David Brevik voted no. It is one of the more consequential lost votes in gaming history.

When Diablo shipped in December 1996 it arrived as a real-time action dungeon crawler, a genre-defining hit that launched an entire lineage of loot-driven games. What almost nobody knew at the time was that its creator, the person who had spent years building it, cast the only dissenting vote when the team decided to make it real-time. And then he rebuilt the game over a single Saturday afternoon.

The Design That Almost Was

Brevik's original vision for Diablo was rooted in classic computer RPGs. The concept document described a turn-based, single-player game drawing directly from roguelikes, particularly Rogue and Nethack. You would move your character tile by tile. Enemies would take their turn. The rhythmic, deliberate pacing of tabletop-adjacent games would shape every dungeon run.

This was not an unusual choice for the mid-1990s. The most beloved RPGs of the era, from Ultima to the original Final Fantasy games, were built on turn-based foundations. Brevik was designing inside a tradition he loved, for an audience that understood it. The randomized dungeon generation, the permadeath-adjacent brutality, the endless replayability of procedural content: all of it made complete sense in a turn-based frame.

Blizzard, the publisher that had taken on the project, saw it differently.

The Vote

Somewhere in the development process, Blizzard pushed back. Real-time combat, they argued, would be better. The fledgling studio had already shipped Warcraft in 1994, and the appeal of action-driven play was clear in that market. The argument was not subtle: players respond to speed, to the click, to the immediate visceral feedback of watching an enemy react to your input in real time.