David Brevik

"The number one personality was definitely David. Without him, there's no way this could have ever happened. He was the fearless leader of us all, and drove the development day to day, especially when things were going weird or we had to get back on track. So, I think, to me, he was the shining leader that made this thing work out. He had the technical skills to get anything done when we did have a hump, when it, oh, it turns out we were going to make this game a multiplayer game, or we were going to turn this thing that started out, famously, people talk about as a turn based game, it became real time halfway through, and it only took Dave about a day to do that."

- Erich Schaefer on Brevik's work on Diablo^(src)

David Brevik

David Brevik is the creator of the Diablo series and former president of Blizzard North.

Biography

Brevik went to school in the California Bay Area. Brevik has stated that as early as high school he was thinking about what kind of games he'd like to make, and what their names would be.

After college, Brevik worked at a digital clip art company that eventually went under. In the aftermath, a few of its former employees went on to launch their own company, named after a secret project the clip art company had been working on: "Project Condor."

Blizzard North

Alongside Max and Erich Schaefer, Brevik was one of the founders of Condor, later known as Blizzard North.

Brevik thought of the name "Diablo" when he lived in Danville, California, which is situated at the base of Mount Diablo. The name appealed to him, though he did not realize that Diablo translates as "devil" in Spanish until much later. He worked as the lead programmer and senior designer for Diablo I. Brevik protested against the decision to turn it from a turn-based game to a real-time one, but relented as the rest of Blizzard North agreed with the change in direction. In late 1996, Brevik was offered a position in a company started by Sabeer Bhatia, where he would have a 10% share. Brevik refused, and Bhatia's company eventually became Hotmail. Brevik has since estimated that as of 2016, had he taken the position, he would have earned $280 million.

Alongside the Schaefers, Brevik was one of the principal designers for Diablo II. Among his contributions was the game's skill tree. According to Brevik, the idea came to him while he was in the shower. He didn't work extensively on the game's expansion, as he was suffering from burnout on Diablo II.

Post-Blizzard

Brevik co-founded Flagship Studios, once again with the Shaefers and other former Blizzard North members. He later moved on to become CEO at Gazillion Entertainment, working on Marvel Heroes. He has since left Gazillion to found Graybeard Games. Brevik has expressed a dim view of Diablo III, and has cited Marvel Heroes as its spiritual successor. As of 2017, Brevik appears to have taken a more charitable view on the game. This remained true in 2018, with Brevik stating "I thought that they added a lot of really great stuff to it that fleshed it out and made it a much better game than I thought that it was at launch."

Brevik visited Blizzard's campus in October, 2016. The same month, he tweeted that "for 20 years, Diablo-like games have evolved & surprised us. I'm proud to be the adviser for the game that pushes this genre to new heights." The tweet was accompanied by an image of the constellation of Libra, which, in sidereal astrology, covers the period of October 16 to November 17 (a period in which BlizzCon 2016 would fall into). He confirmed soon afterwards that he wasn't returning to the series. It was later revealed that he was acting as an adviser for the Chinese release of Path of Exile, a game that he had previously called "Diablo 2.5." He featured in the 20th anniversary panel for the series at BlizzCon 2016.

In February 2017, Brevik confirmed that he's talked to Blizzard a few times about returning to work on the Diablo series (or another Blizzard project), but stated that he was focusing on his own work for now, working on an action-focused RPG.

In an interview published in January 2018, Brevik announced that he was working on a new game called It Lurks Below. The game is a spiritual successor to Diablo II and features game mechanics similar to Terraria and Minecraft. On April 25, 2018, the game entered Early Access mode on Steam.