This is how history was made.
David Brevik was one of the co-founders of Blizzard North. He was there are the very beginning of the Diablo series, and as part of a GDC talk he made last week has uploaded a copy of the classic game’s original pitch document.
It’s not long (at least by today’s standards), and includes only one concept image of the game — showing its isometric viewpoint — but it’s still a very interesting read. It’s crazy seeing a game that would go down as one of the all-time greats have to explain itself like this!
Of particular note is this very early idea for how permadeath could be handled:
I’ve posted the first few pages of the doc below, but if you want to read the whole thing, it’s available here.
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.
Comments
2 responses to “Read Diablo’s Original Pitch Document”
Design doc could have just been “Moria for Windows” and that would have been fine, only replace Balrog with Diablo and hire a graphic artist.
Interesting to see that it was original intended to be turn based not real time. Glad they didn’t stick with that decision 🙂