Diablo oh the good old times, I still remember the first copy I got. I opened the box and looked through the manual and what else the small treasure contained. Diablo was one of my first original games of many to come, but back then I didn’t have a lot of money and I had to save for some time, even had to scavenge some bottles I could turn in for cash (you got to love bottle deposit) and do chores at home.
“So, stay a while and listen!” – quote: Deckard Cain
I installed the game and tried it for a few minutes, and I fell in love with the gameplay. I still remember the days after getting the game, my cousin came by for the weekend LAN party which is rare cause he lives far, far away and it is like 1-2 times a year we saw each other. But this time he had his computer with him and he also got his copy of Diablo, and we knew that playing over the network was possible. Game on.
Back then we didn’t have any money to buy network cards or cables, we barely scraped enough money to buy a printer cable, and we used that as our connection between our computer LPT1 (Logical parallel port) connections and we spent at least 3-4 hours to get it to work, back then the internet was expensive and only people with a lot of money had it, good old 28.8k modem and you have to use the one phone line in your house to get on the internet.
Well, we had our network. It was a tradition that the first 3-4 hours were spent getting it to work. Well, we got the network to work. We put some frozen pizza in the oven, and we got the cheap cola, we were ready to have fun. Booted up Diablo, and made our character, I made a Warrior and my cousin made a Wizard. We went into the cathedral and started killing mobs. It went fine and we got to levels 3, 4, 5, and 6. And it took a very long time. The reason for this was every time our inventory was full, we walked up through the levels, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then went to sell and walked back to where we came from.
Either it was because we were unlucky to get the right scroll to drop, or because we didn’t get any town portal scrolls or books witch my cousin could learn. But when we finally got a scroll of town portal we didn’t know what it was, it was not before we came to level 7 we accidentally used the scroll and a blue thing popped up, we could click on it and we did, we got a loading screen and pop we were back in town and we were like DOOH!!!! Gratz for common sense. If we just had read the name of the scroll. But back then we were still new in the gaming community, okay we did play “Secret Agent” or at least I did, getting games was not easy for a person who didn’t have internet and VERY few friends who had a computer, the only person I knew of having a computer was my uncle and he had some friends he got his games from.
Well back to Diablo, after figuring out what scrolls are for we started using them more, and at this time the weekend was over and my cousin had to go home. But just the feeling of all the work you had to go through just to play a game over a network (in our case printer cables) is telling be how far we have come in the computer world.
Already back then I wrote stuff down, notes, and tips to get certain items and was trying to make a website in plain HTML files. I liked the idea of making websites, even if they would never see the day of light online, but I did teach myself HTML cause I wanted to make a readable document, where you could always go back to when you were looking for a special item.
Also, quest text and pictures, I barely had any knowledge of drawing programs back then, so I used Microsoft Paint which was on my computer, which was all I knew. That process is another part of my computer life, maybe I will write about that also at some point, but for now, I just wanted to share my history of Diablo with you all.
At this time I attended boarding school and I was not allowed to have my computer with me, but when the exams started late that year, I got permission from my parents to get my computer to the school and use it to write my papers on, cause my handwriting is not very easy to understand, and I barely understand it myself sometimes. But after the exams I got to keep the computer at the school, all it had to do was to stay in the school’s computer room (we were not allowed to have computers in our rooms) But we did play some Diablo over the network but this time I did had a network card that uses 10BASE-T with BNC connectors and we connected up to 4 computers at a time and we played Diablo together.
After boarding school I had no clue what I wanted to do so I started a youth center where you could attend different workshops, like woodworking, metal, gardening, cooking or tailoring. I attended metal cause then I also could attend their sport program like climbing, swimming and bike riding. After a few months there I figured out that this kind of school were all over the country and I had showed them at my youth center that I knew about computers, cause I helped them often with their problems J it was a whole other world back then, and a lot easier to fix things. Well One day I they called me to a meeting cause they wanted to get me moving on with my life, so they helped me figuring out what I want and they have already an eye out for another youth school that had computer workshops that could help me on my way and one day we went there to visit the center and I got the tour of the facility and saw this was the right way for me. So a few months later I started at the next team, and I the next 3 months I got my PC license there.
During this time in the breaks and after school we had our computer connected to their network and we played Diablo-like crazy, I remember one person who just started playing Diablo and he was kind of daredevil and he went into catacombs that were above his level or difficulty and I had to go get him many times with my high-level warrior, cause back then if you died you would lose all your items and gold, cause they dropped on the ground and everyone could pick it up, along with the person’s ear so yes you guessed it, I had a lot of ears of this person, and we had a lot of fun with it. And if the network crashed while one person was dead, you had to pray to god that the person who made the game still was in the game until they could come back and pick up their items, or else they would be gone forever. And yes that did happen twice with this person, so we had to boost him so he could get either a lot of gold or items because usually the vendor in town had good items.
And now the word came out that an expansion for Diablo would hit the street Diablo: Hellfire and of course, I bought that also original cause I had a lot of time in Diablo so I knew it was worth spending money on that game, I got to be selective with what games I bought back then. And Blizzard games never go wrong. But as stupid as I was I threw away the big box and kept the jewel case of the game, which I still have this day today. I have then since bought a big boxed version of the game again, I am still looking for Diablo: Hellfire as a big box but I have confidence that I will find it at some point, to complete the collection.
So Diablo was my first action roleplaying game, and it was a whole new world for me cause back then I was more into first-person shooter (FPS) and strategy games (RTS). I have a lot of good memories with that game and when I get more time I will write some of them down for you to read.
I did find some of the old documents I made back then with tips and tricks, quests, and items. And I do plan to make my unofficial guide for the game, and I will post it on this site when it is finished.