Diablo Knowledge
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Even World of Warcraft Has a Third Leg for Wirt
By the time World of Warcraft rolled around, Blizzard had turned the whole thing into a running gag across the company. Somewhere in Azeroth there's an item called Wirt's Third Leg, quietly keeping a decades-old Diablo joke alive in a completely different game.
Diablo Shows Up as a Sore Loser in a Pod Race
Head to Thousand Needles in World of Warcraft and you can stumble into a Star Wars-style pod racing event in the Shimmering Flats. One of the racers is Diablo himself, and he does not look thrilled about being stuck in a go-kart instead of terrorizing Sanctuary.
Ex-Blizzard Devs Snuck a Wirt Tribute Into Their Own Game
When some of the original Blizzard North team left to found Flagship Studios, they clearly couldn't resist bringing a piece of Diablo with them. Their game Hellgate: London includes a quest reward called 'Wart's Peg Leg,' a not-so-subtle parody of Wirt's Leg.
Cain's Family Has Been Fighting Diablo for Centuries
Deckard Cain isn't just some random old man who happens to know a lot. He's a descendant of Jered Cain, the Horadrim mage who led the original hunt that trapped Diablo and his brothers in Soulstones centuries before the games even start.
The Expansion Blizzard Didn't Actually Make
Hellfire, the only expansion ever released for the original Diablo, wasn't built by Blizzard North at all. It came from Synergistic Software over at Sierra, and Blizzard quietly retconned the whole thing as non-canon not long after it launched.
A Guitar Chord Was the Whole Diablo III Reveal
Composer Matt Uelmen wrote Diablo's Tristram theme on a 12-string guitar, and it became so recognizable that when Blizzard wanted to announce Diablo III at BlizzCon 2008, all they did was have a guitarist strum the opening chords onstage. Apparently over ten thousand people in the crowd knew exactly what game was coming before a single word was said.
A Coin Flip Away From Being Turn-Based
Diablo started life as a turn-based dungeon crawler in the vein of Rogue. Creator David Brevik actually fought against switching it to real-time combat, but the studio put it to a vote, he lost, and he ended up reworking the whole system by making turns happen twenty times a second instead.
Diablo's Look Was Basically Traced From X-Com
When the team needed to figure out how to angle and render their isometric world, Brevik has said he just grabbed a screenshot of X-Com and built Diablo's camera and tile grid to match it exactly, same shape, same size tiles and everything.