Why We're Never Getting A Diablo 2 Remaster

The idea of a Diablo 2 Remaster is enough to get any Blizzard fan excited. We so often view the past through rose-colored glasses; who wouldn't want to revisit the premier dungeon crawler of the year 2000, and have it actually look as good as we remember it?

Sorry to dash your hopes, but the creators of the game say it's probably not happening.

If there's one thing you should know about game development in the 90s and around the turn of the century, it's this: many developers were awful at managing their data. Square Enix even copped to this, with the company's CEO stating about certain titles, "I'm embarrassed to admit it, but in some cases, we don't know where the code is anymore." Blizzard looks to be in the same boat with Diablo 2, but it's not because developers at the studio weren't supposed to be keeping backups. They were supposed to... but just didn't.

Max Schaefer, one of the creators of the Diablo, said in an interview with GameSpot that the team lost the code for Diablo 2 deep into its development.

"Not just our code, but all of our assets," Schaefer said. "Irrevocably, fatally corrupted."

"It's all gone. We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic," said Erich Schaefer, Max's brother and another co-creator of Diablo.

Fortunately, through some reverse-engineering and hackery, the Diablo 2 team was able to put the game back together again and release a product to the public. But this could only be done using pre-release builds that developers had taken home to play, which means the original assets — the code and art created before then — no longer exist.

"[Blizzard would] have to make them from scratch," said Erich Schaefer.

So with that, you can probably lay to rest any hopes you had for a Diablo 2 Remaster. It would take a whole lot of extra work to make such a release happen, and with Diablo 4 in the works, Blizzard seems more focused on the franchise's future than its past.