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Though the series has been riding high for decades now, Diablo almost didn't make it to shelves. The original genre-defining action-RPG narrowly avoided death by bankruptcy, thanks to Blizzard, who made a lifesaving offer at the eleventh hour for the devs behind the fledgling project.
See, Diablo was the brainchild of a studio called Condor in the early '90s. Although progress was happening, it was looking increasingly like finances would run dry first, until a sudden call from the company behind Warcraft. "The offer was unexpected, but very welcome. The taxman was literally at the door, threatening to shut us down," Erich Schaeffer, co-founder of Condor, originally told Edge Magazine, now reprinted in Playmakers.
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"At this point the budget was very low, under half a million dollars," Max Schaefer adds. "Once we were acquired, we sat down to work out what we could do now we were free from budgetary constraints and had a little extra time. How could we make this as big as possible?"
Thus, the world was introduced to the Kingdom of Khonduras in 1997, and Diablo was an instant best-seller. A sequel was announced in short order, and three years later, Diablo 2 arrived, to even greater success. The second installment remains a standard-bearer for loot-driven dungeon-crawling, with a remaster coming out in 2021.
But it all started with Diablo, a little experiment in combining Dungeons and Dragons with some roguelike structuring. Who knew a blizzard would be all such a venture through hell needed to survive?
