If you're a fan of Diablo I and Diablo II, and Battle.net, don't miss our latest episode featuring David Brevik, a 33-year gaming industry veteran behind these legendary titles and services! David takes us on a journey through his career, from co-founding Condor Inc., which later became Blizzard North, to the original Diablo pitch and its iconic sequel—one of the most influential action RPGs in gaming history. He also shares insights into pioneering the first looter shooter with Hellgate: London and developing Marvel Heroes as CEO of Gazillion Entertainment.

Today, David continues to push the boundaries of game design and development, mentoring the next generation of game creators while working on exciting new projects as President of Graybeard Games and Skystone Games. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at his transition from big corporate projects to indie development and the valuable lessons he's learned along the way!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The evolution of game design from Diablo 1 to Diablo 2
• Why David left Blizzard and the impact of corporate turbulence
• Lessons learned from overreaching in game development
• The highs and lows of founding Flagship Studios and Skystone Games
• Insights into the indie game development and publishing process

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• David Brevik on LinkedIn
• Skystone Games
• Graybeard Games
• Original Diablo Pitch Document

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey to success. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a recruiting firm for the game industry that values quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Today we have David Brevik with us, who I got to meet over snacks at a GDC party, the best meeting possible. He is a 33 year veteran of the industry and he co-founded the studio that became Blizzard North and he created Diablo and its sequel Diablo 2. In addition, there's more. He created the first looter shooter, Hellgate. As CEO of Gazillion, he created Marvel Heroes. 

He is currently doing it all. He is the president of Skystone Games, and of Graybeard, and a creative director on an upcoming project. Excited to hear more. Let's get started. David, thank you for being here. 

David Brevik: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I want to get right into founding Blizzard North. Tell me the story. 

David Brevik: Wow, it's a long time ago, but in the early 90s, I graduated from college with a computer science degree, and I knew I wanted to make games. I've wanted to make games since I first touched a computer, pretty much. And I taught myself to program on an Apple II Plus in the late 70s, early 80s. And all I ever wanted to do was make games. And so, out of college, I got my first gaming job. It was a company that was making something called Clip Art, which is like little images and stuff that people would put on CDs so they could put them in newsletters or presentations and things like that. 

So it was a company full of artists, but it wasn't going very well. And they knew the Tramiels, which is a family that owned Atari at the time. And so they got a contract to make an Atari Lynx game, which was a handheld machine. And so they needed a programmer and then they hired me. But when I got there, And met some of the artists and stuff, we were having a great time, but we knew that the company was pretty doomed because they had sunk a lot of money into the Clip Art thing and that didn't work. And so you could see the writing on the wall, especially once my paycheck started bouncing. 

So a couple of the artists and I left, and I went to a different company where I became technical director of a company called Iguana Entertainment, which was another developer that went on to make NBA Jam, one of their big claims to fame.

I made a couple games there and made some contacts and with that, they moved to Texas and I didn't want to move to Texas, so I stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area and contacted some of the artists from where I had originally met. And together we formed our own development company and got contracts to make games with some of the contacts I had made working at Iguana. 

So that's really how it started. We would go to lunch. We knew that the company was doomed when we were at the Clip Art company. We had a code name Condor, like we were spies or something and would say like, we got to talk about project Condor at lunch or whatever we would kind of sneak off. And then that ended up being the name of the development company. We called ourselves Condor. Later we obviously changed our name to Blizzard North once we got acquired and became part of Blizzard. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, I was going to ask you what the difference between Blizzard and Blizzard North is. With the acquisition, you changed your name?

David Brevik: Yeah, it was actually two different development companies, one down in Southern California in Irvine, one up here in Northern California. We were in Redwood City at the time. And we were just two totally different teams working and we showed up before E3 existed. Games were at Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and in Chicago and stuff.

And we showed up to one and we were working on a Justice League Task Force, which was this fighting game with the Justice League, like Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and stuff like that. And we were making a Genesis version of the game and we showed up, and unbeknownst to us, another team was working on a Super Nintendo version of the same game.

We had not talked with the same parent company that hired us, like never told us that other teams were working on a different version of the game. And they just split it between two teams, which was really unusual. It was really weird, but we showed up and the games were strangely similar. And we had a lot in common. And then they're like, Hey, we just started making computer games. That's really what we want to do more than console games. And we're demoing our little product here. So I went and checked that out and that was Warcraft 1, the prototype .

They were called Silicon and Synapse at the time, but they knew they were going to be changing their name because they got acquired and were going to change their name to Blizzard Entertainment. And so we kept in touch, and then after, we said, hey, we got a great idea for a PC game, and they said, we'll come out after we finish Warcraft 1, and you can pitch us the idea. And so, they came out in January after they finished Warcraft 1 in December, and we pitched them Diablo, and they loved it. 

And so then they signed us to do that project and the rest was history eventually about halfway through development of Diablo. They acquired us and we became Blizzard North. So there were two separate parts of Blizzard that made Blizzard Entertainment in general. 

Lizzie Mintus: So you had the idea at Condor for Diablo before acquisition. 

David Brevik: Actually, it was even way before that. It was in high school. I thought of the idea. I went to school, I moved to California when I was a junior in high school. My parents, my dad got promoted and we moved out here. I was ready. I had my bags packed in an instant. We came from Georgia and I was always wanting to be dealing with computers and stuff. So moving close to Silicon Valley was a dream. 

So we moved here, and we moved to the base of Mount Diablo, which is here in the Bay Area. And that's where the name comes from. It came from the mountain that we moved right next to when I was in high school. And that's when I started designing games a little bit more seriously. 

I really loved role playing games. And then once I went to college in the mid 80s, I started playing a bunch of games like Rogue and Moria and Angband and NetHack and all of these kind of randomly generated games that I really enjoyed. And that's really where the design for Diablo came from was solidified during that time. 

So yeah, we had come up with the idea much before when we were Condor, and really kind of made a pitch document and stuff. In fact, the original pitch document for Diablo that we created and dropped around, you can find on my website on graybeardgames.com. You can go download the actual PDF of the original Diablo pitch. 

Lizzie Mintus: Well, thank you for providing that to the public. So you had this idea in high school and then you found a team and you worked on it some at Condor. I'm curious, what was Diablo almost? What did you think about doing that didn't make it into the game?

David Brevik: Oh, it was very different. As you'll see from the pitch document, it turned into a very different game. First off, it was turn based instead of real time. It was single player instead of multiplayer. There were a million changes that it went through in an evolution. 

We created and invented Battle.Net, like six months before we released the game. We invented the little health bar with all the potions and stuff. We put that in October before the game was released in December. So there were, like, all sorts of fundamental things about Diablo that had changed, even up to the last moment. So the biggest change was going from turn based to real time. And there was a long fight about it, but in the end, I decided to prototype it and I knew instantly that it was the right decision to change it to real time, even though I was pretty, pretty opposed to it at first. 

Lizzie Mintus: So, if somebody is making a critical decision in the game, which obviously you're making so many constantly, would you recommend prototyping it to figure it out?

David Brevik: Absolutely. I think, playing something and feeling it and understanding it is really the essence of video games. Finding your fun, finding the core, finding what you think is going to be unique about your product. And the faster you can do that through prototyping or whatever methods, the better. Finding that is really important. And the thing you should focus on the most first. 

Lizzie Mintus: How did you go about play testing during those days? Did you have external play testing? 

David Brevik: No. Well, we did eventually, but mostly we just play test internally. But I knew that things were really good when a lot of the employees would be working on something all day and then they would stay after dinner. They would just play the game in the evening and not go home. I was like, oh, we might be onto something here. And so I think that we all played the game. We all contributed, we all designed, everybody was allowed to make any kind of suggestion. It was a very different kind of time back then.

We hired people that were only gamers. And that was not very common. When you were working for a game company, it was filled with people that weren't necessarily gamers or didn't play games or even understand games, but they're just doing their job of either drawing a picture or doing some programming or marketing or whatever it is. And they weren't necessarily gamers. 

But one of our core tenets when we were making Condor was we hire only gamers. People that are really focused and passionate about making games, so some of the internal feedback that we would get was super valuable because they were largely people that were really passionate about games, so getting the feedback and getting design ideas from anywhere on the team was always something that we really treasured.

Lizzie Mintus: How did you recruit them? Was it just somebody that knows somebody? 

David Brevik: Well, gaming really started to kind of blossom during this time in the mid 90s, and there were more and more gamers, especially people that were around my age that had been kind of grown up with, had the original Atari game system and then had graduated into the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo and things like that. And they played games from either Apple 2 Plus or Commodore 64 or things like that. I mean, originally, long ago, it was like a weird hobby that people did. It was like, I don't know, something unusual that not a lot of people are into, like Ham Radios or something today. There wasn't a really big audience. But as time kind of went on and people started growing up with games, and they were much more available because the systems were affordable and things like that, then more and more gamers kind of came out of the woodwork.

So a lot of people that were on the team were kind of young, in their 20s, but had kind of grown up with games in the last 10 years, and have been playing games quite a bit. So it was a lot easier to find people than you might realize that we were able to find people pretty easily.

Lizzie Mintus: How big was your team when you shipped? 

David Brevik: When we shipped Diablo 1, it was about 20, 20 to 25, somewhere in there. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. Think about how many people are working a year to do it. 

David Brevik: Yeah, it's very different now. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's so crazy. 

David Brevik: Well, even Diablo 2, it was about 70 people. So it was like, it had grown quite a bit between Diablo 1 and Diablo 2.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Tell me about creating Diablo 1. When was the moment when you felt like, Okay. This is going to be big. I know you said your employees wanted to play all the time, but when did you know it was going to happen? 

David Brevik: I didn't really know. We suspected. I mean, when we pitched the game idea, we were like, Hey, if we could only sell 20,000 copies, maybe if we could get a sequel or whatever. And so the dream was to make a couple of them. But we had a demo of the game that was released long ago. You would go to the bookstore and there would be magazines that would have these CDs, which you could try games on, had little demos and things like that.

And so we had a special PC gamer edition that gave a preview of the game of Diablo and had a demo on the disc. When we did that demo, we got a lot of positive feedback and people were really excited about the game coming out. And so we suspected by that point, which was only just a couple of months before we released that. We knew that there was a good chance that this was gonna work out.

It also helped though that Blizzard by this time had created Warcraft 1 and Warcraft 2. So it was like Warcraft 1 came out, then we pitched them Diablo, and then the next year that Warcraft 2 came out, and then the next year Diablo came out. And so that sequence or whatever, we were riding a little bit on the hype of Blizzard 2, as well as this was something different and totally unique in the gaming space.

And there were a lot of ways that we wanted to buck the trend of what RPGs were at the time. We had a much different kind of theme. A lot of them were like, elves and high magic and dragons and things like that. And we wanted to get away from that. We wanted to make a darker, creepier, scarier experience, gothic and kind of nature.

So that helped make it stand out from the crowd and we had real time combat, which really didn't exist. And we also were very streamlined into time to actually killing monsters. We wanted you to just click a couple buttons and then you were like slashing at monsters, right? So we wanted to get that action. 

A lot of role playing games back then were like you had to create your character and you had to roll them and you had to name them and you had to give them a backstory and it took a long time. Not only that, it was sometimes even a party so you had to create like five or six characters before you could actually play the game.

So we wanted to quickly get in and those kinds of things, I think, made it really accessible, and then have the thing that was really the kicker was Battle.Net. Inventing Battle.Net so that you could play right out of the box with anybody on the internet was a huge boon for the game. 

Lizzie Mintus: What went into the Battle.Net idea? 

David Brevik: Well, we as a collective at Blizzard had made multiplayer games with 2, but they were more like LAN parties and things like that. You played over a LAN, but then, these different companies started sprouting out that this was their job. They were like, we are a website, or a site that you can connect to, and you can find other people playing quake or whatever it is. 

So it would match people up on the services, but we said, Hey, what if we made our own so that you aren't going out there and we put it in for free into the box, like you had to go subscribe to these services. It was like, I don't know, 10 a month or something like that to go play Quake online with other people and matchmake for you. But we decided that, Hey, we would just put that in as part of our own system where we could matchmake for you, in the box for free. So this was a huge value add.

We came up with this idea, like, not long before, like I said, it was probably eight months before we actually released that we came up with the idea and then started work on it maybe six months before the release of the game. And in fact, the game wasn't even really ready for multiplayer. We had all along wanted to make a multiplayer game, but I had zero experience with any kind of multiplayer coding. We actually had to have one of the engineers from Blizzard South come up and work with us for the last four or five months of the project and help us make the game multiplayer for release and taught me how multiplayer stuff works and whatnot. And it was super valuable and with that we were able to take the next step in Diablo 2 into all the multiplayer coding ourselves and make it client server and peer to peer and a few other things like that.

Lizzie Mintus: So one person made it multiplayer? 

David Brevik: Well, it was a couple people, but yeah, it was largely the efforts of one person. 

Lizzie Mintus: Pretty incredible. Yeah. So why did you decide to get acquired? It sounds like you knew you had a great idea, maybe not to the extent, obviously, that it became, but did you think that Blizzard and their success could really take you to the next level?

I know it's always hard to know when to get acquired. And someone told me the other day, all the richest people I know sold too soon, meaning that, it's never too early necessarily, even if it could be something bigger later. 

David Brevik: Right. No, that's exactly right. The fact of the matter is that one, I didn't go to school for business and I didn't understand a lot of these things at all when I was even going through them. And I didn't really have anybody I could talk to about what this was really like, when to sell and whatnot. And I didn't really fully comprehend what that meant. 

I'm much wiser now. I understand this much, much better. But at the same time, I don't regret it at all. In fact, a funny story is that we actually got a better offer, like nearly double the money from a different company and we turned that down because we felt like our future with Blizzard was better than our future with that other company. And so it turned out to be true.

So I think that, yes, we sold a little early, but at the same time, things worked out for a reason. Because we sold early and before the game was released, yes, we made less money, but I thought we were supported better by Blizzard. Like, would they have really sent one of their top engineers to come help us make it multiplayer if they didn't actually own us? There were things that kind of like really worked together to make a stronger partnership and a stronger game that led to more success, I think. 

Lizzie Mintus: What's the secret to creating a successful sequel? 

David Brevik: Making it better. Getting rid of the nuances. No, I mean you want to keep what the essence of the product is. But you also want to give something that's not exactly the same. You want something that is different and new and unique and has some different twists about it. And one of the things that we did, there were a million things that were kind of different between Diablo 2 and Diablo 1.

But I think that one of the things that we did with Diablo 1 was we had this idea that it's more realistic. Anybody can pick up a hammer, a mace and swing it. You might be really bad at it. So your animations might be really long as a wizard that like can pick up the mace, but anybody can do anything. But it kind of homogenized the way that you played the game and the character classes themselves didn't stand out as much. And people were a little bit lost as to what to do because you could do almost anything that was like, well, what should I be focusing on? So I think one of the things that we did was guide people in a better way on how to play the game. That was more defined character classes and then the invention of skill trees and how to go about things like, Hey, this is the flavor of whatever barbarian that I would want to play, these are the different ways I could play it. Oh, I feel like this is more my style. I'm much more of a leaping whirlwindy kind of guy or whatever. Those kinds of things help guide people through the game much better and create a better experience overall. 

Lizzie Mintus: And how did you know it was time to leave Blizzard? 

David Brevik: That's a super complex question, but in essence, I think that there was a lot going on. So, a brief history here about the corruption of Blizzard, is that Blizzard was originally owned by an educational company called Davidson Associates, and they were bought by this other company called CompuCard, which bought Sierra Online and Davidson and Associates at the same time. And then merged with another company called HFS and turned into this company called Sendint.

And Sendint was one of the most corrupt companies in the history of Wall Street before Enron. They got caught completely cooking their books and the only thing that was really even profitable was the gaming stuff or whatever. Anyway, they ended up selling the company to a French water company, utilities company. Then they didn't know what they were doing either, ran up the largest debt in the history of European companies, and tried to change themselves from a utility company into a kind of multimedia company. The executive got kicked out and so there was all this instability above us. 

We were making games and they were hits and everybody above us was floundering around and didn't know what we were doing and didn't even understand us. We're part of a French utilities company. What does that even mean, right? Why are we part of that? Or we're part of this comu card scam and all this kind of stuff. It was bad. 

Anyway, we tried to protect ourselves because the future was just so murky. They could literally fire all of us and take all of our IP and hard work and then replace us with cheap labor somewhere else. And then we have no control over our own destinies and things like that. So we decided that it was just kind of time for us to move on and do something new and different.

So after we had made Diablo two, and that was a real slog. There was tons of great stuff about it and it really turned out very nicely, but it also just kind of burnt me out. I was ready to do something new. And so it was between the fact that I felt like we didn't have any control over our destiny and as well as I felt like I had other ideas or other avenues I wanted to go down, it was time to leave. 

Lizzie Mintus: That was such a juicy story. Thank you for that. I didn't anticipate it at all. So then you left and started another company. 

David Brevik: Correct. That company called Flagship Studios, that was right afterwards. And we made the first looter shooter game called Hellgate London, which other games like Borderlands and Destiny and things like that have kind of modeled that game.

That company didn't blossom. Our game was really unique and people love that game and still, people talk about how awesome it is, but it was a mess. We were funded by Namco, the famous Pac Man company, etc. They were going to be doing, oh, let's do more than just console games. We're going to make a PC division. So they said, we'll fund your game. And we'll make you guys kind of the cornerstone of our new PC division. And about six months after we signed the contract, they fired all those people. So we're not doing PC games. We're like, oh my god, we've got no support from our publisher anymore.

And they're like, we're not even going to publish this game. So we actually had to go out and do fundraising and create a second company. We were going to have no kind of account system or online stuff or whatever presence, like that was supposed to be provided by Namco. So we had to create another company to make all that stuff. And then we had to find a new publisher, which ended up being EA. And so we were torn in all these different directions and there are all these different players. We also overreached on the game and didn't give ourselves enough time.

So I think that there were a bunch of mistakes that we made, but in the end, I'm still super proud of that game. I think that it was really fun to play, but wasn't the success that we had hoped for. 

Lizzie Mintus: What do you think you could have done differently for anyone listening? It sounds like there were a myriad of curveballs.

David Brevik: I think that, despite all the curveballs, and there were a lot of curveballs, I think that the most important lesson that we learned was to underscore and over deliver, right? It's more important to not have everything and do some things right. extremely well. Like, give yourself enough time to polish and focus on doing one thing superbly rather than four things mediocre.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that can be applied in many different places as well. Not just games. You said in a tweet that you have many stories about the development of the game Marvel Heroes and the extremely difficult corporate conditions that you persevered with, but you created something amazing and fun. Tell me some of those stories.

David Brevik: Yeah. Well, I started out by coming in to be the creative director on a Marvel project. So after Flagship went away, I was like, okay, I want to do something else, but I don't want to be in charge anymore. I don't want to be the president or anything like that.

I just want to design games. And so then I said, well, I'm a huge Marvel fan. Somebody said, Oh, we're getting the Marvel license. Come here and you can make a Marvel game. I said, sounds great. And then I got there and they're like, Oh, we didn't get the Marvel license. And then my friend John calls up and he's like, Hey, we got the Marvel license. I heard you want to make a Marvel game. So I said, sure. So I went over to work with him and at that company, I don't even remember what the name was. It had some nicknames. It was like NR2B or something like that was the nickname for the company at the time. 

Anyway, I went over there and I started bringing in my friends and Hey, we're going to make a kind of Marvel Diablo style game. So we started bringing people over and things were great. And they have this big company. There's like 400 people and they're working on all these different projects and stuff like that. Then as I started working there, I started noticing things weren't quite what they seemed and it was a much sketchier situation than I realized in that they had kind of overreached and a bunch of the products weren't very good.

And then, I started talking about these things. Oh, they're having some trouble over this project. Oh, that looks like it could be in trouble. And I started talking to different people in the company about it. Eventually the board got wind that I had been talking about these things and they started talking to me about all this stuff.

And then I kept getting promoted. They're like, well, you seem to know what you're talking about. You should be in charge of all the games here. And then eventually they said, you should be CEO of the company. So I'd gone from, Hey, I'm going to be designing my own little personal Marvel project to be in charge of this giant company.

And they had raised several hundred million dollars and kind of blown it all. And so it was a really difficult situation that we had all these investors and the investors were huge. They were big, big named investors from like Tomasic, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore to Oak, which was one of the biggest at the time in the world. And like Hearst and like all of these huge investors. And they had envisioned that we were going to make this giant company with all of these products or whatever. We're going to compete with EAs of the world and things like that. And the products came out and they were terrible and they all bombed and they all were kind of a mess.

And so I was in charge of cleaning this entire thing up. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to make this game. And it's not going very well because I'm not really paying attention to it, right? I've got so many other things going on. Eventually we were able to downsize the company to a reasonable size and focus on a couple of products and start to deliver on those things.

And so, it was going pretty well. Marvel heroes was a success. It was profitable, but it was never really the hit that we really needed. And with the debt that we had kind of run up and the licensed IP and the costs of that and stuff was never really going to be a super big venture.

And so, eventually I was like, okay, again, I'm in charge of this whole thing. I don't like dealing with the board and constantly raising money and like all of these kinds of things. I want to get back to actually making games again. I don't want to be CEO anymore. And so I left after releasing the game and several years after that and it all went really, really well, but eventually I was like, okay, I've had enough of this. I'm ready to kind of move on and, uh, and get back to actually making games instead of trying to rescue this company, which I saw really almost no way to rescue it. 

Lizzie Mintus: I love that you went there to just make a game that you wanted to make and then got roped into being the CEO and having all these other responsibilities.

David Brevik: Exactly. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's what happens when you're good at your job. 

David Brevik: Keep putting me in charge. I don't know. I just want to make games. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Well, sounds like you've escaped it now. 

David Brevik: Sort of. I did and I didn't. I ended up making my own indie game company where I did everything myself. I did every part of the game. I made the art, I did the music and the sound effects and all the programming, made my own engine and things like that. So, I went from the kind of the polar opposites of being a CEO and raising money and not really being involved in the game day to day and managing the board and stuff to, I'm doing every single thing in this particular game.

I think I went a little crazy, but I'm doing really well. So that was great too. It was a really great experience. And then I made my own publishing company about four years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic. I ended up partnering with a person I had known for a long time. And the two of us created this, uh, indie publisher called Skystone. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, so the indie game that you made yourself was, It Lurks Below, right? 

David Brevik: Correct, yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, I was doing some research. 

And tell me about Skystone Games. Who are you publishing? What do you look for? Maybe you can publish someone listening to this podcast game. That would bring me great delight. 

David Brevik: Me too. We started about four years ago and when you're a new publisher, it's a little beggars can't be choosers kind of thing. And we got to try and build some confidence with the development studios and the public about us being a good publisher. And we learned some lessons and made some bets. And some of those started to work out. 

Right now, we published about six or seven games at this point. And some of them now are in fact, another one just went into early access, but we've had a couple of releases this year, one game called Hell Card, that we're going to be doing more with in the future, but also will eventually be coming out on console and things like that.

And then we also have a game that just came out called Maniac, that did really well for us. Really tall, kind of almost a micro indie that just came out and that's done really, really well. We're going to hopefully get that onto more platforms and stuff too. And then we have a couple releases this summer as well. So four releases I think this year, that's not counting other releases maybe on the console. We had a game that came out in December that we're going to be releasing on console as well this year. 

So we've been very busy lately. We've got a stellar lineup coming up in the future, but the kind of games that we're looking for are kind of all over the map at the beginning, but now we're a little bit more focused on games that have kind of deep systems, depth to gameplay, lots of strategic ways that you can go about doing things with your character, roguelike mechanics, lots of replayability, those kind of things are the things that I think are most important for us. 

We've got a couple kinds of deck building style games, where you make different builds of the way that you kind of go in and explore the environment and fight the monsters or whatever it is that you're doing in the deck builder. We've got roguelike mechanics with Maniac where you're kind of leveling up your character. It's almost like a Vampire Survivors meets GTA kind of game, and so that there's lots of replayability there and progression and things like that.

So those are the things that I think that we're looking for, games that you can sink a lot of hours into and get a good value for. RPGs are definitely something I have a lot of experience and expertise on, and that's sort of what makes us a little bit different than other publishers out there.

We do all of the normal things a publisher will do. We'll help fund a game and we'll do marketing and PR, and help with localization and QA, and all of those kind of things. Do influencer outreach and all that kind of stuff, community support. 

But what makes this a lot different is that, well, is me helping out on the project. I can give you feedback. I have a lot of development experience. I can give you technical advice. I can help you get in charge, in touch with specific people for specific roles because of my deep relationships with the industry. And deep, vast experience, 30 plus years of experience making games, I have a lot that I can believe that I can bring to the table to help young developers succeed.

Lizzie Mintus: Fun. What about the team? What do you look for? I mean, you talk about what you look for in the game, but in terms of the people making the game, what other things make you say, yes, I want to publish this studio, this people's game? 

David Brevik: Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think the industry in general is based on the quality of the developers, right? The people themselves. And so I often ask a bunch of questions when we typically get a pitch. We'll look at it. Hey, this kind of fits our vibe and what we're looking for. We play it. We like the prototype or whatever. Okay. Let's go talk to them. And then I asked them a bunch of questions and saw how we kind of philosophically align.

What some of their strengths and weaknesses are on the team, how I believe that we can help them become a stronger developer. Those kinds of things are all things that we look for. They don't have to be perfect at everything. Nobody is. So it's more about, hey, how willing are they to be flexible and listen to feedback and try and do what's best for the game. Those are the things I think that we look for the most. 

Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. So in researching you, I read you were offered 10 percent of hotmail. Tell that story, please. 

David Brevik: Yeah. This was during Diablo one, I believe. We had an office space in Redwood City, and we knew this Person, Sabir Bhatia, who was this engineer that Max, my two business partners are Max and Eric, these brothers from the original Clip Art company, and myself, the three of us, Max, Eric, and myself, were the founders of Blizzard North.

Anyway. Max and Eric knew Sabir, eventually I knew Sabir too, but we started working together and he was like, Oh, I'm going to make my own company and all this kind of stuff. And so one day we were talking about things and he's like, okay, I really need an office space. I need just a little room or whatever. We've got this giant office space. We're only using about half of it or two thirds of it. Hey, can we have the back office? We'll give you 10 percent of the company if we can just use that back office.

And I go, Okay, well, first off, I don't want the distraction. I don't want another company in here to distract us from our focus of making this dream game, because we're working on Diablo 1 at the time, but also what's your idea? And he's like, it's an email over the internet. I said, Sabir, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. I have already got an email over the internet. That doesn't even make sense. What does that even mean?

And he's like, no, this is a great idea. And I'm like, no, this is the dumbest idea. And he's like I'm going to do it and shortly after he sold the company for $400 million, and that was before windows 95. So then the Microsoft stock really went up. So anyway, I lost out on 10 percent of Hotmail for giving them a backroom, but a bunch of us still have like really short name Hotmail email addresses. 

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe that's worth it. 

David Brevik: Exactly. It's like we were one of some of the original people on Hotmail because we were some of the test people or whatever, but it was like the whole idea didn't make sense to me. Eventually it did. Like I didn't understand at the time, like how important it was, that they could directly market to the people that getting basically usernames or whatever ways to contact people and that the value of advertising to that, how valuable that really was. That's part of the reason Facebook and Twitter and all these things are super valuable because it's about collecting and being able to access different audiences. And so that being able to have email addresses for potentially millions of people that you control, it was super, super valuable. But I didn't understand when I was too young. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's an excellent story. Thank you. So I love to talk to people on the podcast and have people who've made many successful products share about the help they've had and the mentors they've had along the way. So I'd love to hear who some of your mentors have been and if there's any advice that they've given you that has stuck with you. 

David Brevik: Yeah, we all have mentors. I think that I learned a lot from the main developers like Mike Morehive and Alan Atham that were down at Blizzard South. They were super helpful in progressing my career and understanding important design elements and being able to give really constructive feedback and debate things in a very productive way. We wouldn't have been even close to as successful as we would have been without them. They really understood the market. They had a couple more years of experience and had done some stuff in the past that really, made it so that they were much better at the kind of business aspects of game making as well as they were really experienced at finding the target audience and delivering an experience for that target audience.

And I think that they understood a lot more about the industry than we did. We understood a lot about making games, but there's more to making games than just actually making the game. There's so many things that you have to consider, like what's your marketing approach, who's the audience and how do you reach that audience and how sophisticated is that audience and what are their expectations and all of these kinds of things that go into actually delivering a fully fledged project that isn't just great design, but also hits all those notes. I think they had a lot of experience with those kinds of things and did a great job at that and really helped us along the way. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. I have one last question for any of our listeners who are thinking about starting their own game company today, what advice do you have?

David Brevik: Well, right now it's super competitive. It is really difficult to get your game noticed there. I don't remember what the number is, but it's like 15,000 games released on Steam or on pace for something like that this year, 17,000, I don't know, some kind of huge number.

And so getting your game out there is really difficult. So try not to do something that everybody else is doing in a lot of ways. You got to at least bring something new to the table. If you're going to be making something. Make sure that you can objectively look at your product.

One of the things that I think that a lot of new developers fall into is that they end up becoming really good at their own game, because they play it over and over again, but they aren't really understanding what it means to play the game from an outside perspective. So, getting some outside perspective is really, really valuable. Get some feedback about how hard it is, or what people don't understand. That's always super, super important. 

And then also I would say, make sure that you aren't making something, if you want to be successful in your business, by successful I mean make some money, make sure that you aren't making something that has got an audience of seven. I've got this dream game, but there are dozens of us that want to play it. It's not really that helpful. If you want to be successful... I mean, it depends on your objective. If your objective is just, I want to make this game and I don't care how big the audience is, great, go for it or whatever. But if you want to make a successful financial company, then you need to ensure that whatever idea you have is going to cater to a larger audience. 

Lizzie Mintus: Not just you. Yeah, that's definitely been a comment throughout the podcast. We've been talking to David Brevik, president of Skystone Games and Graybeard Games.

David, where can people go? I think you mentioned your website to download the original Diablo pitch or contact you or have their game published by you. 

David Brevik: You can reach out to us at Skystone Games. We have a website and stuff. You can get our contact information off that at skystone.games. And then Graybeard Games, gray with an A, graybeardgames.com, you can go there and download the pitch for Diablo, as well as I have contact information there if you want to contact me directly. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

David Brevik: Thank you. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.