Diablo 2 Devs Explain Why Remaster Is Unlikely

Diablo 2 remaster, something that many people hoped to see this announced during BlizzCon this year.
But apparently, it is difficult to make a remaster at all since the original source code is gone.

In an interview with Gamespot, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik share their story about this:

There was one story in particular that sounds like a developer’s nightmare. Erich and Max Schaefer recalled that in the 11th hour ofDiablo II‘s development, the entire backup of the game’s source code and assets was lost. “Not just our code, but all of our assets. Irrevocably, fatally corrupted,” Max Schaefer said.

His brother Erich added, “It’s all gone. We were supposed to have a backup but neglected it. We spent a day or two in sheer panic.”

The team at Blizzard North was thankfully able to reconstruct a lot of the code and assets from the version of Diablo II that developers took home to play. However, the root code and assets were apparently lost, which means Blizzard would have a tough time making a Diablo II Remaster today.

“[We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes,” Erich Schaefer said. “I had a big chunk of it. Went home, pulled out the hard drive or whatever we did back then. Spent a few days reconstructing it, which ended up working fine, except that we lost all the history. We lost a lot of the assets, art assets. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 Remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They’d have to make them from scratch.”