Diablo creator David Brevik explains he had to leave Marvel Heroes “for my sanity”, but still feels “guilty” after Disney killed the project

While most known for his work on creating the Diablo series, iconic game designer David Brevik has spent decades crafting other ARPGs. After leaving Blizzard and scrapping the original Diablo 3, Brevik worked on Hellgate: London and then the popular superhero ARPG Marvel Heroes.

In an interview on the VideoGamer Podcast, Brevik looked back at his time on Marvel Heroes, a game that was created while he was CEO at developer Gazillion Entertainment. After his departure from the company, IP holder Disney killed the live-service project, and Gazillion was forced to close down.

Years later, Brevik explained that he still feels “guilty” for the closure of Gazillion and the death of Marvel Heroes. While the closure of the studio wasn’t the fault of the veteran game designer, he explained it’s hard to not feel guilty about the situation.

Diablo creator David Brevik on Marvel Heroes

In the latest episode of the podcast, available now, Brevik explained that thinking about Marvel Heroes is “still rough” so many years after its shutdown.

“Absolutely, yeah, it’s still super painful,” Brevik said. “Again, I feel badly for a lot of the people that were working on the project, that are my friends, and whatnot. It’s just a real shame. Not only personally do I feel bad for myself, I feel bad for the fans, I feel bad for my coworkers. It just was a bad situation.”

“I was the CEO of the company, and being the CEO of the company is not what I signed up for.”

MARVEL HEROES LEAD DAVID BREVIK

Brevik explained that his role as CEO at Gazillion Entertainment often clashed with his background as a game designer. Instead of helping to design the game and fixing problems, he was in constant meetings and talks with Disney over what the studio could and couldn’t include. After ten years of working on the project, it was too much.

“In a lot of ways, I left because I had to,” Brevik said. “I was the CEO of the company, and being the CEO of the company is not what I signed up for. I’m a game developer, right? Not a CEO, I don’t wanna run companies and talk with investors all day, which is what a CEO does, right? I wanna actually make games.”

“I’d gotten too away from making the games,” he continued. “I spent all my time kind of in these executive meetings about finance and all of these kind of things that were just not passions of mine and not really what I wanted to do. So I had for my own sanity to walk away from that and get into something that brought me joy again.”

After his departure from the studio, it wasn’t long until Disney pulled the plug on Marvel Heroes. The Diablo creator explains that he always “knew there was a risk” that the game would suffer after he left, but the news still came as a huge blow.

“I knew that there was a risk when I was leaving that this could be bad for all of my friends and stuff. And I was really disappointed that I feel guilty a little bit about how that kind of shut down and how poorly that went after I had left. Boy, who was rough.”

Rise of the Silver Lining

Years after the cancellation of Marvel Heroes, there is a fan community bringing the game back for modern players on PC. (Which we won’t link to for obvious reasons.) As expected, Brevik is more than aware of the fans’ efforts to keep Marvel Heroes alive—as well as the original version of Hellgate: London which has fan servers to this day—and he’s incredibly grateful.

“I know that people have been working on kind of their own servers to get the games up and running again,” Brevik revealed. “Which brings me some joy because even though, you know, it’s there’s some legality issues perhaps with this, but it’s really, I’ve dedicated almost 10 years of my life to Marvel Heroes.

“I find it incredibly depressing that nobody can ever play that game again, right? That I spent such a huge portion of my, my, my career on something that people just don’t have access to who could never play.”

For more Diablo coverage, read Brevik’s thoughts on why modern ARPGs are too fast, or check out the news that Diablo 4 won’t be receiving annual expansions anymore.