Upcoming Book Invites Diablo Fans to "Stay Awhile and Listen" to the Untold Story of Blizzard North

Oct 31, 2011

Former Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North developers tell the tale of one of the industry's most influential studios and the dungeon crawler that defined a genre.

Digital Monument Press, an e-book publisher dedicated to documenting video-game history, is excited to announce its debut title, Stay Awhile and Listen, for release in summer 2012. Featuring extensive input from Blizzard North and former Blizzard Entertainment developers, Stay Awhile and Listen delves into the 12-year history of Blizzard North. Readers will explore the making of the Diablo series, get to know the engineers, artists, musicians, and designers whose ideas and perspectives formed a powerful culture of open and organic development, unearth details on unannounced projects such as the first two iterations of Diablo III, go behind closed doors to observe the relationship between Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment, and learn the circumstances that led to the departure of Blizzard North co-founders David Brevik, Max Schaefer, and Erich Schaefer in 2003, as well as the studio's closure in 2005.

Just as the different perspective of every Blizzard North developer influenced the company's games and culture, David Brevik believes perspective will play a large part in determining what readers take away from the studio's story. "If you're a reader interested in the back-story and history of how this all came together, and the relationships and trials, and how much work, effort, time, and sacrifice goes into this kind of thing, I think you'll get a good sense of how hard you have to work to get to where we were. Or if you're another developer, maybe you can learn something from some of the mistakes we made."

For Erich Schaefer, partaking in Stay Awhile and Listen was important not only to relay the story of Diablo and Blizzard North, but also to provide encouragement and motivation for anyone fighting to turn a dream into reality. "I'd definitely like to see this set a record for what went on. ... I would also love for the story to inspire somebody to make great games. I don't know how that would work, exactly, but if you find the right readers and they end up thinking, 'Hey, I can do that' and just try big things, that would be great."

"What I hope readers take away from the book is that regular people make games like ours, so don't ever think you can't be part of something like that," agrees Max Schaefer. "That's the important thing for me in telling this story: to let people know that regular people can do things like this, you just have to dothem. We didn't have business experience, we didn't even really have professional experience. It's just a matter of having a dream and having a vision, and doing the grunt work that realizing that dream entails."

Written by David L. Craddock, Stay Awhile and Listen is projected for release on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, and Barnes & Noble Nook platforms in summer 2012.