What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!]
edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars
good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars
Oh yeah, I remember being really impressed by the Guild Wars/ArenaNet tech at launch. It felt like a game changer.
Heck, they did a better job than most games do to this day. Often when a game has the ability to start before completing the download, it just means you get to look at the main menu.
It also really helped a lot of folks in the game development community when Carmack published his thoughts on dealing with latency in QuakeWorld around that time, and the Valve guys working with the Quake3(?) engine published something a bit later that pretty good IIRC.
I love the part where he talks about people thinking the installer was broken or didn't download fully because it was so small. They ended up padding it with some assets to make it feel more authentic.
Ah! OK, I saw his name too and figured that was also potentially the person. Oh, he was a founder of ArenaNet?!! Very cool! I met a lot of their staff last year at PAX. Great group of ppl IMO and those I spoke to were proud to work there. I guess Pat would be one of the founders they spoke of! :)
edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars
good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A