The famous Blizzard graveyard of canceled games includes a sci-fi Diablo and a Warcraft take on Helldivers
Oct. 2, 2024The Overwatch developer has a ton of skeletons in the closet
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Developer Blizzard is notorious for canceling games, but the sheer number of abandoned ideas might still surprise you. It’ll also make you wonder what your life would have been like with five times as many World of Warcraft spin-offs in it.
Journalist Jason Schreier discusses Blizzard’s lengthy video games kill list on a new episode ofthe MinnMax podcast, on which he also promotes his book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future ofBlizzard Entertainment, out October 8.
“Bloodlines, which was a space vampire game? […] Diablo for the Game Boy…” lists off MinnMax founder Ben Hanson during the interview. “Then [defunct California offshoot] Blizzard North, after Diablo, was working on Star-blo, which was sci-fi Diablo. I’m assuming that’s got to be just a code name, right?” It is, but you have to admit it has a nice melody to it.
Other canceled Blizzard games, Schreier shares, include the following: the post-apocalyptic game Nomad, an early, third-person camera version of Diablo 4 called Hades, a World of Warcraft take on Pokémon Go called Orbits, a Helldivers version of WoW,the survival game Odyssey, a God of War WoW game called Andromeda, and the Minecraft-meets-WoW game Avalon.
That last game “has not been made public before,” Schreier says, though it was in development for two years under former Diablo 3 game directorJay WilsonandLeft 4 Deadcreator Mike Booth.
“People who played it said it was cool,” Schreier continues. “From the way it was described to me, it sounds a little more [like sandbox action RPG] Dragon Quest Builders than Minecraft, and there were quests and a storyline […] but it was all Minecraft-style, pick up blocks and whatever.” Think of all the square orcs you could have made.
Blizzard’s axed MMO Project Titan reportedly “cost the company $80 million,” and was like Animal Crossing or The Sims meets Overwatch.
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Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.
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