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'''Blizzard North''' was a game developer studio located in San Mateo, in Northern California that created [[Diablo I]] , [[Diablo II]] and [[Diablo II: Lord of Destruction]].
Development on Diablo III was begun at Blizzard North in 2000, and continued (through many rough spots) until 2005, when Blizzard North was shut down. Diablo III's development was restarted almost from scratch at Blizzard Irvine in late 2005, by an almost entirely new development team, and it has continued from there.
See the [[Diablo III History]] article and the article on [[Blizzard North's Diablo III]] for many more details.
According to various insider accounts, virtually none of the early work completed on Diablo 3 remains in the current version, which was begun almost entirely from scratch by a new team in Irvine in 2005. [[Bill Roper]] discussed this in an interview in early 2009. [http://www.incgamers.com/Interviews/175/bill-roper-talks/2]
::'''''IncGamers.com: ''' Blizzard North had previously been working on the third Diablo, from what I understand?
::'''Bill Roper:''' There was definitely work on it up north, but whenever something switches to a different team or a different lead, they pretty much tend to scrap everything.
::'''''IncGamers.com: '''So everything was just thrown out, and started again?
::'''Bill Roper: '''I would guess so, but I have no actual knowledge of what they did or didn't do, as that was well after we were gone. But I wouldn't be surprised – there's hardly anybody from the original team or even the Diablo 2 team that's there – so my guess would be that they thought “Great, we have this awesome thing that we're working on,” so the designers and artists there would now be able to put their visions into the [[Diablo universe]]. Nothing that I've seen looks like anything I ever did with the game, so I would imagine they got rid of the vast majority of what I did when I was there.