Blizzard Entertainment'sDIABLO II

by erich schaefer

The original DIABLO went gold on the day after Christmas in 1996, after a grueling four-month crunch period. We hadn't put any thought into what game to do next, but as most developers can probably relate to, we were pretty certain we weren't ready to return to the DIABLO world after such a long development cycle. The only thing we were certain of was that we wanted to avoid another crunch like we had just experienced. DIABLO II went gold on June 15, 2000, after a grueling 12-month crunch period. After DIABLO shipped, we spent about three months recovering and kicking around game ideas for our next project, but nothing really stuck.

The idea of returning to DIABLO began to creep into the discussions, ...

Get Postmortems from Game Developer now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial