It’s because Blizzard North nearly lost the entire game to a corrupted backup that destroyed everything: It turns out that Blizzard doesn’t have the original assets from Diablo 2 or any of the development work on that game, and it’s not because they were foolish or forgot to save them. But as disastrous as that would have been, it’s got nothing on the story of what happened to Diablo 2, and why we may never see a remaster of that game. So yeah, while Blizzard didn’t develop Diablo, without them, it’s possible that Condor would have been utterly screwed and the Schaefer’s would have had to give it up well before we ever got a taste of the game that changed ARPGs forever. We scrounged up some money, and luckily the deal that turned us into Blizzard came around right at the right time to save our butts.” We come in one morning and there’s a notice on our day that’s like ‘Three days to pay or you’re going to jail.’ It was rough. We never mailed it to the government,” Erich Schaefer said. These are taxes we withhold from the salaries of our guys, and we’re supposed to mail them to the government. It was developed by Max and Erich Schaefer and David Brevik when they were working at Condor, an independent studio that was… is the phrase on the verge of ruin hyperbolic here? I don’t think so. And Diablo just barely happened.įirst, let’s talk about how Diablo wasn’t a Blizzard game. In a very real way, Diablo changed ARPGs forever, and no ARPG made after them could exist as we have it now without Diablo. Why would they talk about that at a Path of Exile convention, you may ask?īecause Path of Exile is an Action-RPG and the impact of Diablo on the ARPG genre of games was so massive that no ARPG made after it can be said to be free of its influence. During a panel at ExileCon, which is a convention dedicated to the Path of Exile games, the original developers of the Diablo franchise (and thus, in a way, Path of Exile’s grandfathers) sat down and talked about all the ways that we almost didn’t get Diablo at all.

For example, the Diablo series barely managed to exist, with both the original game and Diablo 2 nearly destroyed before they even got out of the gate. So many complications, so many ways for things to go wrong. Sometimes you sit back and wonder how anything we love ever survives to be loved by us.

Diablo 2 lod remastered