Mention the word ‘Blizzard’ to a gamer, and they’ll instantly flash to one of two games, Starcraft or Diablo. Or go into an Error 37 rage that injures several people. Those two games made Blizzard the powerhouse that it is today, paving the way for other titles. And in a strange twist, they almost collided with one another, as Blizzard once considered making a cosmic version of Diablo.
Starblo, while sounding like an under the counter DVD, was the codename for the project, according to the David Craddock book Stay Awhile And Listen, which Shacknews grabbed an excerpt from.
Craddock described the game as being in the same vein as Diablo, but being set “on a space opera stage.”
The project earned the nickname Starblo for its mix of a space setting and the action-RPG formula that made Diablo so successful,” he said. “Like Diablo 2, Starblo would take place over several acts, but rather than journey across a single world, players would board their customizable spaceship and travel to new planets, killing and looting the space creatures they found there.
By the time Dave Brevik and the Schaefers left Blizzard North in summer 2003, the Starblo team had produced a few playable builds of the game, but still hadn’t come up with a proper name.
Makes you wonder what other developers thought about merging their more famous properties into different genres, doesn’t it? I for one, would have really dug to have played a version of Sleeping Dogs that had zombies in it.
Last Updated: October 24, 2012
