weebdeluxe

When you’re a teen and video games are your biggest hobby, money is an issue. You have very little of it, but a lot of time. Which back in the 90s meant that you played a lot of the same games over and over again. If you were lucky enough to be into PC gaming as well, you could at least check out many titles easily by trying their demos. You found them on CDs that came with the videogame magazines you bought because they also came with at least one full version of a game you never heard of. Those were the ways of the pre-internet days.

One game I tried this way was Diablo. It had the distinction of running really well on my Pentium PC with 166mhz, which was the bane and base of my early PC gaming experience. I played the game a lot. I understood it very little. I had to be a young teen back then and RPGs were still a very foreign concept to me. I grew up with an NES and only dabbled a bit in Amiga games. But the mood of the Action RPG title was great. It felt like playing something forbidden. So I played, never getting any good at the demo. Basically cheesed my way forward by using the health fill up of level ups. That’s how little I understood about the game. What are those red potions for anyway?

Back then, if I wanted a new game that had zero chances of landing on one of those magazine disks, I had to get a used copy. In Luxembourg, getting games in the 90’s wasn’t always an easy task. But in a bordertown to Belgium (borders are never far away in Luxembourg, but this one sat almost right on top of it) there was a flea market. It was organized once per month and it was focused on PCs. Hardware and software was sold back there. I remember it vividly. Huge stacks of old computers, disk drives and the like. Bigbox PC games shown off proudly. A lot of it was FPS-fare of the day: Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Since most of these games were forbidden, censored or hard to get in Germany, Belgian and French sellers took the opportunity of selling these games in Luxembourg to potential German customers.

That’s where I got my copy of Diablo. It cost 800LUF, which roughly translates to 20€. It came in a simple jewelcase, just the back having the original inlay with some text and a couple of screenshots. No box or manual, but it had an ugly sticker with the name of the original owner on the disk. So you could say my copy is unique. Looking back, that was probably the reason why the asking price was so low. Diablo 2 hadn’t been out yet, so the game wasn’t that old yet. I got it right away, without thinking twice.

I never managed to get past the first five levels of the main dungeon. I learned a bit more about it’s mechanics, but I guess it was too complex for me and by the time my brain had developed enough to grasp what an RPG even is, I had already moved on to Diablo 2.

No, it took me until the GOG version launched to actually play through the original. I was impressed, the mood is very 90s PC gaming and the game holds up. For the most part. Not too happy with the controls and the way combat is even handled, but it was a worthwhile experience none the less.

This year I had decided to do a retrogaming month. I baptized it “Retromay”, because I’m that kind of creative person. Since the GOG version initially launched, the Hellfire expansion was added to it. I have a weird fascination for that expansion. Back when it released, I didn’t have enough money to get it, instead buying some weird 3rd party addon disk for 10DM over in Germany that I could not get to run at all. And that was that for me and Diablo back then. But now? Now I could finally go and play it. Even try out that new class I always wanted to try.

I found out very quickly that the game does not play nice with Linux Mint. All I got was a black screen with soundeffects. It reminded me of the old DOS games, where you had to fiddle so much to get stuff up and running. Thankfully, fans had already taken care of things and with the aid of GOG and the DevilutionX mod, I was able to get the game to run via the Heroic Game Launcher.

The Monk class is very interesting. I went barefisted and looked up how to spend my points. It was tough at times. Diablo can be very unforgiving if you don’t want to cheese your way through it. Doors are your friends, funneling the enemies one by one through them sometimes your only way of surviving. But the game grabbed me completely for fours days until I had finished the main dungeon and the side dungeon.

Would I have enjoyed the addon back as a teen? Maybe. I was too young and stupid to really understand Diablo. Even my time with Diablo 2 was defined by me not playing through it for years, restarting it over and over again. And this would have been no different. But there’s a benefit to growing older. You learn to appreciate old things.