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 getting remastered