By any measurement you can think of, the original Diablo was a booming success. Initially it was hoped that it could sell what would have been an impressive 100,000 copies, but that number shot up to 500,000 on launch and beyond two million after its first year in stores. Yet videogames are unlike most other creative endeavours, there’s no ‘difficult second album’ because those first debut releases are in many ways foundational rather than revolutionary.
Think of Civilization, The Sims, System Shock, Portal, Assassin’s Creed, Street Fighter; countless times in the industry we’ve seen an impressive, enjoyable and successful debut game practically humiliated by the next game in the series. Many of the very best games in the world are sequels, and it’s typically down to the fact that their creators don’t need to struggle coming up with something new, fresh and yet equally as captivating as a musician might with their second album. They take the previous engine, they fix the problems and they add in all the things they wanted to do the first time around now that they have the knowledge, experience and a bigger budget. And that’s what happened with Diablo II.
“The fact is that we thought that we were invincible,” says David Brevik, the creator of the series and the sequel’s lead programmer and designer. “As a company we had made and then and then and we knew that looked really good and that was coming soon. We thought that we could do whatever we wanted because we were passionate about games and we understood how to make PC games. We thought that we could have at least a breakeven scenario.” David had founded his studio Condor with Max and Erich Schaefer, but the name Condor – as it was originally called – didn’t last very long, with Blizzard buying out the studio a few months prior to the original ’s release. But even under the name of Blizzard North, David and the team behind was not beholden to its sugar daddy in Irvine, California. “The guys down south said, ‘Do whatever you want to do and we’ll look at whatever ideas you have.’” David adds that Blizzard was hopeful for a sequel, but that they were “really flexible” about what the team would move onto next.
