Diablo III game designer once wanted to be a video game music composer

Michael Chu, senior game designer for Blizzard Entertainment, is the man behind Covetous Shen. He is also responsible for bringing to life the Monk, the Witch Doctor, Eirena the follower, and Zoltun Kulle. But how did all of that happen?

“I started at the ground floor,” Chu says in an interview with Games in Asia. “I was a game tester on Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and I was also a tester for Warcraft III.” Following that, Chu became a designer on World of Warcraft. He was one of the first quest designers for the game, and has been working on design ever since then.

(See: Blizzard Entertainment’s Michael Chu talks Diablo III: Reaper of Souls (VIDEO))

World of Warcraft was “really enjoyable” to work on, he says, when asked which has been his favorite game to design so far. “I feel like I learned so much about game design, and to see how that game began from the early days to how big it became was really fulfilling and rewarding.” (P.S. He is Horde!)

Haven’t seen one of these for a while.

Chu still does game design today, but did you know that his dream was originally to become a video game composer? “I really love Nobuo Uematsu, who did the soundtrack for the Final Fantasy games,” he says, “and I studied music, I played cello, so it was something I really wanted to do.” Chu went on to study programming and though that he might go down that path, but later realized that what he really loved was designing games.

(See: The top 10 best video game themes of all time)

And these days, that’s exactly what he gets to do. Apart from countless meetings and actual implementation and execution of game features, he also designs quests.

“When we start working on a quest, where we start is we look at the story that we’re trying to tell, and that usually gives us a lot of ideas of where we want to go,” he says, explaining how a quest would go from conceptualization to life in the retail version of the game. “After we have the story, the questions we ask are: how do I turn the story into gameplay?” And after implementation, Chu says, it’s just more and more iteration.

Chu also wrote the backstory for the Wizard player character in Diablo III, in a short piece titled Firefly. “The idea behind those stories is that each one of them was supposed to introduce a different one of the classes,” he says. In the end, Chu didn’t end up writing the Wizard, having been thwarted by “one of those funny things with scheduling.” But he did say that because the writers all work on the game so closely, they’re all very familiar with the characters.

Disintegrate!