Diablo IV is a gorgeous, cinematic adventure that will rival The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and (potentially) Starfield for 2023's game of the year. At the same time, Blizzard's corporate turmoil during the development of Diablo IV made it the most dramatic story in the entertainment industry. After allegations of harassment and discrimination toward women in high-profile lawsuits, a massive employee walkout, and staff attrition, Blizzard fired Diablo IV's original leaders. By all accounts, conditions on the Diablo IV team have improved since 2021, thanks to employee-led efforts and new leaders like game director Joe Shely. But to understand how Diablo IV went from a crisis to a comeback story—and why some staff are still pushing for changes at the corporate level that will have a far-reaching impact on the video game industry at large—I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Blizzard employees, some of whom shared new details about the making of Diablo IV under the condition of anonymity. |
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The brand takes what it does best—keeping ice frozen—and made it even more portable. |
| Nostalgia doesn't always work, but it's employed most appropriately in this film. |
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Most people know a good deal about Harrison Ford. His path to becoming an actor was methodical and uneventful: going out for parts, landing small roles. He figured he could be a character actor. "Anyone but the leading man" is how he describes it. A working actor. Getting paid and going home at night. Then there's the famous thing that happened, a story of which there are many versions, but this is the right one: Ford had got a small part in the second feature film by a young director named George Lucas, 1973's American Graffiti. But he had a young family and wasn't making enough to live on, so he worked as a carpenter. "I said I would do it but only at night, when no one was around, because I didn't want to be that guy—I wanted them to think of me as an actor, which I was," Ford says. "First thing in the morning in walked George Lucas to begin the process of meeting people for Star Wars. I was there with my tool belt on, sweeping up, said hello, chatted, and that was it. Later, I was asked by the producer to help them read lines with candidates for all the parts. Don't know whether I read with people who were reading for Han Solo—can't remember. I read with quite a few princesses. But there was no indication or forewarning that I might be considered for this part. It was just a favor. And then of course they offered me the part." |
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From the ones behind your favorite undershirt to those you can rock with a suit. |
| From a stunning portrait of Michael J. Fox to the definitive Bill Russell look, the genre will continue to inform and surprise us this year. |
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Eliot Borenstein's new book Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head convincingly argues that writers and artists made smaller, more incremental contributions to comics, ones that are harder to notice but are ultimately just as vital. This decade in Marvel's history is often remembered as an awkward transitional period—which it was—but the growing pains felt during this time are just like the ones we experience in our youths: aching pangs that promise future advancement. Borenstein examines the work of five Marvel Comics writers, but I'm going to focus on the example of Steve Englehart. Englehart accomplished a lot during his tenure at Marvel. He was also a pot-smoking, astrology-loving conscientious objector who, along with artists Jim Starlin, Frank Brunner, Al Milgrom, and Alan Weiss, would take LSD and tool around Manhattan in its Taxi Driver era. The gang saw Disney's Alice in Wonderland at Lincoln Center, which inspired Englehart and Brunner's psychedelic Doctor Strange run. They were, essentially, incorporating the countercultural movement into their work. |
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