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Blizzard North considered making Diablo Junior for the Game Boy Color
David Craddock is a freelance writer (and former Joystiquer) who's putting a book together about Blizzard North, the studio that created the enormously popular Diablo series. Up until the book's release (it is called, of course, "Stay Awhile and Listen"), Craddock is doling out some insights that he's picked up from his research on Diablo's past development.Like, for example, the fact that a version of Diablo 2 was considered for the Game Boy Color and/or the Game Boy Advance. Following the release of the popular sequel, Blizzard North considered a single-player handheld game with the working (and adorable) title of Diablo Junior, which would have three separate cartridges on offer, each featuring a different class of hero. The game was never made, mostly due to the high costs of mobile development at that time.Craddock says Blizzard North also considered a second expansion for Diablo 2, which would have come out after Lord of Destruction. That expansion would have focused on multiplayer features, and set up customizable guild housing and banks. In the end, however, that expansion was also scuttled, and Blizzard North got to work on the long project that would become Diablo 3.
Upcoming book Stay Awhile and Listen delves into the history of Blizzard
Are you into video games? Of course you are. Are you into history? Are you into Blizzard Entertainment? And perhaps most importantly, are you into books? If you answered yes to all of these questions, then you're probably a rather small subset of people, but luckily for you, we've got just the thing to fill that niche. David L. Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen is being published by Digital Monument Press, and if you're at all interested in how Blizzard came to be the industry powerhouse that it is today, it's probably worth a read. This isn't just some unofficial rag, though; Stay Awhile and Listen features input from a great number of Blizzard and Blizzard North developers. The book hits shelves, Nooks, Kindles, and Apple iBooks in Summer 2012. [Source: Digital Monument Press press release]
