Diablo (series)

• 1. Introduction

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  Diablo, the Lord of Terror, sold more than a million copies in the single year of 1997, before most people had even heard of the dungeon crawler genre. The series he anchors has since moved nearly 100 million copies worldwide, a figure recorded as of the 8th of April 2020. But the numbers only hint at something stranger: a franchise built around a single, recurring act of descending into darkness, again and again, deeper each time.

  Who invented this loop, and why did it grip so many players so completely? What does it mean that the studio that made it, Blizzard North, created the template and then collapsed before it could see the franchise through? And how did a demon named after a California mountain become one of the most recognizable villains in the history of video games? These are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Mountain and a Game

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  Around 1994, David Brevik was working at a studio called Condor Games when the idea that would become Diablo took shape. Brevik lived near Mount Diablo, and the mountain lent its name to the project. His inspiration was the roguelike genre, which featured turn-based combat and procedurally generated dungeons, but he wanted to strip away complexity and replace it with a more expansive loot system.

  Condor was already working alongside Blizzard Entertainment on a separate project at the time. Blizzard saw potential in Brevik's concept, noting that it shared ideas with their recent release Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. They agreed to help develop it, but pressed hard for three changes: convert the game from turn-based to real-time combat, add multiplayer through Blizzard's Battle.net platform, and remove permadeath.

  Over the course of that collaboration, Blizzard acquired Condor outright. Condor, based in San Mateo, California, was renamed Blizzard North. Blizzard's main campus in Irvine, California, informally became Blizzard South. The result of all this was Diablo, released in January 1997, with players descending through twelve levels of dungeons beneath the town of Tristram into Hell itself.

• 3. The World of Sanctuary

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  Sanctuary, the setting of the Diablo universe, was not built by gods. It was created by rebel angels and demons who were exhausted by the endless war between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. Their first children were the Nephalem, beings of mixed angelic and demonic heritage, and humanity descended from them.

  This origin makes humanity the pivotal force in the setting: both angels and demons seek to influence humans because of that shared bloodline. The town of Tristram and the region around Mount Arreat appear across the first three games. Above the world sits the High Heavens; below lies the Burning Hells. The Archangel Tyrael stands out among angels for his sympathy toward humanity, while Deckard Cain, the last descendant of the ancient order called the Horadrim, serves as the primary narrator of lore across three games.

  The main antagonist, Diablo, holds the title of Lord of Terror and functions as one of seven Great Evils presiding over the Burning Hells. His two brothers are Baal, the Lord of Destruction, and Mephisto, the Lord of Hatred. The series' central dramatic engine is Diablo's drive to absorb the other six Great Evils and become the Prime Evil, the singular sovereign of Hell. Diablo IV, set fifty years after the events of Diablo III, pivots toward a new threat: the return of Lilith, who seeks to reshape Sanctuary and end the eternal conflict on her own terms.

• 4. Sales Records and Critical Standing

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  Diablo III sold 3.5 million copies on its first day of release and 6.3 million copies in its first week, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time at that point. Another 1.2 million copies went to subscribers of Blizzard's Annual Pass service. Diablo II, released in June 2000, sold over two million copies within a month and a half, then reached four million within a year of release.

  Critics placed both Diablo and Diablo II among the best video games ever made. The character of Diablo himself drew particular attention. Time magazine named him the second most influential video game character of all time, describing him as "gaming's archetypal foozle, an illimitable damage sponge into which players pour a game's worth of tactical preparation, informed by scrupulous looting, savvy inventory juggling and ability streamlining." Guinness World Records placed him at number 44 on its 2013 list of the top 50 video game villains. GamePro ranked him 14th on their list of the most diabolical video game villains of all time.

  In 2016, Glixel staff ranked Tyrael, the angelic ally who appears throughout the series, as the 39th most iconic video game character of the 21st century.

• 5. The Collapse of Blizzard North

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  Work on Diablo III began in 2001 at Blizzard North, the studio that had built the franchise from scratch. By 2003, that effort was unraveling. A dispute with Vivendi Games, the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment at the time, drove several key figures out of Blizzard North. Brevik himself left, along with the studio's founders, Max and Erich Schaefer.

  The remaining staff continued working on their version of Diablo III, but in August 2005 Blizzard closed Blizzard North entirely. Most of the existing work on Diablo III was scrapped. Development restarted within Blizzard's own teams. The game that eventually came out in May 2012 had a protracted path to release and faced criticism at launch, particularly over the requirement that players remain connected to the Internet at all times, even for single-player gameplay. Ongoing patches and updates were later credited with improving the experience significantly.

  A cancelled project called Diablo Junior illustrated how the franchise might have expanded in a different direction. Development on this Game Boy title began after the release of Diablo II, originally targeted at the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance before being shifted to the original Game Boy because of its larger install base. The plan was to release it in three separate cartridges, each centered on a different class from the original game, in the style of the Pokemon releases. High production costs ended the project before it reached players.

• 6. What the Loop Actually Is

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  Maps in every Diablo game are randomly generated each time a player enters them. This means no two runs through the same dungeon are identical. The design traces directly back to the roguelike games that inspired Brevik, particularly the early dungeon crawler Moria, which introduced the concept of an adventurer based in a town above a dungeon and able to use scrolls of town portal to return to safety.

  The core activity the series built around this randomness is loot: weapons, armor, and items with attributes assigned to them through random generation. Players pursue progressively better items in an ongoing loop, the dungeon always promising something rarer just a few floors down. Combat is real-time and driven by point-and-click mechanics on PC, with the mouse used for movement and abilities.

  A cancelled project code-named Hades showed Blizzard testing the limits of that established formula. Led by Josh Mosqueira after the release of Reaper of Souls, the project ran from 2014 to 2016 and would have moved the camera to an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective and increased difficulty along the lines of Dark Souls. When Mosqueira left Blizzard, Hades was cancelled alongside him.

• 7. Beyond the Games

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  Netflix optioned the Diablo property from Blizzard in 2020 with an animated series in development. The project fell through after Blizzard sued Netflix, alleging that Netflix had poached Blizzard's chief financial officer, Spencer Neumann.

  The franchise also expanded into comics. Tales of Sanctuary, a comic book written by Phil Amara and Dave Land with art by Francisco Ruiz Velasco, was published by Dark Horse Comics on the 9th of November 2001. It contains three stories set in the Diablo universe. In November 2011, DC Comics began publishing a five-issue miniseries called Diablo III: Sword of Justice, written by Aaron Williams with art and covers by Joseph LaCroix.

  In 2015, Blizzard released Heroes of the Storm, a multiplayer battle arena game that included over fifteen characters from the Diablo universe as playable heroes. Characters from the series have also appeared in World of Warcraft as Easter egg references, in-game companions, and mounts, including a flying mount called Tyrael's Charger and a composite character named Murkablo. A legal dispute arose in May 2021 when Fox Media sought to register the name Diablo with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a character in the adult animated series HouseBroken, which premiered on the 31st of May 2021. Blizzard's legal team argued the registration was likely to cause consumer confusion with the long-established franchise, a fight that illustrated how far the name Diablo had traveled from the California mountain that gave it its name.