Blizzard is advertising a classic games software engineer position(s)

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=15000XZ

Compelling stories. Intense multiplayer. Endless replayability. Qualities that made StarCraft, Warcraft III, and Diablo II the titans of their day. Evolving operating systems, hardware, and online services have made them more difficult to be experienced by their loyal followers or reaching a new generation.

We’re restoring them to glory, and we need your engineering talents, your passion, and your ability to get tough jobs done.

This actually isn’t surprising. When Diablo III was in development, Bashiok mentioned Diablo II patch 1.1.4. As I mentioned, this never really came to pass because of what happened to StarCraft II and then D3 at their respective launches. SC2 was the first to launch on what then the new Battle.net 2.0; where one of the biggest complaints was the “ghost town” effect due to the new lobby system in Battle.net. And the issues with D3 are pretty much well documented that it no longer needs to be repeated.

Attrition of programmer talent for the classic legacy games also had an effect of putting those original plans of constantly maintaining/patching these older games on the back burner.

With that said, this is going to be challenging on the Mac side since D2 there was based on a mix of really old legacy code (68k, PowerPC that ran on the older classic Mac OS, and then a sort hacked together Carbon version that allowed the game to run on PowerPC OS X systems). Older PowerPC Mac’s that ran the classic Mac OS used a dynamic recompiler that translated 68k to PPC on the fly.

When Apple migrated to Intel, a similar technology embedded into the operating system called Rosetta was used that allowed most Carbon apps to run on the Intel version of OS X. Rosetta itself was depreciated back in OS X 10.7 so most players have been using the Windows version of D2+LoD packaged into Wine bundles to run the game.

The Windows side shouldn’t be as bad. The other challenge though is they probably want to extricate those games from Battle.net 1.0, and allow them to work with the current Battle.net for not only better integration, but to take advantage of the server side security/validation mechanisms.

With that said, I’m glad that they are making it a priority again so that players who want to play these classics on current operating systems don’t have to go through as many hoops as they have to do now.What we should not expect is the actual changing of the actual content including upgraded graphics and textures. That is another challenge and project in and of itself. But players are now going to be wildly speculating this means an actual HD remake of those games.

I kind of don’t see that happening because HD remakes aren’t just about changing all the graphics to high resolution textures. There are actual deeper questions as to how much game play mechanics should be changed because in D2’s case, movements and combat animations are based on sprites unlike D3’s vectorized/wireframe movements. Imagine D3’s characters with attack animations like D2; it would look and feel tacky. Yet, actually changing those mechanics by actually redoing the actual graphics engine will affect the overall classic feel of those games.

That’s why I view this advertised position as mainly being about the code and bringing it forward where it can run and be better maintained on current day operating systems, and less about creating enhanced versions (something like that would have to be a bigger project and encompass larger teams).