Blizzard’s Allen Adham loved their vision but realized that the hard truth of the matter was that the type of game Brevik, Eric Schaefer, and rest of the Diablo team wanted to make was the type of RPG that people were no longer buying. This was the age of Doom. The age of Warcraft. Blizzard believed that if Diablo was going to have a chance at market success, it needed to feature real-time combat.

Diablo’s developers balked at this suggestion as artists often will when the money men begin to dictate their creativity. Not only were they being asked to compromise their vision, they were being asked to essentially destroy the foundations of the genre they loved while also somehow saving it. The team eventually reached a compromise with Blizzard. In exchange for more time and more money, they would try to make a real-time RPG combat system that didn’t make them feel like sellouts. At the very least, they would be able to definitively tell the publisher that they were wrong.

Not wanting to completely undo everything the team had worked on, Brevik decided to start his experiment by removing the timer that dictated turn lengths in their turn-based combat system. The only real difference was that players would perceive these actions occurring instantaneously. The change was small, but the difference it made was immeasurable. In the book Stay Awhile and Listen, Brevik recalls what it felt like to play this new game for the first time:

“I remember very vividly: I clicked on the monster, the guy walked over, and he smashed this skeleton and it fell apart onto the ground,” said Brevik. “The light from heaven shone through the office down onto the keyboard. I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so amazing!’ I knew it was not only the right decision, but that Diablo was just going to be massive… A new genre was born in that moment, and it was really quite incredible to be the person coding it and creating it.”

The version of Diablo Brevik played that day was not the final build of the game. More tweaks – and further compromises – would be made before the game was deemed suitable for public consumption.