Right around 37 minutes in, Brevik mentions that Mike O'Brien (along with Pat, one of the three co-founders of ArenaNet) was the brains behind Battle.net, and then "a few of the guys from [Blizzard South] moved up north during the last six months of development and started making Diablo into multiplayer and integrating Battle.net into the entire thing."
That lines up with Pat's assessment:
> Initially Collin Murray, a programmer on StarCraft, and I flew to Redwood City to help, while other developers at Blizzard “HQ” in Irvine California worked on network “providers” for battle.net, modem and LAN games as well as the user-interface screens (known as “glue screens” at Blizzard) that performed character creation, game joining, and other meta-game functions.
Thanks for the link but I think David Brevik said a couple guys from blizzard came up to help for 6 months and he had zero multiplayer code built as well as it was his first C program.
That interview was exhausting, I couldn't finish it. I have no idea why the interviewer treated this like a systems design interview at a FAANG, with constant interruptions and unnecesarily rephrasing what the interviewee had already explained. The GDC talk linked in another reply, while only tangetially related, was much more enjoyable.
He was the 2nd employee at Blizzard, did the netcode for their games and also for Guild Wars.
His blog is great https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...