5 Worst Development Crunch Stories in Gaming

2. Diablo 2

Now seen as a classic in the dungeon-crawling, action RPG genre, Diablo 2 is arguably the game that is many people’s favourite in the series. But what people might not know is the inhumane grind it took to get this game over the finish line. 

Back in 2020, David Brevik, who was the project and design lead on Diablo 2, gave a talk at Devcom Digital to talk about his experience making the game. And spoiler warning, it sounds horrendous. 

The first Diablo game wasn’t a walk in the park either for the development team, with David saying that the team faced a crunch period of 3 - 4 months to try and hit the release date of Thanksgiving 1996. It was later pushed back to January 1997, which left the team less than enthusiastic to start work on the sequel. 

But the team were motivated by seeing the amount of love the first game was receiving and how some feedback was more critical than others. The team at Blizzard North knew that they could do better, and they wanted to prove to everyone that they could make a sequel that would blow the first entry out of the water, with David saying he was confident that Diablo 2 would be, “at least twice as large” as Diablo 1. 

With that, development went underway, with Blizzard North aiming to include more classes, more skills, more of everything. You can probably see where this is going. David went on to say at Devcom, “All of these things led to the final grind. Because we had decided to make more classes, more levels, streaming worlds, all these kinds of decisions... what we thought was going to be a two-ish year project turned out to not be that. We just kept on designing more and more and more and more, and guess what? It kept taking longer and longer and longer.” 

Diablo 2 was targeting Christmas 1999 as its release date, only 2 years after the original. Then, in late April, early May, crunch started. Nobody wanted crunch to happen, especially after all they went through with the first game, but the team’s ambition got the better of them, with David saying, “It's not a good decision. I don't recommend it. It cost me dearly. It cost everybody dearly. But it was what it was. We crunched." 

David started working up to 14 hours a day, every single day. He estimated that he worked on average 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. And it wasn’t just him; everybody was working weekends and pulling unbearable hours to get Diablo 2 finished. The crunch became so bad that, in one of the more horrific parts of the story, David explains that, “We would order meals, we would give people sleeping bags and toothbrushes, and some days people would sleep in the office... It was a terrible grind at the end of this project. We were working, and summer became fall, and it was pretty obvious that we were not going to make it." 

The game finally finished its development in June 2000, a whole 6 months after the initial release date. During which, David said he “ended up taking three days off throughout the entire process of this crunch,” and that “It was a little over a year that I crunched... It was an incredible grind on myself, my relationships, and life, and my soul.” 

Diablo 2 launched to rave reviews and is still played by many today. Its community is still alive and kicking well into its 26th year. It’s something David has said he’s extremely proud of, saying, “The legacy continues, and it's amazing to see something we worked so hard on -- myself, the team, many people sacrificed and made a huge contribution to this product... For it to be so beloved is a wonderful experience. We're very blessed to have that."