What’s the worst ending to any game David Brevik — the designer who created Diablo — has ever played? It’s not a boss fight he couldn’t beat, or a narrative conclusion that let him down. It’s the game that just stopped existing.
In a new interview as part of PC Gamer’s Disk Cleanup series, Brevik opened up about the game he’s been playing most recently: Marvel Heroes, an ARPG he created between 2010 and 2013 — and which has been dead for nearly a decade. Or rather, was dead, until fans brought it back.
The Game That Lived, Died and Came Back
Marvel Heroes launched in 2013 as a Marvel-universe ARPG built by Gazillion Entertainment, with David Brevik serving first as creative director and eventually as CEO. He is candid about what the shift in title meant for his relationship with the game. “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,” he says. “Being a CEO was basically raising money. I like making games.”
He left the company. Not long after, Gazillion folded, and Marvel Heroes was shut down abruptly in November 2017 when Disney terminated the licence. Players who had spent years in the game found it simply gone.
“It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again,” Brevik says. “So that’s the worst ending of any game I’ve ever played. But I really love the game. It’s amazing.”
“It was a game that I spent many years of my career working on, and nobody could ever play it again.” — David Brevik on Marvel Heroes
Why Fan Servers Changed Everything
The story doesn’t end there. A dedicated group of fans built a private server that resurrected the Marvel Heroes client, allowing the game to live on in a community-hosted form. Brevik now plays on it regularly.
“Along came some die-hard fans who ended up making their own server for the client, and they resurrected the game,” he explains. “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.”
He streamed the game almost every night when he was originally involved with Marvel Heroes, building friendships through it. Returning to the fan server has let him reconnect with that community. His most-played characters include Thing, Iron Fist, Deadpool, Elektra and Thor. His one gripe: a late-stage “Marvel Heroes Omega” update overhauled the skill trees in a direction he wouldn’t have taken. “They changed away from skill-tree builds to a more modern, more casual version,” he says. Some Omega characters he likes more than before; others less so.
Diablo’s Creator, A Grandpa Now
Brevik’s gaming history stretches back to the Apple II — Wizardry, Lode Runner and The Oregon Trail formed his early education. He studied computer science and worked through several studios before co-founding Condor, where he pitched Diablo to Blizzard Entertainment. After Blizzard acquired Condor and renamed it Blizzard North, Diablo was released expecting modest sales. It went on to become one of the most influential games ever made.
Today, Brevik is President of
Skystone Games, a publisher behind titles including Tiny Bookshop and Mistfall Hunter. When he isn’t on the Marvel Heroes fan server, he’s playing Minecraft — running servers for his grown-up children and grandchild. “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,” he says.
It’s a quietly touching portrait: the man who helped define the ARPG genre, decades on, finding himself on a fan-built revival of his own dead game, streaming nightly, still making friends through the thing he built.
Live-Service Endings: A Growing Concern
The Marvel Heroes story is not unique. Live-service games shutting down — taking years of player investment with them — have become one of gaming’s more painful recurring events. Brevik’s framing of it as the “worst ending” lands with particular weight coming from someone who made the game. He didn’t just lose access to a favourite pastime. He lost something he built.
The fact that fans preserved it anyway, and that Brevik now plays on their servers, is one of the nicer endings a shutdown game has ever managed to find.
