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Comment by Humdeee | Hacker News Reader

Fond memories of this as a kid. I remember after playing it for a while with friends and coming across BoBaFett's trainer and DooM-Gaze's (sic?) trainer enabling god-mode, fast spellcast, maxed stats, Godly Plate of the Whale armor, King's Sword of Haste, dropping elixirs all over town around Deckard Cain, etc. I was legitimately scared at my age to step into the cracks of hell to go after Diablo when they opened behind Pepin's hut. And the Butcher... kept all the lights on for that quest...

As a 10 year old, it was the first "adult" game I played (alongside Leisure Suit Larry). Dropping the turn based style and keeping classes more simplistic was an excellent decision. It's what introduced me to the online world via battle.net and PKing (player killing) was a joy in itself. Clans, online friends, and memories all shortly followed. Loved reading this.

Diablo 1: still better than the 3rd.

Source: overbearing nostalgia

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There was a far more advanced cheat(a gamehack patch) called Soulburner's Editor that allowed to spawn items/monsters, teleport to any level and spy on other players with ghost mode(which allowed to join games unannounced) and various other hacks. It was my early inspiration to programming:you could convert earlier (e.g. 1.07/1.08)hacks(which don't work in new version) by searching for the offset where the code content was identical in hex editor(usually new patch just changed the offset) and trying if they work again or crash the game. That way you can make old hacks compatible with newer versions, but the code was still a mysterious string of hexadecimal digits that didn't make sense(outside of ascii content which looked like text in hex editor). Then i found out you can disassemble the strings and the entire game was a huge megabyte long assembler dump(which i had no idea what to search at first). There was a windows debugger called SoftICE which i got reccomended and i've started to tinker with it, it was extremely boring and tiresome pausing and single-stepping through thousands of lines of assemblers and if you modified anything wrong the game promptly crashed. Still it was a fascinating look into the "Diablo hacking scene" despite having near zero skills i managed to get a general idea how the "gamehacks" worked: they overwrote memory without touching critical code and the hex strings functionality was often very simple, its disabled jumps or set bytes to specific values. Some of them were small assembler programs which added new functions(like Soulburner's editor) but the mystery of how it was created in the first place was beyond me(the only clue was it hooking into diablo console to add its own console commands). It was obvious it wasn't incrementally added(like simple godmode cheats it was distributed with), it was tested and programmed separately. However i quickly got bored with it and diablo as a game itself, exploring everything it offered and even looking at beta content with MPQ editor and diablo-specific utilities. It was also extremely discouraging when many people enjoyed crashing games with various hacks and competed on who didn't get crashed(by using various anti-crash patches). The game turned into some online crashfest and real players migrated into password protected games and single-player.

I had pretty much the exact same experience and it seems we're about the same age. It was my first exposure to online gaming and I remember being so amazed that you could play a game like that over the internet with total strangers!

Cheating was a big downside to playing on battle.net though, in my experience. It got so bad that you would enter a game and another player would either crash the game (by dropping a modified ear IIRC) or everyone would be playing with god-mode on. And creating an open, "legit" game only enticed cheaters to join in order to kill everyone. Oh well. My friends and I had plenty of fun playing over IPX and later LAN, or having password protected games on battle.net with people I met in the chat rooms.

I was surprised to find that only a handful of years ago people were still playing on battle.net. Not a lot, but enough to join a couple games and have some fun. Didn't see any cheating, either.

The rush of cheating wore off pretty quickly. I think everyone went through their 'ear collection' phase, but it was rather beating Diablo on Hell difficulty as the real accomplishment. I always found the Lazarus quest to be harder though.

I remember first discovering online mode. Clicking Multiplayer and seeing some sort of "you must be connected to the internet" type message. I started up the dial up connection and tried again and then the world opened up to me.

As much time as I spent on D1 and enjoying myself, it paled in comparison as the gateway drug to SC:BW for me.

"Ah, fresh meat!"

I still recall opening a door in the game (with hints of something odd about the tiles behind it) and hearing that come out of the speakers to this day.

I could of sworn that the audio for the Butcher's voice was levels higher than the rest of anything else in the game. Madly clicking in retreat as some fat, greasy demon sprinted after you is a staple to every young player.

Further, unless you did a full install, that audio clip had to load off of the CD. Which meant if your CD-ROM was slow to spin up, often you'd be dead on the floor as that audio clip played, after a brief freeze.

I was in high school when Diablo came out and it was epic. Me and several of my friends played many late night sessions for months. We were exhausted at school, but we had a blast and I wouldn't trade those nights for anything - so much fun.

Moo. I said moo.

"Look I'm just a cow OK?"

I believe that was from Hellfire, right? Was it the character that you could give a moose suit to?

yep :)

Well, I know what I'm doing once I get home tonight. I actually found my CDs for both D1 and Hellfire last weekend.

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