Diablo's last-minute multiplayer guided Diablo II's development, creator David Brevik says

Diablo 2 turns 25 years old today, so stay a while and listen to original series creator David Brevik talk about the early days of the franchise.

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What's one of the best ways to celebrate a quarter century of Diablo? No, sorry, Blizzard isn't adding act 6 in a surprise patch, although they may have teased new Diablo 2 content is on the way.

In fact, one of the best celebrations of the sequel didn't even come from Blizzard. Today, Path of Exile co-founder Chris Wilson conducted an interview with Diablo series creator David Brevik, delivering easily the best Q&A session that we've seen with the former Blizzard North alum.

The whole interview is worth watching, especially on today, but one part in particular stood out to me.

Wilson asked Brevik if Diablo 2 was built with multiplayer in mind, the ex-Blizzard dev said this was very much the case. This is something we can see evidence of with the Paladin class and his arsenal of helpful character-buffing auras.

Check below for a transcript of what Brevik said regarding this topic.

Wilson: Was the plan to just make a great single-player game, and the online play was a bonus, or was online play a critical must-have thing that you actually designed around?

David Brevik, Diablo creator:

Well, a little of both. When we first started out with Diablo I, we were focused on just making a great single-player experience.

Even though when we had pitched the game to Blizzard South, that they had said, 'this is gonna be multiplayer' and yeah, sure, it's gonna be multiplayer.

And then as we kind of went on in development, we were only just making basically a single player game, so we weren't making kind of design decisions or anything based on having multiplayer.

Then as we got closer and closer to the end of Diablo, they said, 'so how's multiplayer coming along?' We're like, 'we don't know how to make a multiplayer game.'

They actually ended up sending a couple people from down south up to help us convert Diablo from the single player game into a multiplayer experience. And they taught us how to make a multiplayer game, and use networking sockets and things like that that we just had no experience with in the past.

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So with that, then some of the stuff changed. The invention of Battle.net happened right around there.

Maybe six months or eight months before we finished Diablo I, the idea came to light that we were going to do this Battle.net thing.

We didn't have time to make it a client server game, we only had time to make it peer to peer. And so, then it was, you know, converting all the code.

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Once we got the actual multiplayer working, then we started making some multiplayer decisions and realizing that the design definitely got influenced by the multiplayer quite extensively as we went along.

You played the game, and how fun it was to have other people in the game, and then who gets to pick up the loot first kind of arguments around the office.

Those kind of things definitely had a big influence on the product in the end.

It started out as a 'yes, we're gonna have multiplayer' then we were making a single-player experience, and then at the end we added multiplayer, and it had a little bit of an influence.

It was definitely a big influence on Diablo II.