David Brevik, now the president of Skystone Games, did not expect to encounter a doppelganger when he arrived at Chicago’s Consumer Electronic Show in the summer of 1994. He’d come to the tech expo with Condor, a studio he’d co-founded only a few months prior, to show off Justice League: Task Force. A humble fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter, it was given a small demo booth and placed next to another game that featured a cast of superheroes, a strikingly similar visual style and, much to Brevik’s surprise, the very same name.
Without their knowing, Condor were one of two studios hired to develop the DC Comics tie-in: their Sega Mega Drive/Genesis version set to release alongside a SNES title made by another recently formed team, Silicon & Synapse. “We'd never talked to them,” Brevik says. “We'd never interacted with them. We didn't know there was even another version, and then we show up at the booth and they're side by side, and we're like, this is really weird.” They didn't know it yet, but these Justice League sort-of clones were the first paving stones on the road to the Diablo series.