I remember buying Diablo — hell, I remember the day that changed my life. It wasn’t alcoholism, girls, or any of the other problems you might expect from a university student. I was living in Manchester one snowy February Tuesday night in 1997 staring at the cover of a video game in a store named Electronics Boutique. There was a guy wielding a sword and standing in front of a red backdrop. That game would set me back twenty-five pounds — a considerable amount of money to spend on something I could’ve spent on food, school textbooks, or literally anything else besides another PC game. Everybody at college had been badgering me about this game called Diablo so I blew my money.
Twenty-seven hours later I was still inside, fueled by Red Bull and Mountain Dew, cramped next to a tower of empty Irn-Bru cans and the crumbs of half eaten Pot Noodles, clicking my barbarian mercilessly while he beat the shit out of skeletons in some cathedral nestled in the hellhole of Creation. My roommate Dave had given up asking me to keep my voice down about an hour ago. I had forgotten I had homework due in two days. I think I may have slept the night before. All I could think about was crawling deeper into this dungeon and killing Diablo until my fingers bled in hopes of discovering something better.
Fuck, that Tristram theme music still gives me chills. Matt Uelmen must have majored in dominating people with ambiance using only a handful of simple chords on an acoustic guitar — he’s a damn god at what he does. Eerie, melancholy, medieval yet not cheesy as hell — seriously, it’s hard to put into words. Sometimes I would pause my character in the town square while I ate dinner or took phone calls just to listen to that tune.
To this day, whenever I hear those opening chords I still feel that magic wash over me like it was my phone number on a dessert commercial or the smell of my mothers cooking.
What made Diablo so revolutionary was Blizzard North’s philosophy on gameplay. They had successfully combined action with RPG elements without sacrificing either genre in the process. RPG games at the time were all menus and turn based combat, paper thin characters hiding behind stat sheets that looked like excel spreadsheets. Action games gave you instant feedback but zero real depth to gameplay. Diablo said “fuck both of those concepts” and developed a click-to-attack interface that anybody could pick up and play within seconds of booting up the game, yet deep enough that how you played mattered.
I made my first character a barbarian because I’m unimaginative like that and the instruction manual said he was ideal for new players. Moving his enormous, pixellated sword down dark cathedral hallways felt clunky at first but there was something immensely satisfying about blasting through rooms full of undead warriors and watching coins explode out of their corpses. Every once in awhile Dave would pause next to me and give me input. “Barbarians are crap” he said “why didn’t you make the sorcerer?” Easy for him to say, Dave wasn’t suddenly attacked by five Zombies with nothing but a tiny shield and questionable reflexes to defend himself.
Diablo’s loot system was where they truly became masters of their craft. Prior to Diablo, if you found a sword in a game it would always be in the same chest with the same stats. Diablo inverted this design philosophy and made every item drop feel like a crapshoot. Is this fancy looking “rusty” helmet trash, or is it game changing? The first time I found a rare mace with fire damage I literally ran back to my room and yelled down the hall for Dave to see what I had found as if I had struck gold rather than simply an upgraded colour scheme and better numbers on a weapon.
This loot system was what made grinding through wave after wave of monsters addicting as hell. One more level of this dungeon, one more boss kill, just one more chance to find that sweet, sweet loot. It was addiction in digital form — Dota’s “just one more push” effect on steroids.
I’ll never forget the first time I met the Butcher. “Heyyyyyy fresh meat!” his gravelly voice yelled as I blundered into his murder den severely underleveled and ridiculously overconfident like only a university student can be. What ensued wasn’t a fight — it was public execution — my execution. He carved through my health bars quicker than I could mouse over my healing potions, warped me back to the main menu before I could process what happened. Lessons learned.
Diablo began to introduce me to what gaming today hates more than anything: losing. Modern gaming buzzwords love to push how fun you should be having at all times, but Diablo was okay with letting you walk into death as a form of learning. After getting crushed by him for the fourth time, I learned to suck it up, explore the rest of the map before fully powering up, and come back later when I wasn’t going to get killed instantly. Life lessons through gaming. Learn patience by Diablo educating you on how it feels to fail.
Soon everyone in our flat was sucked into Diablo’s carnage. Dave eventually bought his own copy after listening to me play for countless hours, and soon enough our flat was like hangout spot for anyone who owned Diablo. Friends would bring save files on floppy disks over to each others houses to show off loot, inquire about difficult boss battles, etc. We would order pizza, drink outrageous amounts of coffee and push through dungeon crawls that wouldn’t end until sunrise. My grades suffered dramatically. I stopped sleeping properly. But man did my barbarian have some sweet gear by that point.
Character “optimization” had become a sickness of its own once we stumbled across websites dedicated to “theorycraft”. Put too many points into strength over vitality? Your character was considered ruined — back to square one. Found a sweet axe but it required 10 more dexterity points? Guess you’ll have to grind through dungeons looking for gloves with dexterity bonuses to compensate. I filled notebooks after notebooks of equations, gear combinations and overall character theorycrafting. I took optimizing my barbarian seriously more than my actual Computer Science coursework. Don’t get me wrong, I was technically doing higher level math for fun all while complaining about how pointless my math courses were.
Enter Battle.Net. Multiplayer before Battle.Net either relied on local network play or shitty modem connections that worked about 50% of the time if you were lucky. Battle.Net streamlined playing with others greatly, and suddenly my lonely journey through the cathedral had become a very social experience. Groups of 4 would venture into the depths of the dungeon and fucking warp Tristram with warrior’s, rogues, and sorcerers running “about wildly” through the castle town — apparently that was how you greeted someone on the internet back then.
I genuinely felt camaraderie with some random dude named WizzeeKid236 who dropped me a set of magical armor because he found something he liked better. Playing Diablo was no longer just a game, it had become a community with its own informal rules and regulations.
Swapping items became serious business, complete with a code of honour. “Ninja Looting” (taking items nobody had the chance to look at what dropped) was punishable by having your entire character blocked by the offender. Newer players asking for help versus speedrunning through content caused cult-like followings over who played the game “correctly.” The item duping scandals that burnt many players accounts also happened during this time — There were actual forums threads debating duplicated Mythical Plates of the Whale turning into World of Trade Warcraft debates over who was right and who was wrong. Pixels with numbers on them didn’t mean anything — yet everyone cared just as much as the next guy.
Me and my friends built overnight Battle.Net groups with folks all over the world. I spent many nights grouping with this german wizard named Klaus who, due to time differences, caused me to log in at midnight and him at 1am. We never talked about anything more than game knowledge — what dungeon to grind out next, whose gear could use what items — but you formed a friendship through knowing you both could die at any given moment killingdemons together. I actually worried about Klaus when he stopped logging on for a week. Wouldn’t you know it, the guy went on vacation. Karma was good.
Diablo perfected pacing. From the cathedral all the way down to hell, each dungeon provided the perfect amount of gameplay to keep you interested without getting boring. Each new dungeon added new enemies that had different attack patterns and required you to think on your feet. Fantasy horror campfire stories depicted through rooms with bodies impaled on swords, strange books littered about with lore hints, and townsfolk whispering about the ancients.
Like everything else, Diablo had some faults. Inventory management was horrible, as better gear usually took up more slots on your character grid — your first introduction to a Tetris clusterfuck. Running was disabled, so backtracking took an obscene amount of time and seriousness that would make zen monks blush. Character classes felt incredibly similar and ended up looking the same after dozens of players leveled beyond maximum game difficulty. But these setbacks were trivial at best. Diablo’s addictive nature from it’s gameplay loop overrode any and all excuses not to play more. One more level, one more boss, just one more chance to get That Wizard Staff.
Diablo Hardcore Mode was a fine class learning how too get a little too attached. Yes, dying respawned your character at your cemetery throne room with all your gear you had equipped — but dying on hardcore killed your character off forever. Make one wrong move, get disconnected during a boss fight, get greedy at the wrong time and you wiped your character. Permanently. I gave hardcore mode a shot once and got to level 16 before falling victim to an unlucky group of Fallen Angels. I cried when my character died. Yeah, I legit cried. So embarrassed was I that I threw a pen at Dave’s cat and proceeded to get yelled at about animal cruelty and anger management. I’ve never played Diablo on hardcore since that day. Pains eternal, my friends.
My Diablo-story low point happened during Easter Break of 1998. While my more responsible friends either headed home for the holidays or went abroad, I decided to embark on my now legendary “Diablo Marathon Challenge”. I would play Diablo for 7 days straight in an attempt to max my character out to level 50. “Challenge” became sarcastic quotation marks pretty fast. I bought enough microwave meals to feed a small army, popped countless energy drinks, and told my flatmates I was working on “an important project”. By Day 3 my sleep deprivation had set in — I saw inventory menus hallucinate in front of my eyes when I blinked. I heard Dagon shrieks while showering. I somehow managed to hit level 47 before completely passing out for nearly two days. When I woke up I felt gross, embarrassed about what I had done. And like clockwork, the first thing I thought about when my eyes opened was optimizing my character for the last few levels.
When the Hellfire expansion released we were torn down the middle. Half our group was ecstatic about the new Monk class and added areas of Cathedral, while the others (Dave being one of them) felt like Hellfire ruined the tone Blizzard North had created so wonderfully in the original game. I was somewhere in the middle — I loved all the extra content, but did agree that certain aspects of the added dungeon felt jarring when compared to Diablo’s Gothic Horror theme. Hellfire breathed a lot of life into the game though, giving us tons of new content after we had memorized every inch of the original cathedral map.
Quotes from Diablo became inside jokes between gamers of a certain calibur. “Oh shit does this look familiar?” and asking someone if their Wizard’s Staff was “Godly” became our ways of identifying whether someone else liked Diablo as much as us. Sometimes during college lectures I could catch other players faces brighten up when someone said their code was “buggered” and they needed a “scroll of identify” to see what was going on. It was cheesy as hell but those small inside jokes made me feel included for once — something I’ve always found myself on the outskirts of growing up.
Diablo was more than just a great game, it spawned a legacy. The action-RPG genre that would come later, affectionately called “Diablo clones” have created some of the best game franchises in the industry. From Path of Exile, to Torchlight to Titan Quest and hundreds more had the foundation laid out by Blizzard North. Even Triple A titles like Borderlands and Destiny feature some sort of Diablo’esque loot system within their games. That freezing cold Tuesday night paved the pathway for me and countless others to explore countless hours of gutting dungeons for digital trophies.
Life goes on. College graduated. I had resumes to send in. My Diablo antics went from “your mom” warnings to normal, to casual in a matter of months. Starcraft released and caused a mini relapse into my sugar fueled antics but it wasn’t the same — I wasn’t as consumed with playing as I once used to. I had grown up… or maybe I had just burned out after hundreds of hours clicking on skeletons.
To this day I’ll reinstall Diablo every once in awhile for some old school dungeon crawling. Graphically it looks stupid old but damn does it have charm. Simple by today’s standards, yet Diablo still plays fantastically. What I’ll never forget about Diablo is atmosphere. That melancholy Tristram guitar still gives me chills. Hearing the Butcher yell “fresh meat!” sends tingles down my spine to this day.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
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