It’s no secret that the Diablo franchise has been a hugely successful commercial series… and at one point, the team at Blizzard was riding so high on their success that they started thinking about bringing the game to the Game Boy Color.
The proposed title of the game was Diablo Junior, and it would have seen a Pokemon-style execution with multiple varied editions of the game that allowed players to exchange those sought-after exclusive characters and items with each other.
Blizzard biographer David Craddock reveals that development actually began on the game after the release of Diablo 2, with a Game Boy Advance version also on the table. It would have been a single-player prequel to the original game.
Craddock is currently putting together a book called Stay Awhile and Listen, an unofficial history of Blizzard, and he’s had the opportunity to interview 80+ former employees of the WoW-famed company.
Here’s a little bit of what he had to say (http://www.shacknews.com/article/76097/author-blizzard-wanted-a-diablo-for-handhelds):
“Taking a page from Pokémon’s book, the team wanted to release three cartridges, each packing a different hero in the warrior-rogue-sorcerer vein as well as items that players would have to trade for in order to collect. Heroes started in a unique town before heading into dungeons and wilderness zones. Diablo Junior was ultimately put out to pasture (absent of cow levels, I’m sure) because of the steep production costs associated with developing handheld games.”
