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Comment by mraison | Hacker News Reader

Fun (or sad) fact: they apparently lost a lot of the source code and assets. Looks like they were able to recover most of the code, but not the assets [1]

[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-diablo-2-was-almost-lo...

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They said they lost the source code pre-release, but managed to reconstruct most of it. Given that it was released and that there have been many patches, I think the source code is fine.

I think the only thing they really lost are the hi-def assets from which the lower-def ingame assets were created.

Are you sure the in-game assets were created from hi-def versions rather than just being pixel art?

To be fair it wouldn't surprise me - this sort of thing was pretty common back then. You'd create high def 3D models and then render 2D sprites etc from them.

They said "It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They'd have to make them from scratch."

I can't think of any other way of interpreting it.

That’s exactly what the article says.

Can you point to where? I can't find it, and a quick search for "resolution", "high", "quality", "def" turned up nothing. They say they lost the art assets but a bunch of pixel art tilemaps would fit that description, especially if they were composited down during the build process.

At least the source code they seem to have, as reasonably recently, they ported D2 from PowerPC to Intel on the Mac.

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