BlizzPlanet has news of a Crowdsourcing Diablo film. Well this could be either good news or bad news. At least a certain german director isn't touching this one.

Remember that spectacular French-based Diablo Fan Film production we mentioned a few weeks ago? It is still moving forward. The director, Michael Shaack, reached us to inform he launched the equivalent of Kickstarter in a french website named Ulule to fund the production of the film from pre-production to completion. Here is the crowdsourcing page. Watch the videos at the bottom of this page.

The fan-made Diablo film’s script is based on the novel titled Diablo: Legacy of Blood by New York Times Bestselling author Richard A. Knaak. The film script adaptation is written by J. Heska.

This project will only be funded if at least $17,726 are collected before July 5, 2013.

“Since time immemorial, the forces of light and darkness collide in a no thank you struggle for possession of the earthly world. Angels, Demons, Men. A precarious balance. But now, the fate of all is into the hands of a mercenary.”

SYNOPSIS

Norrec Vizharan is not a lucky man. Born into a peasant family, he escaped the fate of high-ground by combining his talents lean muscles with two robbers ruins. Eking rapine in old Donj ons already visited by more seasoned competitors, his fate suddenly changes when he discovers the forgotten armor of Bartuc, the Warlord of Blood.

Armor that proves more powerful than it seems, and that wakes ambitions buried deep in his mind. But dreams of greatness, Norrec, will be difficult to achieve. Becoming the object of desire, it will face mysterious opponents servicing powerful forces, cross continents and oceans and sink into the depths of the underworld to fulfill his destiny.

Unless his greatest enemy is the armor itself, which seems to pursue its own ends

Edge-Online has a retrospective article on the original Diablo. The article contains excerpts from ex-Blizzard devs such as Max Schaefer and David Breivik.

Simple, as it happens, would be the operative word for Diablo. “Back then, RPGs were so overwrought with statistics that the genre had shrunk to a tiny audience,” says Erich’s brother and Condor’s co-founder, Max Schaefer. “We wanted to do an RPG how we’d played Dungeons & Dragons as kids: hit monsters and gain loot. Our mission was that we wanted the minimum amount of time between when you started the game up to when you were clubbing a skeleton.”

Condor, the company that would create Diablo, was founded in 1993, and hit a quirky seam of good luck early on. “We were just starting out with Dave Brevik and my brother Erich,” says Max. “We were in Brevik’s house and he’d just quit his job with Iguana Entertainment. We’re having our first meeting: what’s our company going to work on, how are we going to make money? The phone rings, and it’s someone from SunSoft who heard Dave was free and had some projects. So on our first meeting we ended up getting our first job. We looked at each other and said: ‘Is this real?’”

“For me, the most direct influence was X-COM: UFO Defense,” suggests Erich. “The size of the characters, the camera angle and the tile-based random maps. I felt like it would make a great dungeon crawl.” Blizzard agreed, and Condor soon had a contract.

The game’s central concept – loot and monsters without the waiting – was never in question, but that doesn’t mean it emerged fully formed. Surprisingly, the ultimate action-RPG was originally turn-based. “At first we had it so that you would take a step and then the monsters would,” says Erich. “You would swing your sword and then the monsters got their chance. I think this was based on the Nethack or Rogue-style of game that Brevik liked a lot.”

A debatable topic if there ever was one but 1Up has a piece titled How Diablo Saved the Computer RPG, looking back at market at the time, the release of Diablo and why it was successful (with some dodgy assertions). From the opening:

It's safe to say that by 1995, the computer role-playing game was dying. RPGs were losing traction to the wave of games modeled after two recently innovative titles: 1992's Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty and 1993's Doom. After the success of those two titles, the computer game industry as a whole shifted to producing more real-time strategy games and first-person shooters. The dwindling audience that enjoyed turn-based role-playing games full of mechanics, simulations, and obscure details were then being swayed by turn-based strategy games like Civilization II.  

By this time, traditional first or third-person RPGs were still being released, but pretty much no one except Europeans bought them. One of the bigger successes in the genre came from a small studio in Maryland: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall from Bethesda Softworks. Yet that was more of an anomaly -- Bethesda saw better traction from shooters like Terminator: Future Shock and its sequel SkyNET. Even the stalwart Ultima series -- Lord British's saga of isometric RPGs in a fully fleshed-out fantasy universe -- abandoned its core principles in pursuit of the action-driven market. Ultima fans generally felt betrayed when Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle -- a party-based RPG with a vast world -- was followed up with Ultima VIII: Pagan -- which featured a lone hero in a much smaller setting that bizarrely featured platforming elements (most likely in pursuit of luring action and even console gamers to the Ultima series).  

Blizzard is celebrating the 15 Year Anniversary of Diablo (do you feel old now?) with a subsite that offers a retrospective video and video interviews with Jay Wilson and Chris Metzen. Among other things, Jay says Diablo III is "almost done", although that could still mean anything with Blizzard.

10 years ago, in the last week of 1996, Blizzard has released one of the most important titles in the history of Action-RPGs as Diablo has seen the light of day then. In the meantime Diablo 2 has been released (in the year 2000 IIRC) and there's been and still will be plenty of Diablo inspired titles. To celebrate the 10th anniversay of Diablo (& the battle.net), Blizzard has opened a website looking back at these past 10 years, their games in this period and more...take a look!