Stay a While and Listen, Remembering the Original Diablo

Over the next few weeks the blogosphere will be rife with all things Diablo III. It’s started already, though so far the only thing anyone seems able to talk about is error 37 or its hip new cousin error 3003. I understand the sentiment, when you fork over $60 bucks for a game as eagerly anticipated as this you want it to work the instant it’s available. This is precisely why I’ve decided to wait a few weeks before purchasing the game, well that and the fact that I’m broke. Even though most may disagree, having been a teenager when the original Diablo was released, there are worse problems than waiting a few more days for a title that’s been in the works for ten years. Stay a while and listen.

The original Diablo was released at the end of 1996, this was before blogs and YouTube endlessly hyped games from inception to release, hell most people didn’t even have the internet, it was still considered a fad. The only information a young gamer like me had to go on was a really crummy yet still incredibly exciting teaser trailer that claimed Lord Diablo was from Hades and a small CD-sized flyer, both included with copies of Warcraft II. Back then Blizzard wasn’t the international powerhouse it is today, sure the Warcraft series was successful, but they didn’t have the same Midas touch they have now. While some gamers may have been savvy enough to pick up the game the day it launched, I stumbled upon it a few weeks later at my local mall’s Babbages somewhere between buying a pair of JNCOs and the latest Tool CD.

Diablo was the first Blizzard game that allowed players to interact with other players on the internet via Battle.Net (or what would eventually be called Battle.Net). You could play Warcraft on a LAN or use a direct modem-to-modem connection (Mom, don’t pick up the phone I’m playing a game!), but signing on to this internet thing was an entirely new concept. Without a real ISP, playing online meant having to fish a free trial of American Online out of the mail (or the garbage). Friends with both Diablo and a real internet connection found themselves hosting gangs of kids after school or on weekends to catch a glimpse of this thing none of us quite understood. Like Skynet, it didn’t take us long to become self-aware. “Wait you mean that guy right there is another person playing? Can you kill him?” We logged in one afternoon at 1:00pm, by 1:15 we’d claimed our first victim. Trolling was born and gaming, for me at least, would never be the same.

50 hours?! This is Diablo, i’m going to need about 6 more. 

Exploring this radically new concept even more, we picked a game at random from a list of what looked like a few dozen games and spawned into Tristram. Two players were trading items by throwing them on the ground; I walked over, picked them up, and then promptly left the game. I felt like a master thief, while in reality I was nothing more than a master dick. This boring and unimaginative trolling might seem common place or rudimentary by today’s standards, but as the idea of digitally messing with someone else a few thousand miles away was brand new and given the fact that I was only 14, I really couldn’t help myself.

Sign up for what? The Inter-what? Is this some sort of scam?

What about the game itself? At the time it seemed like the best game ever. My friends and I talked about it over the phone, came up with strategies, and planned our digital raids at school in between dissecting frogs and being mean to girls. Looking back however, the game is full of some really silly design choices, some of which would never be repeated today.

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10 Comments

  1. I fondly remember my days in the original Diablo. Like you, I bought it on a whim after seeing it mentioned in my other Blizzard games. And I was not disappointed. I spent hours playing on my own, and when I discovered the wonders of the multiplayer, all was lost.

    The worst part for me (or the people I played with I suppose) was that as a young kid playing, my character seemed to have split personality disorder. On some days, I’d create games doing nothing but running noobs all the way through to Hell, giving them duped items for free just cause I felt that awesome. On other days, I was a menace who would snatch loot from people, player kill, and just generally be a dick. Ah, those were the days.

  2. D3 just like DukeForever cannot and will not live up to the expectations (just to be clear – D3 seem to good game while DukeF was crap from a-z).

    Still Diablo with Hell patch is very very playable and offers many new challenges and fixes.

  3. I only started playing Diablo II for about a year before LOD came out, then I jumped on that. Ah I remember those days, they were fun. I too am waiting to buy and play part III and like you am waiting until all the bugs and glitches get corrected. Cant wait!

    Anyways good read, kudos to the author.

  4. One slight factual correction: although you could develop your characters to learn the skills of the other classes (ie. strength for a mage, magic for a warrior), the caps on those abilities varied with classes – eg. warriors maxed out magic at 50, rogues a bit higher, and wizards the highest (about 250 I think?). So really, while developing other skills could be useful, especially for things like teaching your warrior to cast Town Portal, by the end of the game you could only be powerful enough in your main abilities to survive.

  5. I remember playing Diabolo, it was pretty awesome, but I didn’t have internet back then.

    The other thing is, you used to buy a game and then you were able to play it, whenever you liked. Now I cannot play whenever I like to. I didn’t buy Diablo III and only have MW3, but it has the same problem. The same problem as all new games I guess. The internet is down or something in the universe isn’t right and you cannot play due to some stupid reasen/error. Why should I bother paying for something that I then do not really own. That’s why I don’t play so many games anymore. Don’t have the time either.

  6. Still in play these days…3 characters all around 25+ lvl right now =) D2 too boring for me after normal difficulty…D3 “server w8/problems” just annoying…i see this problem in beta so i cancel my pre-order few days before release–good call i guess =)

  7. Diablo I… I still remember fondly my silly adventures. I was a warrior and as all normal sane persons, I clicked on every shrine I could find. Unfortunately one of them took some of your magic points (maybe it gave you strenght?) permanently.

    After a while I opened a door *lag spike* and I was dead on the floor, 10 acid spitting dogs still shooting at my perished corpse. I ventured back to my corpse only to realize that I had a total of 3 maximum mana as naked person. And that precious telekinesis skill cost a lot more. And I couldn’t just walk to my corpse and take the items since the acid dogs disagreed with that strategy.

    So.. I went back to level one and started killing lowly skeletons with my bare fists in hope to get random +magic item to get my maximum mana up. After an hour or so I finally did it and was able to telekinesize my items from a safe spot.

  8. I first found out about Diablo when a co-worker showed it to me at work. It looked interesting, but clunky. I finally picked up a copy when it went on sale, and that was it. I killed Diablo with all 3 character classes. It was truly amazing that the game had the replay value to do that, especially for me, when I wasn’t a big fan of RPG games. But it was good, and the random dungeons were really cool.

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