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.
Blizzard offered not just to fund the game, but to acquire Condor, turning it into Blizzard North. Suddenly, resources were plentiful, opening up the possibilities for what Diablo could be. This completely changed the scope of the hellbound role-playing game, and proved to be a pivotal moment for the medium as a whole.
"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?
