Diablo should never have been in real time. Originally conceived by Condor, later known as Blizzard North, Diablo was intended to be a turn-based RPG that borrowed heavily from the tradition of roguelikes. It was Blizzard, along with the success of WarCraft II: The Tides of Darkness, that suggested that Condor turn it into a real-time point-and-click dungeon crawler.

“We’ve been fighting that transition for a long time,” Condor founder Max Schaefer told GameSpot in a retrospective 2002. “The amount of time we had on it was completely ridiculous as it only took us about three hours to mock the game in real time.”