The general consensus is that Blizz had a lot of ideas when making D1, but decided to release the game as we all know, and a lot of the surplus ideas made the core for what we know as D2.
There isn't much to the original D beyond 'Real-time Rogue'. D2 was much, much more ambitious in scope (and much less focused as a result IMO).
Wow, nice work. Of course, putting models, animations and backgrounds together is real labor (and at least the monk and Na-Krul probably involved some significant work), even if it's based on a template, but I think it says something that 'Hellfire' is the last title listed in that article on Synergistic, and that Bliz has more or less pretended that it never existed and has never licensed out their IP to an outside studio since that time (and may not even be outsourcing pre-production cinematic stuff again after that leak a few months ago).
There isn't much to the original D beyond 'Real-time Rogue'. D2 was much, much more ambitious in scope (and much less focused as a result IMO).
Do you have any supporting documentation on that, or is that just a theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Synergistic_Software