Diablo was never supposed to be real-time. Since it was originally conceived by Condor, later known as Blizzard North, Diablo was intended to be an RPG in turn that borrowed heavily from the tradition of roguelikes. It was Blizzard, who resembled the success of WarCraft II: The Tides of Darkness, who suggested that Condor could turn it into a real-time dungeon crawler.
“We’ve been fighting the transition for a long time,” Condor founder Max Schaefer told GameSpot in a 2002 retrospective. “The amount of time we fought over it was absolutely ridiculous, as it only took us three hours to mock the game in real time.”
