duty, telling their own story as well as giving players a sneak peak of what awaited them in the next stretch of areas. After Act One, they got their first look at Act Two's desert milieu as they watched Marius and the Wanderer travel to Lut Gholein. Once players defeated Mephisto and hopped a portal down to hell, they were treated to the Wanderer's gruesome transformation into Diablo.

Players were also introduced to the archangel Tyrael in cinematics. Seeing him as a fully animated angel with a flaming sword got them excited for the occasion when they would encounter him in the game following their fight against Duriel in Act Two.

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Chapter 21
[SQ1]

Despite benefitting from a clear production pipeline, Lord of Destruction's gameplay was modified several times during its twelve months of development.

"The skill tabs got reworked several different times," explained Pete Brevik, programmer. "We tried several different sets, and what it came down to was, you could have one skill that really defines the class set, then you would develop the other skills around that one. The traps kind of really stood out. We were able to make a whole tree based on that one idea. It played very well."

The agency Diablo II grants players meant players interested in the Assassin would find plenty to like even if they steered clear of traps. Max, well-known around the office for his action-heavy approach to Diablo and games in general, preferred martial arts. "For me, pace was kind of traps' downfall: you're really moving quickly through Diablo II, and to just put something stationary down kind of slows the pace. I think the traps made the game's pace a little more deliberate. You had to be a little more organized. If you were playing with people, it was sometimes tough to keep up. But that was just my little quibble with the way traps came out."

But as Tyler pointed out, changing up the pace was one of the main points of the Assassin's design. "A couple things got solved through that approach. "There were challenges of, is it annoying to run down monsters? So we gave the Assassin a warping melee attack, which was cool."

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[SQ2]

The Druid's demeanor is cool, but he speaks clearly, a purposeful deviation on Anthony Rivero's part from druidic priests in robes that stand around mumbling spells.

"Some of the influence for the light armor version, the first version you see, is he's wearing almost like a Jedi-type outfit with some fur incorporated into it, the bear claw on his shoulder. I wanted to try out red hair because it just felt to me that druids were almost Celtic in a sense."

In one skill tree, the Druid casts elemental spells, like the Sorceress. In another, he could summon pets, like the Necromancer. The particulars of those skill trees are unique, however. His pets consist of vines that snake through the ground and devour corpses to restore their master's health, and wolves that fight by his side.

"He had support pets, which we didn't really have before. That made things different in a way," said Tyler, pointing out that the Necromancer's pets—mainly golems and skeletons—were more offensive: The extra numbers were good in a fight but not much else.

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[SQ3]

Pete Brevik recalled struggling to figure out how to implement a were-bird in code. Diablo games were mouse-driven. Players clicked to attack and move. Either they would click on the screen to fly around, or, if that was too confusing, they would need to use the arrow keys, breaking the tradition of being able to play with only one hand. Moreover, how would players tell if they were on the ground or in the air? And what was the point of flying when all the action took place below. After several attempts that were awkward and messy, the team gave up.

"That's always been the core of Blizzard North: Get something on-screen then add backgrounds, add monsters, add new animations," said Pete. "Once all that starts coming in, then you know what's missing. You can say, 'Oh, we don't have this feature; and we need to do this and that; this needs to have that animation.' But that's how it all begins: just get it on-screen."

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[SQ4]

That said, those players needed a story more than they may have believed.

"If the story's not there, then they call foul," Joe Morrissey elaborated. "Even the guy who says, 'I just go for the next objective,' they'll say, 'Why didn't they think about this?' And then all the sudden you realize they do care; they only care if it's not there. If you're playing Diablo II and then all of a sudden space marines show up and start fighting, some players might say, 'That's really cool,' but most people will say, 'What the hell was that?'"

Joe learned by example. One of Diablo's most famous quests involved killing the Butcher, a crimson, cleaver-wielding demon. The Butcher's backstory was that he had slaughtered dozens of townsfolk in Tristram and hung them up around his lair like bloody ornaments. Players who glossed over dialogue relevant to the Butcher were still able to intuit that the demon was bad news through other details: the wounded townsman bleeding out in the grass in front of the entrance to Tristram's cathedral; the cadavers festooned throughout the Butcher's lair; the way the Butcher charged the moment players opened his door.

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[SQ5]

Walking back and forth along the summit causes the foreground—the mountain summit where players stand—to scroll at a different speed than the breathtaking vista far below. "Literally people would get together—maybe a few background artists and a programmer—and say, 'For the expansion, it would be cool if we did a parallax effect and could show the whole battlefield below.' We'd just do it," said Marc Tattersall. "If you had a great idea, rather than go through the bureaucracy of trying to sell it to your boss, you just grabbed some people and did it."

Dave Glenn had provided the technical foundation that made the view possible. "In Act Five, being able to get to the summit and be able to have the valley and village scrolling with perspective in the background was something that came about from the technique we used to make the lava in hell: Having a background image that scrolled differently than others in the foreground, in the actual gameplay area."

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[SQ6]

According to Dave Brevik and other developers, a second expansion for Diablo II was considered, but ultimately tabled in order to move on to Diablo III. The expansion, tentatively named Diablo II: Salvation, would have introduced another new character class and features geared toward Battle.net.

"One of the classes for the second expansion was a healing class, a cleric," said Dave Brevik. "We wanted an anti-undead cleric class. I can remember writing up the idea, and after I wrote it I said, 'Man, this would have been really fun.' It was mainly a multiplayer class. It allowed for healing based on people's damages and things like that. It wasn't direct healing, like, I'm standing back and healing everybody kind of thing. It was a very different style of gameplay. We'd actually gone through and made ideas and concepts and new tree entries for every class that would have been multiplayer-focused."

"What I'd wanted to do with Diablo III, and what we should have done with Diablo II—which we actually did, and then it got cancelled—we were going to have another expansion that was going to introduce more MMO-like features," added Dave Glenn. "Like being able to have a guild castle to spend money on and upgrade. You could join a game that had just your castle and some surrounding lands. You still played the game as you normally did in Battle.net, but then you'd have a home base to spend money on, and store and trade goods between your clan."

Glenn had progressed so far as building prototypes for guildhalls before Salvation was shelved. "We were going to have a depository in your guildhall where you just throw in [gold] and there's a leaderboard that shows who has the most gold. It was called the Stieg Stone, after [designer] Stieg Hedlund. It was a model of a little guy. We'd try to out-earn each other and stuff.  It was just a money sink, a deposit. You couldn't get the money out, but you'd just deposit your extra gold into it and try to get on the leaderboard. It was a super basic concept: for everyone in a group, would that be compelling, to keep adding to something? Because some people would say, 'Why would I spend money on something like that?' Well, just so you'd get [recognition]. That's why you do a lot of things. There's no logic to it, it's just a reward."

Salvation was cancelled due to growing excitement over what Diablo III could be. "We thought it would be kind of a grind to just start into the same stuff again, and that it was time to move on and do something else. For some people, that meant do something other than Diablo, whereas others were saying, 'Let's just do the next Diablo,'" said Max Schaefer.

[Return to Chapter]
Chapter 24
[SQ1]

On March 11, 2004, Capcom released Monster Hunter on PlayStation 2. The game puts players in control of titular monster hunters who wield special powers and weapons to track down and fight giant monsters. Like Pokémon, the objective of Monster Hunter is to weaken, not kill a target so it can be captured and later dissected for parts. Players use the parts to craft armor, weapons, and other items.

While Monster Hunter included a single-player mode, its appeal was its online play. The five-man crew who had worked with Capcom thought some the game's networking code looked awfully familiar.

"Same network infrastructure, same style of gameplay [as the PS2 Diablo title]," Joe Morrissey said.

[Return to Chapter]

Acknowledgments

Like game development, writing and publishing a book the scale of Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II is a massive effort possible only with the help of an incredible team.

First and foremost, a huge thank-you to the folks from Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard North, and other companies mentioned in this book. Each and every person I interviewed gave generously of their time to answer my many—many, many—questions over the past ten (!!) years. Your games have touched my life and the lives of countless others, and your story has inspired me. I hope I have done, and continued to do, justice to this part of your story.

Andrew Magrath is my best friend, a fantastic editor, and an even better writer. He's been on this ride since near the beginning; there's no one I trust more to be the first pair of eyes on these books.

Lili Ibrahim is a phenomenal artistic talent, and the cover of Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II never fails to remind me that I am fortunate to have her on my team.

Bookmasters is a printer and distributor local to the great state of Ohio, where I was born and raised, and where I wrote most of the Stay Awhile and Listen series. The team has been a pleasure to work with, and produced beautiful printed copies of this work.

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II would not have been possible without the overwhelming supporter of each and every backer who pledged to the book's Kickstarter in the summer of 2018. Thank you to Asif Khan, Michael Russell, Rajasekaran Senthil Kumaran, Jason Zisk, Matthew Gyure, Jakub Beránek, Murilo Fernando Floriani, netsabes, Jereme Givens-Lamothe, Nicholas Russell Weible, Gerard Snitselaar, Philip Denton, René de Hoog, Andreas Sammer, David J Engel, Kevin Yockey, Pope J-rod, Brian Staszewski, Harold Sotomayor, Phil Murwin, Tom, Matthew Kimbrough, Gabe Durham, Markus Jevring, Richard, liquid, Kevin Pereira, Alex, Diifa Co., Steven Kern, David Massey, Trogdor, Mark Fleming, David Powell, Matthew Carr, Ryan Sumners, Guest 1397790150, John Beyer, John Barton, James Newton-King, Collin McRae, Legendary, Cat Chen, Jason Smith, Thomas Dankert, Ben Barrett, Daniel Opitz, Sean West, Michael Mackenzie, Daniel Tauber, Edmund Burt, A C., Tormod Haugen, vincent Chavanel Jobin, Chachi, Steve Niemitz, Steve Barringer, Slartie, Neil Ryan, James Steinberg, Steven Broderick, Steven Wei, Ben H, Jarret Raim, Benjamin L, John Rogers, Greg, ikillkenny, Alex David, Kirin, Mirza Sadović, Ido Yehieli, James Thompson, Robert McClanahan, Max Horn, Nathalie de Bruijn, Daniel Baeck, Mike Moore, nlattessi, Nicholas Irish, Joshua Guenther, Daimadoshi_CL, Joseph Weinhoffer, Stephen Chalker, Stuart, Maxime Ouellet, Jonathan VanHandel, David Nielsen, BW Diederich, Adam Wokkers, Vladimir Kozlov, sikander, Andrew Varga, Jon Bellwood, Dan Korn, Szmozsánszky István, Lukasz Paczkowski, Yurt, Matthew Kelly, Eliot and Ressie Lyons, Sylvester Jakubowski, Andreas Schommer, George Henson, noorick, Martijn van Berkum, Christopher Buchanan, Daniel Martinez, Apiram Raengpradub, TrantorX, kparal, Ian, Stargrave, Eric Schwarzkopf, William Eiten, bwooster0, Florian Schulze, Jared, Mike Walker, Jasen Ramon, Magnies Gregory, stutzj, Andrew Seid, Tyrone Gauger, Kristoffer Jetmundsen, Joe Burns, Daniel Upton, Vegard Skjefstad, Jeffrey, Rob, Christian Palmhøj Nielsen, Wade Woodson, American McGee, Mika Kuusisto, Vitaliy Zlotskiy, Naythan Smith, Mark Stahler, Paul Wong, Josh, Shane Myers, Kevin Conley, Pascal, Mark Scott, Dead Mage, Bernard Le Moullec, KickyStartsman, Gregory Burke, Ross Williams, Andrew Grothen, JohnDoe, andrew sheivachman, Eric Oestrich, Jason Richards, Keyoke, scifidownbeat, Scott Grant, Anastasia Massie, Devon, Alan Newman, Thomas Kilger, y4rn, John Skotnik, Pang Zhi Han, Mackenzie Marshall, David Thomson, Joshua Lake, Stephen Keller, MagnarJ, Michael Bailey, Kai Kubicek, Jed-Josie Arnold, Thorsten Korinth, Ryan Stocks, Ruiz Bennett, Jesse Merrill, Lasse K, rk, Shorack, Alex Cottle, incognitum, Kushal Naik, Gareth Coster, Weikie Yeh, Adam Kittelson, Brandon, Guest 1877668242, Kari Silvennoinen, Jonathan Roseberry, Garrett C, Ben Howenstein, Guest 826299076, rms, Mike Lietzau, Nick Dunn, Jamie Martin, Hamilton Chong, Raymond Harris, Eric, Andrew Lonero, Rob Hall, Dmitry Jemerov, Mike Bermudez, Brad Calvert, Ben Linford, Juan Francisco Bautista, Eric Walklet, Ian Joseph Thompson, Owais Ali, Buyu, Jason Holt, Jesse Michelsen, Matthew Howell, Alexandra Walowicz, Brian Page, Wolf Owczarek, Eric Hambright, Mark Holtz, Jeff Lorenzen, Jeff Brock, Robert Crossfield, Roland Shum, Robert Steinman, Danny Nissenfeld, Mitchell Funk, Benton Hunt, Steve Mumford, Adam Baker-Siroty, ryan gavigan, Ryan Carlson, Dale Harvey, Adam McArthur, Chad Cloer, Philip Stein, donamandaheap, Tim Caudill, Shadic, Jamie Locatis, Chris Wilson, Jamie Rees, Raquel Dodd, Peter Chudleigh, kelly pelkey-fitzwater, Michael Radojevic, Dan A., Paul Sadauskas, David Marshall, Christopher Reynolds, Hendrik Richter, Ken Hollan, Matthew Lang, Sharad Cornejo, Brandon Cessna, Adam C, Andrew Francis, Serinox, Joachim De Lombaert, Trevor McKendrick, claym8ion, Jessica Conley, Justin Brodley, Michael Schoell, Alex Bellone, Nicholas Chaimov, Ted, John Mac, Nick Kato, DalamarD, Rick Parker, Grzegorz Świt, Outsdr, Charles Clemmer, Kris, Carlos Alfredo Diaz, joechick, Cameron, John Ford, Spiketail, Adam Rosenfield, Kris Loukas, Dan Johnson, Shane Lillie, Robert Schultz, Nathan Englert, Doug, Virginia Brunner-Livingston, Kupo Smith, Aric, Jean-Sébastien Fauteux, William, Jeff Baxendale, Jonathan Heberer, Dragon Eyes, Ian Marks, Michael Smith, Daryl Heffernan, Jason Technocrat Wilkes, Michael Feldhusen, Z Ward, Kurt Beedie, Kevin, bellif, Robert Michael, Malban, Justin Vollmer, Torv, Thom Wetzel, Allen Hord, CodeRedBeard, Jacob Ouellette, Teo Georgiev, Nelson, Jon Cope, Donato Sinicco, III, John, Graham Cheshir, Guest 1993697481, Axiom, Brian Risinger, Bill, Christopher Sharp, Steen Rasmussen, Guest 1714152881, Kevin Foss, James Riggall, Talia DeMartinis, Joshua Krell, Derek Osborne, Carson Crawford, Yauchy, Ana H, Charles Singletary, greenedr00l, David Litke, Pablo Padilla, Derek Neilson, Bill, Fabrizio Pedrazzini, Kenneth Van Aken, ExServ - WereSheepCat Of Sin, Jennifer, Walrus_T, Callum, Michael Razzino, Mark Offutt, Reshad Staitieh, Derek Correia, obsKura, Matthew Beckham, Steven Lord, Eliot Weinstein, John Jacques, Paul Mills, Ben Royse, Lepage, Michael Kieselbach II, Brian Fargo - Chief Tormentor, Richard Seis, Margaret Egbert, Graham Bullard, Steven Hawkins, Nick Burgess, Erica McCowan, Aleksej, Guest 1111669887, Warren Beck, Peter Vulgaris, Steve Brennan, Ramon de C Valle, Lucas J Smith, Vikrant Agarwal, David Freshwater, Johnny Voxel, Obsidian Entertainment, Casey Putney, Jeff Slane, Bob, Jarred Capellman, Justin Holdsclaw, Peter Curd, Scott James MacLellan, Trent Thompson, Evan Lennick, Sean G, Jacob Trenta, Justin Baker, Jared, Rune Klausen, Andrew James, Evan, Amie C. E. Kline, Katie Grace, Jonathan Bloom, Kyle Hopson, tanquerayno13, and Anand Manu.

Thank you, as always, to my Mom. She loved and supported me when I wanted to be a professional wrestler. Two weeks later, when I discovered I didn't care for exercising, I returned to my goal of becoming a programmer, and she supported and loved me. When I finally arrived at writing stories, she supported and loved me. Her love and support have been a constant source of strength, and I'll never be able to express my gratitude enough.

Finally, thank you to Amie Christine. My love, my best friend, my wife, my partner. Her support, encouragement, love, and excitement for my projects fuel me when the never-ending hustle threatens to crush me. Thank you, Amie, for everything.

Notes and Citations

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II includes new content from interviews with the following people: David "Dave" Brevik, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, Stephen Meretzky, Alan Ackerman, Chris Arretche, Kevin Beardslee, Cheeming Boey, Ben Boos, Bruno Bowden, Peter Brevik, Evan Carroll, Robert "Bob" Clardy, Karin Seis (nee Colenzo), Mike Dashow, Colin Day, Lee Dotson, Jim Edwards, Gage Galinger, Froilan Gardner, Dave Glenn, Stieg Hedlund, Matt Householder, Peter Hu, Michael Huang, Robert Huebner, Harley Huggins, Kelly Johnson, Peter Kemmer, John Kubasco, Stone Librande, Brad Mason, Jon Morin, Joe Morrissey, Michio Okamura, Scott Petersen, Brennan Plunkett, David Pursley, Kris Renkewitz, Tom Ricket, Anthony Rivero, Chris Root, Stu Rose, Mike Scandizzo, Stefan Scandizzo, Rick Seis, Eric Sexton, Phil Shenk, Robert "Bob" Steele, Duane Stinnett, Jon Stone, Jeff Strain, Marc Tattersall, Tyler Thompson, Patrick "Pattie" Tougas, Donald Tsang, Matt Uelmen, Jeffrey Vaughn, Fred Vaught, Kenneth "Kenny" Williams, Steven Woo, and Patrick Wyatt. Interviews were conducted through email, Skype, and in person from 2009-2019.

Blizzard Entertainment declined to official participate in this book. As such, I did my best to fill in their side of every story by speaking with former employees at position throughout the company, especially those who held decision-making roles and who interacted often with members of Blizzard North.

Role-playing games are dead. That was the: "The Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame," The Golden Age of Games, http://goldenageofgames.com/the-computer-gaming-world-hall-of-fame/. (Author's note: The link to Computer Gaming World's induction of Diablo no longer works. Other sites such as Golden Age of Games kept lists of CGW's inductions, which is why I link to it here.)

On its face, painted with a Sharpie: Photograph given to the author. Schaefer, Max. Diablo gold disc. December 26, 1996. Blizzard North, Redwood City, California.

GameSpot editors confessed in their review: "Diablo Review," GameSpot, https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/diablo-review/1900-2538662/.

Computer Gaming World, one of the most: Fortune, Greg. Diablo Rules the Underworld. Computer Gaming World, April 1997, pages 80-81.

and followed that by inducting: "The Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame," The Golden Age of Games, http://goldenageofgames.com/the-computer-gaming-world-hall-of-fame/.

from publications that proclaimed Diablo RPG of the year: "Awards," Blizzard Entertainment, http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/awards.html.

BoBaFeTT Trainer, one of the earliest hacks: "Welcome to BoBaFeTT's Diablo WORLD!", GeoCities, http://www.geocities.ws/free_bobafett/main.htm. (Author's note: The trainer became available in May 1997, making it one of the earliest hacks for Diablo.)

Diablo seemed to be written helter-skelter: (Author's note: In July 2018, a coder by the alias of GalaXyHaXz spent over 1200 hours cleaning and modifying Diablo's source code. The coder uploaded it to GitHub so anyone can download it and experiment: https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution. The code is still available as of January 2, 2019.)

the dawn of affordable personal computers: "35th-anniversary salute to Radio Shack's TRS-80," CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/tech/gaming-gadgets/anniversary-radio-shack-computer/index.html.

Their first game was Dungeon Campaign for the Apple II: "Game 83: Dungeon Campaign (1978)," The CRPG Addict, http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/01/game-83-dungeon-campaign-1979.html. (Author's note: There was some confusion regarding the chronology of Synergistic Software's catalog. Bob Clardy joined a discussion in the article's comments to confirm that Dungeon Campaign was indeed the company's first commercial product.)

trailing just behind Beneath Apple Manor by Don Worth: "Game 79: Beneath Apple Manor (1978)," The CRPG Addict, http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2012/12/game-79-beneath-apple-manor-1978.html. (Author's note: Publishing the first commercial RPG is a lofty accolade, one difficult to confirm due to games such as Beneath Apple Manor and Dungeon Campaign releasing long before game publishers put together lavish marketing campaigns that included release dates. Through careful research with the "CRPG Addict" himself, I was able to verify that Beneath Apple Manor does stand as the first CRPG made available for purchase in retail stores. Further information on the making of that game can be found in my 2015 book, Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games.)

for more than $1.8 billion: "CUC Will Buy 2 Software Companies for $1.8 Billion," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/21/business/cuc-will-buy-2-software-companies-for-1.8-billion.html.

Per the terms of the sale, Ken Williams was given a verbal promise: "Ken Williams," Sierra Gamers, http://www.sierragamers.com/ken-williams.

who had agreed to the acquisition out of his responsibility: "Ken Williams' Official Letter to all Former Sierra Employees," Sierra Help, http://www.sierrahelp.com/Misc/History/KenWilliamsLetter.html.

a software board would be formed: Ibid.

Written by lead Battle.net architect Mike O'Brien: "Tough times on the road to StarCraft," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft.

Every Blizzard title released from 1996 through 2004: "MPQ Archives Storm.dll," http://www.zezula.net/en/mpq/stormdll.html.

they predictably expressed confusion at the lack of support for Battle.net: Scorpia. "Flame On. Multiplayer is Missing, But Hellfire Still Packs Some Good Diablo Hack-and-Slash." Computer Gaming World, April 1998, page 154.

players interested in online play give it a pass: " Hellfire Review," GameSpot, https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/hellfire-review/1900-2537524/.

a day that became known as Chainsaw Monday: " R.I.P. Sierra," Sierra Help, http://www.sierrahelp.com/Misc/History/SierraEulogy.html.

PC Data listed the game as the best-selling: "Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo Remains Number-One Selling Game," Blizzard Entertainment, https://web.archive.org/web/19990210072202/http:/www.blizzard.com:80/PRESS/970408d1.htm.

over half a million customers had installed: Ibid.

approximately 400,000 of those had played: Ibid.

thanks mostly to its sock-puppet mascot: "Pets.com killed by sock puppet," Market Watch, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sock-puppet-kills-petscom.

WarCraft II became the first Blizzard title: "Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard," GameSpot, http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/p2_02.html.

reached the top of bestseller charts: Ibid.

the team was suffering burnout from over two years: Ibid.

Artwork went a long way in defining: "The Evolution of StarCraft," StarCraft Evolution, http://web.archive.org/web/20071017043633/http:/www.sclegacy.com/content/starcraft-encyclopedia-4/starcraft-evolution-12/.

onslaught of criticism from attendees, who dismissed the game: Ibid.

through Blizzard's thinly veiled attempt to: "More than 'Orcs in Space': Devs measure the enduring influence of StarCraft," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/315950/More_than_Orcs_in_Space_Devs_measure_the_enduring_influence_of_StarCraft.php.

in shady neighborhoods where they had to carry: "StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-flames.

it had been one of a scant few RTS games: "The History of Blizzard," IGN, https://www.ign.com/articles/2010/10/22/the-history-of-blizzard.

showcased giant robots charging and stomping: "StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-flames.

Components of WarCraft II's engine: "Tough times on the road to StarCraft," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft.

he wrote code allowing for advanced capabilities: "The Evolution of StarCraft," SCLegacy.com, http://web.archive.org/web/20071017043633/http:/www.sclegacy.com/content/starcraft-encyclopedia-4/starcraft-evolution-12/.

was renamed to the Wraith: Ibid.

had been equipped with a flamethrower, machine gun: Ibid.

unintentionally bogged down the project: "Tough times on the road to StarCraft," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft.

Pat hacked out a solution by instructing workers: "The StarCraft path-finding hack," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack.

Bill Roper decided to run one last test cycle: "Bill Roper Recalls How StarCraft's Launch Ruined His Birthday 20 Years Ago," US Gamer, https://www.usgamer.net/articles/bill-roper-recalls-how-starcrafts-launch-20-years-ago-ruined-his-birthday.

on March 27, his birthday, the game went gold again: Ibid.

sell over one and a half million units by the end of the year: "STARCRAFT NAMED #1 SELLER IN 1998," IGN, http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/01/21/starcraft-named-1-seller-in-1998.

In what would become a tradition: "At Blizzard, it's free swag, valet parking and playing games all day," Orange County Register, https://www.ocregister.com/2008/12/09/at-blizzard-its-free-swag-valet-parking-and-playing-games-all-day-2/.

Blizzard treated the team to a wrap party: Ibid.

Bob Fitch claimed that StarCraft's development: "Behind the Scenes of StarCraft's Earliest Days," US Gamer, https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-making-of-starcraft-the-early-days-of-blizzards-rts-legend.

the Space Cadet table of Full Tilt!, packaged into every version of Windows: "Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?," Microsoft MSDN Blog, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803/.

one of the motivators behind Maxis's decision: "Three Decades of Sims: Remembering 'SimCity' and 'The Sims' Developer Maxis," Game Rant, https://gamerant.com/simcity-sims-maxis-history-studio-close/.

Electronic Arts purchased Maxis in a stock swap: "Electronic Arts Will Buy Maxis in Swap," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/05/business/electronic-arts-will-buy-maxis-in-swap.html.

a mechanic introduced in the board game Civilization: "Technology Trees: Freedom and Determinism in Historical Strategy Games," Game Studies, http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/tuur_ghys.

the computer game widely credited with popularizing research trees: "The History of Civilization," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129947/the_history_of_civilization.php?page=4.

Dave, Max, and Erich would make a plan: "In Their Own Words: An Oral History of Diablo II With David Brevik, Max Schaefer, and Erich Schaefer," US Gamer, https://www.usgamer.net/articles/in-their-own-words-an-oral-history-of-diablo-ii-with-david-brevik-maschaefer-and-erich-schaefer/page-2.

Act One's pastures and fields were meant to be big: Ibid.

assets that Maxis later jettisoned when the team: "Full text of 'Sim City 3000,'" Sim City 3000 game manual, https://archive.org/stream/Sim_City_3000/Sim_City_3000_djvu.txt.

Max had been using an ancient version of StrataVision: Doug and Denise Green. "StrataVision takes Mac rendering to higher level." InfoWorld, October 1991, page 76. (Author's Note: Early versions of StrataVision were infamous for creating beautiful scenes at the cost of long rendering times.)

On February 21, 1996, Comp-U-Card International: "Marketer CUC to Buy Davidson & Associates," Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/1996-02-21/business/fi-38256_1_bob-davidson.

The purchase went through as a pair of stock swaps: Ibid.

CUC chief executive Walter Forbes explained: Ibid.

would assume leadership positions as the largest shareholders: Ibid.

Davidson & Associates had made $150 million: Ibid.

which staffed 250 of their 750: Ibid.

Diablo had sold approximately 1.25: "Battle.net Defines Its Success: Interview With Paul Sams," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131648/battlenet_defines_its_success_.php.

another stock swap, was valued at $11 billion: "$11 Billion Merger Plan Would Join HFS and CUC," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/28/business/11-billion-merger-plan-would-join-hfs-and-cuc.html.

a day referred to as Black Monday: "The Crash of '87, From the Wall Street Players Who Lived It," Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-16/black-monday-at-30-wall-street-remembers-the-1987-stock-market-crash.

the use of computers to sell bundles of stock: "Those Who Don't Learn From Financial Crises Are Doomed to Repeat Them," The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/financial-crisis-black-monday/539859/.

students working out of dorm rooms or their parents' garage: "The Dot-com Bubble," The Bubble Bubble, http://www.thebubblebubble.com/dot-com-bubble/.

was on track to become one of the best-selling games: "STARCRAFT NAMED #1 SELLER IN 1998," IGN, https://www.ign.com/articles/1999/01/21/starcraft-named-1-seller-in-1998.

had committed accounting scandals: "Cendant to restate results," CNN Money, https://money.cnn.com/1998/04/15/companies/cendant/.

from 1 to 35 and 5/8 per share: Ibid.

Cendant's market cap fell from $38 billion: "A Merger Made in Hell The inside story of the decade's dumbest deal," Fortune, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250846/index.htm.

cooking its accounting books since 1995: Ibid.

starting with a payout of $2.83 billion: Ibid.

negotiations to secure the LA Convention Center: "E3: Past, Present, and Future," GameSpot, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-past-present-and-future/1100-6210423/.

a year considered by many pundits: "Was 1998 The Ultimate Year in Video Gaming?", Kotaku, https://kotaku.com/5925979/was-1998-the-ultimate-year-in-video-gaming.

worth around $84,000: "BUYER'S GUIDE 1998 ACURA NSX," Motor Trend, https://www.motortrend.com/cars/acura/nsx/1998/.

by rolling out a patch that pre-loaded: "Patch 1.04 (Diablo II)," Diablo Wiki, http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_1.04_(Diablo_II).

Early that November: "Diablo II Delayed Again," Computer Shopper, http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/news/diablo2delayed111199.htm.

Developers have spoken and written about: "10 Things Every Indie Game Developer Should Know," Build Box, https://www.buildbox.com/10-things-indie-developers-should-do/.

although the topic has been under contention: "To Play Or Not To Play?", Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134864/to_play_or_not_to_play.php.

what the bosses originally pegged as: "Postmortem: Blizzard's Diablo II," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131533/postmortem_blizzards_diablo_ii.php?print=1.

approximately four times the size of its predecessor: "Postmortem: Blizzard's Diablo II," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131533/postmortem_blizzards_diablo_ii.php?print=1.

move smoothly and sinuously in sixteen directions: Ibid.

would get into heated debates with players: "Player Kill," Diablo Wiki, https://www.diablowiki.net/Player_Kill#Max_Schaefer_Defends_PKing.

when he created a new cow model: "APRIL FOOLS' ARCHIVE - 2008 - 1999," Blizzard Entertainment, http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/april-fools/archive-2.html#1999.

inspired by Warhammer and Warhammer: 40,000: "The making of Warcraft part 1," Code of Honor, https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-1.

have been rivals since the nineteenth century: "The NorCal Versus SoCal Rivalry," The Santa Clara, http://thesantaclara.org/the-norcal-versus-socal-rivalry/#.XDeMcFxKiUk.

region epitomized by the descriptor: "San Francisco Values Clarified," Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/geri-spieler/san-francisco-values-clar_b_669712.html.

to French water company Havas: "Cendant Said to Near Sale of Software Division," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/20/business/cendant-said-to-near-sale-of-software-division.html.

as one part of Vivendi Universal Publishing: "Havas Interactive Changes Name To Vivendi," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/91497/Havas_Interactive_Changes_Name_To_Vivendi.php.

then as Vivendi Universal (VU) Games that November: "Viv U streamlines games," Variety, https://variety.com/2001/digital/news/viv-u-streamlines-games-1117855872/.

twenty-eight total, thirty-four with the addition: "Area Size (Diablo II)," Diablo Gamepedia, https://diablo.gamepedia.com/Area_Size_(Diablo_II)#Presets.

fourteen animation categories: "Postmortem: Blizzard's Diablo II," Gamasutra, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131533/postmortem_blizzards_diablo_ii.php?print=1.

Diablo II is arguably the best role-playing game of all time: "The 50 Best Video Games of All Time," TIME magazine, http://time.com/4458554/best-video-games-all-time/.

Over its first twenty-four hours: "Eye of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard," GameSpot, http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/blizzard/p2_02.html.

the number had risen to one million: "Diablo II: One Million and Counting," Game Center, https://web.archive.org/web/20010212100702/http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,0-4471,00.html.

named the fastest-selling game of the time: "Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade," Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, https://www.webcitation.org/5QPCMZ1A5?url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdoup/is_200505/ai_n13462894.

There was an article about how when the book first went on sale: "Watch Your Back, Harry Potter; A Wizardly Comuter [Sic] Game, Diablo II, Is a Hot Seller," The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/03/business/watch-your-back-harry-potter-a-wizardly-comuter-game-diablo-ii-is-a-hot-seller.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.

Diablo II had sold four million copies: "Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Goes Gold," Yahoo! Finance (Press Release), https://web.archive.org/web/20010801205053/http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010621/2122.html.

ranked #19 on the best-selling games: "Best-selling PC Games of 2008," IGN, https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/01/15/best-selling-pc-games-of-2008.

the Battle Chest appeared in the top ten PC games list: "Activision Blizzard Q2 financials: Net revenue comes in at $967 million," VG247, https://www.vg247.com/2010/08/05/activision-blizzard-q2-financials-net-revenue-comes-in-at-967-million/.

had gone live on Battle.net on June 27: "Diablo II Patch Dates," The Amazon Basin, https://www.theamazonbasin.com/forums/index.php?/forums/topic/125365-diablo-ii-patch-dates/.

when he or she stepped through a town portal: "Patch 1.01 (Diablo II)," Diablo Wiki, http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_1.01_(Diablo_II).

between June 29 and early August: "Diablo II Patch Dates," The Amazon Basin, https://www.theamazonbasin.com/forums/index.php?/forums/topic/125365-diablo-ii-patch-dates/.

a press release had announced Stieg's intention: "Running Away from Diablo," IGN, https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/04/19/running-away-from-diablo.

sold over one million units: "Lord of Destruction breaks sales record," GameSpot, https://web.archive.org/web/20020210212838/http://gamespot.com:80/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870,2798893,00.html.

making it the fastest-selling expansion: Ibid.

memo written by Erich Schaefer: Author's Note - Much of the information in this chapter comes from internal documents and assets shared by Blizzard North developers under condition of anonymity.

most of the root code and a majority of the assets: " How Diablo 2 Was Almost Lost, And Why A Remaster Is Less Likely," GameSpot, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-diablo-2-was-almost-lost-and-why-a-remaster-is/1100-6471517/. (Author's Note: This information was complemented with my own interviews.)

fashioning Diablo III as massively multiplayer game: Author's Note - Much of the information in this chapter comes from internal documents and assets shared by Blizzard North developers under condition of anonymity.

Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard North, Sierra, Interplay: "Vivendi to sell Blizzard, Sierra....," Gamers Hell, http://www.gamershell.com/news_3344.html.

could fetch as much as two billion euros: Ibid.

His chief objective was to sell off: "Microsoft eyeing Vivendi unit?", CNET, https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-eyeing-vivendi-unit/.

Vivendi and Microsoft were in talks to purchase: "TECHNOLOGY; Vivendi Seen in Talks to Sell Game Studios to Microsoft," New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/business/technology-vivendi-seen-in-talks-to-sell-game-studios-to-microsoft.html.

was willing to cut a large check: "Microsoft eyeing Vivendi unit?", CNET, https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-eyeing-vivendi-unit/.

Vivendi had been close to finalizing the: "Sale Of VU Games Drags On With No End In Sight," Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1836/Sale_Of_VU_Games_Drags_On_With_No_End_In_Sight.php.

Pundits whispered that Microsoft and Take-Two: Ibid.

departure of Bill Roper and Blizzard North's co-founders: "Blizzard North Co-Founders Leave Company," Slashdot, https://games.slashdot.org/story/03/06/30/2353203/blizzard-north-co-founders-leave-company.

On the morning of July 11: "New Blizzard North team lead announced," GameSpot, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-blizzard-north-team-lead-announced/1100-6071481/.

About the Author

David L. Craddock lives with his wife, Amie Kline–Craddock, in Canton, Ohio. He is the author of several books including the Stay Awhile and Listen trilogy of nonfiction books chronicling the history of Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North, the Gairden Chronicles series of epi-fantasy novels for young adults, and Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters. Follow David online @davidlcraddock on Twitter and at davidlcraddock.com.

Books by David L. Craddock
Fiction
Heritage: Book One of the Gairden Chronicles

Point of Fate: Book Two of the Gairden Chronicles

Firebug: War of the Elementalists, Book I

Nonfiction

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

Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels

Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs (TBD 2019)

Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters (TBD 2019)

Ascendant: The Fall of Tomb Raider and the Rise of Lara Croft (TBD 2019)

Stairway to Badass: The Making and Remaking of Doom (TBD 2019)

Shovel Knight (Boss Fight Books)

Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution

GameDev Stories: Interviews About Game Development and Culture

Once Upon a Point and Click: The Tale of King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, and the Queens of Adventure Games

Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games

One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge

Making Fun: Stories of Game Development - Volume 1

Angels, Devils, and Boomsticks: The Making of Demons with Shotguns

Anything But Sports: The Making of FTL
Red to Black: The Making of Rogue Legacy
Everybody Shake! The Making of Spaceteam

Table of Contents

- Introduction: Wait Awhile and Listen
- Chapter 1: Inside Out
- Chapter 2: Wild West
- Chapter 3: Kicking and Screaming
- Chapter 4: Bases
- Chapter 5: Orcs in Space
- Chapter 6: Cowboy Development
- Chapter 7: Hubris or Fear

- Chapter 8: A Business-Like Approach to Showers

- Chapter 9: Lay of the Land
- Chapter 10: Full Disclosure
- Chapter 11: Shifts
- Chapter 12: Settling In
- Chapter 13: In Dave We Trust
- Chapter 14: Solidarity
- Chapter 15: Ghosts and Ashes
- Chapter 16: Blood and Fire
- Chapter 17: Vantage Points
- Chapter 18: Hell Unleashed
- Chapter 19: Battles and Battle.net
- Chapter 20: Separate Ways
- Chapter 21: The Seventy-Percenters
- Chapter 22: X Factors
- Chapter 23: Shadows on the Wall
- Chapter 24: Axes and Cyclones
- Chapter 25: Bluffing
- Chapter 26: The Bosses
- Chapter 27: The End of Everything
- Epilogue: Predictions
- Side Quests
- Acknowledgments
- Notes and Citations