Diablo

Video Game
STUDIO Blizzard Entertainment
RELEASED 1996

It is a horrible era for the formerly peaceful town of Tristram. The young Prince Albrect is missing, King Leoric is dead, and demonic raids are now commonplace. You are one of the heroes, who has visited Tristram, seeking fame and fortune for slaying whatever is causing this horror. However, the sleeping Evil sees in you what it most desires: Freedom.

Knowledge

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Diablo Almost Looked Completely Different

Before settling on the dark isometric look everyone knows, Diablo was at one point going to be rendered using claymation. It's genuinely hard to picture Tristram's gothic dread working the same way with stop-motion clay models.

Only One Book Series Actually Counts

Diablo has had a handful of tie-in novels over the years, but according to Blizzard, only Richard A. Knaak's Sin War trilogy is treated as fully canon to the games' story. Everything else sits in a much murkier, semi-official zone.

The Man Who Wrote Diablo Also Wrote Half of Azeroth

Richard A. Knaak, the author behind most of the Diablo novels, has also written extensively for Warcraft and StarCraft, on top of his own long-running Dragonlance series. The guy clearly doesn't take a day off from world-building.

The Novels Take You 3,000 Years Before Diablo

The Sin War trilogy isn't set anywhere near the events of the games. It rewinds the clock 3,000 years before the fall of Tristram and follows a farmer named Uldyssian as he gets tangled up in the ancient war between angels and demons over Sanctuary.

Every Demon in the Series Comes From One Dragon

All seven of the Great Evils, including Diablo himself, were originally born from the seven heads of a single primordial dragon named Tathamet. Three of those heads became the Prime Evils, and the other four became the so-called Lesser Evils.

The 'Lesser' Evils Aren't Actually One Family

Unlike Diablo, Mephisto and Baal, who consider themselves true brothers, the four Lesser Evils split into two separate pairs. Andariel and Duriel call each other twins, while Belial and Azmodan see themselves as siblings, and that lack of unity is a big part of why the Lesser Evils struggled to team up against the Three.

The Three Brothers Ruled Hell by Force

Mephisto, Baal and Diablo styled themselves as a dark ruling triumvirate over the whole of Hell, using brutal strength and cunning to keep the four Lesser Evils in line beneath them. It's this power imbalance that eventually sparked the rebellion known as the Dark Exile.

Diablo Has More Than One Name

Outside of the name players know him by, Diablo also goes by al'Diabolos in older Horadric texts, and followers of the Triune sect refer to him as Dialon, the Spirit of Determination. Different cultures in Sanctuary clearly weren't on the same page about what to call the Lord of Terror.

The Secret Cow Level Made It Into Azeroth

Blizzard spent years insisting 'there is no cow level,' a running joke going back to the original Diablo. For Diablo's 20th anniversary they finally caved, at least in WoW: killing a Treasure Goblin in the Broken Isles could pull you into a farmer's field crawling with axe-wielding cows and a boss called the Cow King, who'd hand out a toy guitar that plays Tristram's theme song.