I was also crying.”ĭespite the glitch, Diablo IV’s debut was a massive success. “I was in a different hall, so we had no idea it had happened,” says another member of the Diablo IV team.

Mueller says his heart recovered when he learned it was only the viewers in Hall D who experienced a blackout, and that the screen recovered in less than 30 seconds. The stakes were (especially) high at BlizzCon 2019, where gamers would meet Diablo IV.

I thought, ‘This is a heart attack.’ And what happened next was worse: it just turned into Windows screens going into Windows screens.”

“You could hear the audio but the screen was gone,” Mueller says. But a few seconds later, unexpectedly, the room went dark again. Offstage in Anaheim, the game’s art director, John Mueller, watched as the stunning, Hollywood-quality “ reveal cinematic” for Diablo IV began playing for the crowd. It had sold more than 20 million copies to become the fourth-best selling PC game of all time-more than Doom, Myst, Dark Souls, and the first two Diablo games combined, and about the same number of copies Elden Ring would ship across all platforms in its first year. Set in a dark fantasy world filled with angels and demons, it was also the grandfather of action role-playing games like Elden Ring and Assassin’s Creed.īut that November in 2019, more than seven years had passed since the release of Diablo III. If you were a certain kind of geek in the late '90s, the original Diablo was a pop culture phenomenon. Four years ago, on the day after Halloween-the Day of the Dead-thousands of people huddled in the dark, waiting for their first glimpse at Diablo IV in the Anaheim Convention Center.

Diablo 4 gameplay video