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Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”
David Brevik’s gaming history began before the arrival of the IBM PC. The veteran designer grew up playing games like Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail on the Apple II. “One that comes to mind right away is the original Wizardry,” Brevik says. “That had a huge impact on me. That was on the Apple II Plus, and I loved that game.”
Studying computer science at college, Brevik worked at numerous software and games companies before cofounding Condor, where he designed games like NFL Quarterback Club and Justice League Task Force. It was with Condor that Brevik pitched Diablo to then-publishers Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard acquired Condor and the studio was renamed Blizzard North, Diablo was released with the expectation of modest sales. Instead, the ARPG would become one of the most influential games of all time.
Brevik left Blizzard in 2003 and has since designed games like Marvel Heroes and It Lurks Below. Today, Brevik is President of Skystone Games, which has published games such as Tiny Bookshop and Mistfall Hunter. But he took a break from searching for the next big hit to guide me through the isometric dungeon of his Steam library.
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What game are you currently playing?
Strangely, a game that I’m playing the most recently is an old game of mine. I made this game called Marvel Heroes, which was in the 2010-12 range, and it’s an ARPG with the Marvel superheroes. I originally went to that company to be the creative director, but over a period of a few years I became the CEO of the company, so I barely worked on the game for a while. I had to hire another replacement creative director, but I was still very involved in the project.
Eventually I left the company. Being a CEO was basically raising money. I like making games. The point was, not long after I left, the company went out of business and the game shut down. It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again.
Along came some die-hard fans who ended up making their own server for the client, and they resurrected the game. So I’ve been playing this resurrected version of Marvel Heroes on this fan-made server. That’s been really fun. Mainly I’ve been doing it a lot with the community. I was very involved with the community when I was playing. Made a lot of great friends, and I would stream the game almost every night.
It was a little weird because, after I left, they changed the game. They had one more giant update that changed Marvel Heroes [from] the way it was originally designed. They released it on console and made an update to the PC version and changed it to Marvel Heroes Omega …. A lot of the characters changed when they made this Omega update. They changed away from skill-tree builds to a more modern more casual version of the skill trees.
It’s just been a real treat. It definitely has problems. I would I would prefer that there were more things to do, a deeper endgame besides just grind[ing] for a couple special items. But I think that overall, that it’s still just really fun, even if you just play a couple of the characters. There’s like 60 something different characters you can play.
Some of the characters that I really enjoyed originally, I didn’t enjoy as much in the new version. Some of the Omega version characters I like a lot more, and probably the character I’ve been playing most is Thing. But I really enjoy Iron Fist and Deadpool and Elektra and Thor.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
I had been on yet another Minecraft kick. We were starting a new server and, I often play Minecraft with my family and friends. All my kids are grown up. In fact, my very youngest goes off to college in about a month [and] my second eldest kid has a kid of her own, so I’m a grandpa.
But we get together and we make a server from scratch and play as a family. And we’ve been playing for a very long time, so when there’s an update or the moment hits us, we’ll end up starting a new server. I’m definitely the most hardcore of people. I love making all the different machines you can make and making giant contraptions for the server.
It’s also changed a little bit. It’s been this weird, almost cyclical thing where at first we were playing together and I had to guide them through the game a lot, and then they were too cool for school and wanted to do their own thing but really needed my help a lot. And then it was like ‘Oh, we can play together again’.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
I loved Eye of the Beholder. I mean I love/hate Eye of the Beholder. I hadn’t played it in a long time, and there was some other came recently that I was that reminded me of it. I was like ‘Oh, I should go back and try it again’.
Eye of the Beholder was, in 1991, one of the best games that I’d ever played. I was super into it. The graphics, the immersion. This is pre-Wolfenstein [3D], so 3D stuff was not really a thing. But this had some fake 3D-style graphics that you were taking a party through a dungeon, and it was turn-based and grid-based.
I had mapped out all the levels on graph paper. I was really into it. And then at the end, I killed the final boss, and a little dialogue box pops up and says “Congratulations, you win!” or whatever. Then quits to desktop.
So that’s the worst ending of any game I’ve ever played. But I really love the game. It’s amazing.
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
It turns out that [in] Marvel Heroes I have 540 hours, but there’s a bunch of others. Right behind that is my other game It Lurks Below. I have 529 hours in that. And No Man’s Sky, I have 400-something hours in that.
I like space games, so they kind of had me at hello, and I just found it fascinating. I loved going around the galaxy, exploring planets, finding things, building bases all over the universe, hunting for special ships, and they’ve had so many updates. I keep coming back for all of thee updates when they add new content.
It’s just been something I’ve really enjoyed. I enjoyed the combat in the game, the dogfighting-style combat …. I didn’t really like the story very much. It’s kind of out there too. It was supposed to be maybe a highbrow thing or something, but I just couldn’t really understand what it was. I couldn’t relate to the story in any way.
I got it right on launch or whatever and I played it, and then would put it away, and then a new update would come and I’d play it some more, and every time an update comes, I play another 25-50 hours.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
I have EverQuest still installed, and that’s something I go back and play every now and then. And I played so many hours. Of all the games, that’s by far and away—even though it’s not part of the Steam library—the game that I put the most hours into. Maybe that or World of Warcraft. But both of them I spent many years of my life playing, and my wife and I would play together, so we’d play every day for years and years. I forget my playtime, but it was years of playtime. I have thousands of hours in EverQuest.
I even play the EQ ’99, which is the old version of the game, the original game plus maybe the one expansion. Some of the [servers] are two expansions. I still go back and play that quite a bit. Level up characters now and then.
Even though it’s maybe the ugliest game in the world at this point, I still really love that game. It was such a unique experience. It’s like trying to explain Star Wars to somebody that wasn’t there in the theatre for the first time. We’d never seen anything like Star Wars, and it was the same with EverQuest.
Even though it was totally painful, a total nightmare, and everybody’s got like the most horrific stories from playing EverQuest…. I had done a dragon run with my necromancer, and I had bound myself right near where the entrance [to] the dragon was, so that when I died in the dragon run, I could just run back.
But the dragon run was a total disaster and there were these giants that you had to clear to the to get to the dragon first. I died fighting the dragon, and it turned out that it had taken so long that the giants respawned and I [had] bound myself right where the giants were. So I would respawn and a giant would kill me, and I would respawn, and the giant would kill me. I didn’t know what to do. I ended up unplugging my internet.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
Visual Studio. I still do a lot of programming. I still make a lot of prototypes. I still dream of someday making games again. So that is something that’s still installed.
I still program almost every single day … I work on lots of different prototypes for game ideas that I have, and someday maybe I’ll have the time to actually work on one. But right now, I’m so busy that I don’t have the time to dedicate to making a project.
Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?
It’s a complete mess. I have icons for games in one corner. I have tools I use for game development and other things in the middle. Other things that I have. I have the Adobe Creative Suite and other things that I can’t live without. I’ve got all the Microsoft tools. And then I have some mobile games that I play, I’ll have PC versions of those.
I have notes that are all over my desktop of different projects that are going on. Notes, feedback, all sorts of stuff. I give feedback on a lot of games and lot of ideas that people have. They ask me to give them feedback on stuff, and so I’ll write up lots of notes.
I probably have 300 icons on my desktop. It’s a mess.
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