In 1994, publishers told David Brevik that role-playing games were dead. This episode traces how his slow, turn-based, claymation dungeon crawler pitched by Condor Games at the Consumer Electronics Show became Diablo, the Blizzard North classic that birthed the action RPG. We cover the chance meeting with Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham over shared misery porting Justice League Task Force, and the two demands Blizzard attached to the partnership: real-time action and multiplayer.

We break down the Friday afternoon when Brevik, intending to prove real-time combat impossible, got a working prototype running in hours, and how the sports game NHL 94 inspired a philosophy of stripping away friction. Then we explore Tristram's procedurally generated descent into hell, the three classes, color-coded unidentified loot and variable ratio reinforceme ...