Diablo III was announced last year on June 28, 2008, at Blizzard’s World Wide Invitational in Paris, France. What’s happened since? More than you remember. Far too much to re-live it all, but I thought it would be fun to do some research and type up a month by month highlight reel, with links and references and such. Even just hitting the highlights, there’s an amazing amount of stuff to cover. So much that I had to break it up into four, three-month sections.

A few of the key events that transpired during just June, July, and August 2008: the splash screen countdown drove the community insane with anticipation and annoyed us with that purple penguin, D3 was announced at the Paris WWI event, the “too colorful” controversy began (and never ended), a few of the D2 team dared to comment on D3, Bashiok made his debut, the Activision/Blizzard merger took place, “Caption This” came to D3, Diablo 2 returned to the best selling lists, and Jay Wilson did more than a dozen interviews from GDC. All that, and I’ll venture to throw in a proverbial “there’s much, much more!”

Seriously, click through. I didn’t break these up into 3 month chunks just to get 4 articles out of it. The plan was to put the whole year into one post, but there was so much content there was no way to do the review justice with fewer words. Even these first three months took upwards of 2000 words to summarize.