Blizzard North

» see blizzard.com/inblizz/north.shtml as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Condor Inc was founded in 1993 by three men who had met working at a clip art studio called FM Waves. David Brevik had the idea that became Diablo, a turn-based roguelike for the PC. Erich Schaefer and his brother Max ran the art and the production alongside him, out of an office in Redwood City with a staff you could count on two hands.

Davidson & Associates, which owned Blizzard Entertainment at the time, bought Condor about nine months before the game shipped and renamed it Blizzard North. The turn-based part did not survive contact with Blizzard, and the argument about that is one of the better-documented arguments in the industry. Diablo went out at the very end of 1996 as a real-time click-driven dungeon crawl with a randomized map and a loot table, and it created a genre that is still being farmed thirty years later.

Diablo II arrived in June 2000 and sold past a million copies in its first two weeks. Lord of Destruction followed in 2001 and turned the game into something people kept playing for another decade on a ladder reset schedule. That was the high point. Everything after it was a game that never shipped.

~ the case file ~

~ the email ~

By 2003 Vivendi had absorbed Blizzard's parent and was widely reported to be shopping the studio around. In June that year four executives at Blizzard North sent an email to Vivendi Games asking for two things: financial protections for themselves, and some honesty about whether Blizzard was being sold and to whom. The email said they would resign if they did not get them.

Vivendi accepted the resignations, effective immediately. David Brevik went, and both Schaefer brothers went with him. Bill Roper, who had been the public face of Blizzard for years and the voice on the Warcraft II intro, went too. All four ended up at Flagship Studios, which they founded within months and which lasted five years before collapsing under Hellgate: London.

A publisher is allowed to call a bluff. What it cannot do is call one and then keep the project those people were building, on the schedule they were building it to, with the half of the team that stayed.

~ the diablo iii nobody saw ~

Blizzard North had been working on Diablo III since roughly 2000. There was also a second project, referred to internally as Starblo, which was the same loot loop pointed at a science fiction setting. Neither shipped. The Diablo III that existed in San Mateo had a different art direction, reportedly darker and closer to the second game, and there are a handful of screenshots floating around that are mostly argued about rather than looked at.

On 1 August 2005 Blizzard Entertainment closed the studio, giving as its reason that the Irvine headquarters could not properly supervise a troubled project four hundred miles up the coast. Both games were cancelled. Staff were offered the chance to interview for jobs in Southern California working on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, which is a polite way of saying the studio's own pipeline was gone. Development on Diablo III restarted from scratch in Irvine and the game finally shipped in May 2012, twelve years after the first attempt started.

~ what the cafes ran ~

Diablo II landed in Turkey through internet cafes, which by 2002 were the default place to play anything multiplayer. Counter-Strike owned most of the machines, but Diablo II was on the same hard drives almost everywhere, and it had two properties that made it survive in that environment. It ran on hardware that was already old, and it worked over a local network without needing the cafe's upstream connection to hold up for an hour.

Battle.net was the other half of it and the less reliable half, on a home dial-up line especially. What people around me actually did with Diablo II was play it in a room with other people in it, trading items across a LAN. The studio behind it was not a name anyone in that room would have been able to tell you. Blizzard was the name on the box, Blizzard North was an internal distinction, and the fact that the people who made the thing had already walked out by the time I was reading about it in Turkish forums was not information that traveled.

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