Diablo pirate pays up in person 19 years later

Heart-warming end to GDC

In a much more tender (than poop-suicide) end to the Game Developers Conference, at today’s post-mortem talk on the first Diablo, writer Shivam Bhatt stepped up during the Q&A session of the talk to apologize to Diablo creator David Brevik for pirating the game as a teenager in 1997.

Bhatt gave Brevik some cash in a part symbolic, part class move simply out of the atmosphere of yours truly, the man who saw an abandoned, 3/4ths-drunk 40 oz Cobra sitting in a subway station this week and thought, “I could probably drink the rest of that.”

GDC can really be a saccharine, nice-as-hell time with good people for as much snark as I’ll drop about utilikilts, virtual reality, and albatross-around-the-neck badge spotting sometimes miles from the convention center.

I hope Brevik plans to split the cash with all his former Blizzard North co-workers putting everyone on track towards buying 1/3 of a Cobra.