Blizzard North

So a paper artifact from Diablo's development, the original Diablo's development, survives as well.

The original 1994 pitch document created when developer Condor, before becoming Blizzard North, was actually the pitch document that was used to pitch this project.

So rather than manually drawing every dungeon and reproducing it in software, the design proposed a system where the computer would assemble dungeon layouts for the developers.

The document describes a dynamic random level generator.

I think there's always been, like, a...

I know there was a professional rivalry, rivalry between Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North during the Diablo I and II days.

Sure.

Uh, and I think there has been between, like, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, 'cause people, like, overwhelmingly prefer New Vegas, and maybe that causes, uh, Bethesda to bristle a little bit or something.

And this was released in 1995 for the SNES and Genesis.

The Genesis version was developed by Condor, who would become Blizzard North at some point in history.

The SNES version would go on to be developed by Blizzard.

The game is named after the Justice League Task Force comic run, which ran from 1993 to 1996.

Welcome to the dark future that Diablo has prepped for us.

This was developed and published by, well, developed by Blizzard North.

who is well known for their previous episode, Diablo 1, and published by Blizzard, who that's a whole podcast in and of itself, assuming that they are around long enough after this latest round of layoffs.

How your average player of Diablo 2 resurrected, according to the Steam data that I've pulled off of it.

I went to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, which is, I went there because it was an animation hub.

I knew ILM was in the Bay Area, Pixar, Tippett Studio, and Blizzard North was up there, EA, tons of video games, Ubisoft, bunch of video games in the area.

And I was like, if I, even if this school sucks for some reason, I bet I can still find somebody who'll teach me what I need to know.

But because of that proximity to Pixar, showing up at school and saying, oh, I want to work for Blizzard, which was the dream.