Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game | Hacker News Reader

Diablo devolved – magic behind the 1996 computer game

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656 pointscyberfart274 comments

I'm old enough to remember that when Diablo came out, it seemed to be running too fast. This was before 3D video cards were mainstream (which happened with the Voodoo and Quake in 1997 maybe?).

I was working a lot with blitters at that point and running into speed issues on the Mac because Apple liked to release machines with half-width busses, which cut memory throughput by almost half. I'd be lucky to get 60 fps on a fullscreen 640x480 blit in 256 colors on a 68k Mac, but PCs seemed to do it trivially, and also do more with masking and color mapping at nearly the same speed.

Even PowerPC Macs ran between 2-10 times slower than their Pentium counterparts on tons of games. For example, Descent ran at 10 fps or whatever and was barely playable on a PPC 601, but ran great on a 100 MHz Pentium. Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side.

This is all from memory so take it with a grain of salt. But I'm mildly curious what kind of approaches went into their blitting, and if they used things like palette animation (which wasn't available on the Mac because Apple put a blocking call on the palette change, which synced it to the refresh rate, although I never tried it from another thread because I don't think it was thread-safe).

I remember trying very hard to play Descent on a 33 MHz 486 DX. It did not go well for me!

I was so upset when I found out I had. 486SX and not a DX. The math co-processor was required! I had to upgrade my CPU with one of those “evergreens”.

IIRC we gamed it in multiplayer on 25 MHz PCs

Did you ever play that pre-alpha source port of Quake on Mac that was just roughly compiled from the DOS source? Got like 12 fps at best on 320x200 on a PowerPC 603e 120mhz... When you fired a rocket the framerate would slow down by like 50% :'D

As a followup for whoever is interested, this unofficial port was usually called "HackQuake" and was compiled from source code that was apparently stolen from the web server of the developer "Crack dot Com". Unsurprisingly, it was not very well-optimized at all. It was leaked online far far before MacSoft's official Quake port was released (I want to say approaching a year?), so it was the only version of Quake that Mac gamers had for quite some time. I don't know much more than that about its history, though!

BTW, the solution to the rocket/grenade lag was to replace your rocket or grenade .mdl file with one that had no particles (it was particle rendering in particular that caused major slowdown).

Some obscure 90's Mac gaming history for you! ;)

I had totally forgotten about Descent, thank you for the reminder. That game seriously scared me as a 13 yo boy at the time. I loved it.

Check out Overload on steam dude. Made by the same peeps.

Overload is a pitch perfect modern Descent sequel. If you liked Descent, you'll love it.

Downloading now, thanks for the tip. Man, I feel old.

Additional check out: Sublevel Zero, a Descent game with roguelike mechanics.

I get a little sick to my stomach just hearing the word "Descent."

I still have Descent dreams. If they’re good it’s just an exciting time, but if it’s an anxiety dream then it’s the equivalent of “the brakes on my car don’t work” anxiety dreams in 3D. I may have played those games a biiiit too much.

Oddly enough, Descent was the one 3D game which didn't make me suffer from motion sickness.

I still hear the Marathon rocket launcher from time to time (rare now) and that alien cackle was so great.

What a fantastic bunch of games those were, right? We eventually had such a blast playing Descent: Freespace at LAN's.. great game.. anyway.. the Descent devs are at it again!

https://playoverload.com/

Ah wingnut, I miss those times of plunging through the caves with you :-)

Played lots of Descent over kali, fun times.

I haven't thought/ heard the name Kali for decades... Did anyone ever actually purchase kali?

I did. I remember thinking that based on my license serial number (which seemed to be sequential), Jay Cotton was making a lot of money.

Here’s a 2-part interview with the creators:

https://episodiccontentmag.com/2016/08/26/kali1/

https://episodiccontentmag.com/2016/09/02/lan-trickery-an-in...

Interesting! I feel like an asshole teenager in retrospect. I pirated it :(

The entire genre of flight and space-sims has almost entirely gone away and to me its such a tremendous shame- with today's multi-monitor setups and wide screens they would be such a better experience. X-wing, descent, flight simulator, were all so much fun. I still have my MS sidewinder collecting dust in a closet- which may be part of the problem- these games really needed a decent flight stick to enjoy, and that's a big barrier to entry.

I wouldn't say that. Elite: Dangerous is the current big space-sim, and hotter than ever. Everyone is looking forward to Star Citizen, although it's even odds to me if it ever sees a full release...

Oh God, Privateer. That was another 10,000 hours of my childhood.

In addition to stuff like Elite: Dangerous and the X series of games, House of the Dying Sun came out in 2016 and is rad.

The descent guys recently did a kickstarter for a new game: Overload. It just came out on Steam. I haven’t checked it out yet to see if it’s any good.

It's Descent through and through. It's great.

To this day I have to ‘invert’ my y-axis when I play for any sort of 1st person perspective game.

Same here! IIRC for me it's due to Duke Nukem 3D's default settings. (Annoying when games "forget" to respect this option, e.g. Crysis 3 in the VTOL flying segment.)

Me too, and this has a knock on effect as my six year old son likes to play some of my games and I don't reset the controls for him!

Huh?

DCS, X-plane, Kerbal Space Program (especially with Ferram Aerospace) , Elite:Dangerous , IL-2.

This off the top of my head. There's many more.

The only one out of that list that comes close to the style and gameplay of Descent or Wing Commander or TIE Fighter is Elite: Dangerous.

I feel you are actually supporting my point with your post. This is a handful of games released over a number of years. Space sims used to be its own genre with AAA titles. There would be hype, people would be excited for months about a release.

Its just not the same- yes space/flight sims still exist, as do puzzle/adventure games, but they are small niches now when they used to be very popular.

Don't forget about Freespace!

Still fun to play!

Well perhaps they will come back in VR form?

Also, I know it's not exactly the same but at least there are awesome driving games.

Strike Suit Zero is a good modern indie space flight sim. But you're right, it's been a long time since we've had regular releases of games like Wing Commander and TIE Fighter.

That game seriously scared me as a 13 yo boy at the time. I loved it

I remember playing for hours then standing up and immediately falling over and having to just lie on the floor for a few minutes...

They just published a remake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overload_(video_game)

This is not a remake, it's a 'spiritual successor' due to the devs not owning the IP rights.

It feels just like descent...

I call a potato a potato. (In my opinion,) it's a remake. :-)

Descent gave me vertigo. I found it completely disorienting. It was awesome, and the only game to do that outside of VR.

What was sad was that the same games ran better on my DX2/66 Dos Compatibility card with 32MB of on board RAM on my 6100/60 (with 16MB of RAM) than they did natively on the Mac.

That's because developers didn't care about Macs, they were and remain to have a tiny market share.

The performance issues were mostly Apple's fault. The 6100/60 had a half speed bus compared to the full speed bus on most PCs. The early versions of MacOS for the PPC were partially still emulated.

The FutureCop devs did :-) “I... Don’t Believe it!” Went the sound clip as a window popped up telling Mac Users to contact the studio and tell them that they were playing on a Mac since the Mac version was apparently a labor of love for the engineers. <3

Yep, in Portugal there was just one official importer Interlog with shops in Lisbon and Porto, with prices that would send anyone to by an Atari ST or Amiga instead.

> Even Duke Nukem 3D ran full speed on a 100 MHz 486dx4. That could not have all simply been due to a lack of optimization on the Mac side.

Curious. I remember playing Marathon 2 on a 75MHz 603e and it seemed fine. What counts as “full speed”? I think Marathon was frame limited to 30 fps or close to that, from experimenting with semi-transparency based on fast-moving platforms…

Doom II on a 386 at 40 MHz was running fine.

That’s irrelevant, isn’t it? I’m gave an example of a game comparable to the one I quoted, which did manage to run fine on Mac hardware of that era, presumably because Bungie was really Mac focused at that time so it was optimised for the hardware properly.

Doom 2 only ran fine on a 386 if you made the window the size of a postage stamp!

Depends on the 386. I had a 386sx-16 4MB of RAM and a SoundBlaster, and it worked WITH sound... in a postage stamp at low resolution.

However a friends AMD 386DX-40 ran it fine, well 'fine' until I saw it on a Pentium 60.

I believe the PC version used palette switching for a lava effect, but not for scrolling (it used Direct X). Never got to see the Mac version of the game.

I wrote a bot for Diablo 1 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/projectsolo/). Due to the way the game uses older Windows modes for the palette, the colors never come out right in screen captures and also get messed up if you alt-tab. IIRC I had to use an API call dating back to Win16 to get the raw bytes, and I used artificial color for the visualizations rather than figure out how to obtain the actual palette.

IIRC, it was the 680x0's that so often had the crippled memory bus.

The slowness on the PowerPC probably had more to do with the CPU power. PowerMacs struggled to be competitive with Pentiums for integer computation, and often the PowerPC Macs were not clocked competitively against their PC brethren.

You referenced a 601... The PowerPC 601 based machines still had NuBus, which was slow compared to VLB & PCI.

All the early PowerPC had a variety of disadvantages slowing them down: 680x0 emulation blowing the processor cache at times (particularly the 603), built in graphics were generally pathetic (and often used RAM as VRAM, undermining the value of the fast memory bus for gaming... but if you installed your own card with dedicated memory that problem vanished), and a the graphics card market was skewed for desktop publishing making it very costly to get good gaming performance.

Of course Apple abused benchmark stats to make it all seem much faster than it was, but the memory bus was derived from the Motorola 88100 bus, and consequently was pretty decent (and if you think about it, the afore mentioned 486dx4 actually had a memory bus that was running about a third of CPU speed...).

Radius graphics cards used to have fantastic blit performance.

Some PowerPC Macs were particularly crippled, such as the x200 series, using a 64-bit PPC CPU on 32-bit data bus, and memory running as low as 1/2 to 1/3 CPU speed. Because of the horrible design, heavy network traffic would critically slow the machine. See more info here: http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-a...

The 603 in the x200's was a 32-bit CPU, and it explicitly supported 32-bit memory bus interfaces. That was part of how it kept costs down. In short, not a bug, but a feature (and there was support for interleaving to get you some of the benefits of a 64-bit bus). As per the link, the clock speed of the CPU was 90-120MHz. No PC was using 90-120MHz memory. They were all dropping to 1/2 & 1/3 (including Pentiums you are comparing against).

I think there is some confusion on the part of the author of that LEM post. The processor was indeed 32-bit but the data path was 64-bit. /shrug

On that note, I finally found the link I was originally looking for - a later post which goes into way more detail as to the flaws of these systems. I can vouch for the unbelievable slowness of these machines as I used one for years. haha :(

"Performa and Power Mac x200 Issues" http://lowendmac.com/1997/performa-and-power-mac-x200-issues...

The data path was 64-bit, but it was designed to support being married up to a 32-bit bus. That was part of how they were a more appealing choice than a 604 processor.

...and to be clear, the x200's really had a performance problem for games because of the crummy graphics chip and wimpy 1MB of VRAM.

I remember going on vacation with my parents and all I had was the Diablo game manual, because I got the game 1 hour before we left. I read the manual about 100 times in the car... good memories

Same thing happened to me with Diablo 2. It came out while my family was visiting my aunt on the other side of the country. My parents bought it for me, but my aunt and uncle didn't have a computer that could play it, so I spent the week looking through the manual.

I had the inverse with carmageddon. I used to study abroad so I waited till I was on vacation to get the uncensored edition, then carried the box all the way home. The manual wasn’t as tick nor as useful as caesar iii’s tho.

Holy crap I forgot about that game

But wait, it gets better: it's on GOG now.

And there’s a not great but decemt enough remake on steam

And the original is in iOS (and Android I guess) as well.

I remember trying to play Diablo multiplayer through a 55.6 kbps modem. It was nice for like 5 minutes but then the connection lagged and I couldn't control my character. When the connection quality improved, I saw my character dead with all his (high level and very diffucult to find) gear stolen by other players.

I was so frustrated I removed the cdrom from the drive and threw it on the wall; the cd broke and that was the last time I played Diablo...

There's a very real possibility it wasn't your connection that was the problem. Since Diablo 1 was a peer to peer game it was super easy to just flood another player to lag them out and steal their crap.

The game's public multiplayer was notoriously full of griefing like that. There were also ways to get firewalls to go on the spawn point and pvp was easy to force.

It was a mess. Going into a public game was basically just asking to get screwed over.

What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!]

edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars

good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A

And who and what is that?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Which programmer/game was that? Mike O'Brien on Guild Wars? (Just going through credits on mobygames ;))

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Ah! OK, I saw his name too and figured that was also potentially the person. Oh, he was a founder of ArenaNet?!! Very cool! I met a lot of their staff last year at PAX. Great group of ppl IMO and those I spoke to were proud to work there. I guess Pat would be one of the founders they spoke of! :)

What mmo? Or what was his name?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Who was it?

Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars

Oh yeah, I remember being really impressed by the Guild Wars/ArenaNet tech at launch. It felt like a game changer.

Heck, they did a better job than most games do to this day. Often when a game has the ability to start before completing the download, it just means you get to look at the main menu.

Weird, my impression was that the Guild Wars people were ex-Microsoft. Do wonder where i picked that up...

I emailed him a few times about the reverse-engineering effort for the old Battle.Net games (PVPGN)

He's a really nice, approachable guy as well. He was quite impressed at how well the program worked, even with how old the games were

I love the part where he talks about people thinking the installer was broken or didn't download fully because it was so small. They ended up padding it with some assets to make it feel more authentic.

It also really helped a lot of folks in the game development community when Carmack published his thoughts on dealing with latency in QuakeWorld around that time, and the Valve guys working with the Quake3(?) engine published something a bit later that pretty good IIRC.

You could make yourself invulnerable in multiplayer games using Great-BoBaFeTT's trainer.

http://www.geocities.ws/free_bobafett/main.htm

Obligatory genius video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1faaOrtHJ-A

Great talk!

Sometimes, you can still use a broken cd.

I wouldn't risk it anymore. One time I received an ever so slightly cracked DVD from Netflix. Desperate to watch the show without waiting for a better copy to be mailed, I stuck it in the computer anyways. Ended up shattering and taking my DVD drive with it!

That's one way to get a free DVD drive from Netflix.

Or just go buy it for $10.

Grabbed an external HDDVD drive for the $10 actually. Even came with a handful of movies at that price!

Ironically (in context of this thread) the one time I've had this happen was my Diablo II CD way back in the day, I don't know if it was damaged or if the disk just got stressed from heat but it shattered and ruined the drive in my mother's computer.

I have no love for optical media anymore.

I don't know about OG diablo but you might be able to register your cd key on Blizzard's site and play the game through their on-line launcher.

I know this works (or worked) with Warcraft 3.

OG Diablo didn't even have a cd-key, unfortunately.

The cd was completely broken in 4-5 pieces. Actally I was impressed of how badly it was damaged because I had thrown other CDs down and they didn't even get a scratch (they were mainly cd-r though)!

I used up all the spins on a Lord of Destruction CD years ago too. Had a hard time convincing my computer retailer that the cause of death was natural causes. I still have the largest shard tucked away somewhere - the rest was dust.

I played Diablo II on a 55.6 kbps modem. Worked fine.

Diablo II specifically includes design elements to be playable via 56k dialup.

1) Latency hiding. The results of actions are determined ahead of time. The hit chance and damage value for melee swings and missile shots (arrows, spell effects) are calculated when you start a weapon swing or bow fire or spellcasting action. The duration of the action hides the network lag; by the time your sword finishes swinging, the packet describing the results has arrived.

2) Low bandwidth. The client does a lot of autonomous prediction and extrapolation. The server typically sends updates of monster positions at intervals of several seconds, rather than every frame. This can create situations where your attacks seem to automatically miss because the monster you think you're attacking isn't where your client thinks it is. But better to have that "lag haze" than to not be playable at all for lack of bandwidth.

This was all implemented for Diablo II after learning from the first Diablo.

Yeah, I played on a 28.8 modem. What he's describing is probably the result of someone using a "trainer"/cheat software that would essentially packet-flood the other player(s) so you can kill them and take all their stuff while they cannot respond/escape. Happened all the time once those hacks became prevalent, kinda ruined the [public multiplayer aspect of the] game IMO :(

haha! I remember borrowing my friend's WarCraft 2 manual before I could play the game (wasn't yet out for Mac), and imagining the epic gameplay. Back in the days when games actually came with a manual and often included tons of awesome artwork you wouldn't see elsewhere. :) Actually reminds me I scanned some of the artwork and printed them out so I could color them -- still have a couple of those!

For me it was the Starcraft game manual. I took that thing everywhere!

Same. I took the manual to school for weeks so my friends and I could look at all the crazy Metzen illustrations.

Those illustrations and stories where the reason I bought SC.. Event though wc2 was just a polished dune clone

Same here! I was OBSESSED with that game as a kid and took the manual with me to school every day for a couple of weeks. Developing custom maps actually got me into programming (setting up triggers, building maps, etc). I remember trying to storyboard my custom "campaign" during recess, and even went so far as recording voice prompts. So many memories!

I still have the tech tree from Civ 2 saved in my bookshelf, along with the Caesar III manual...

I did something similar with the Starcraft manual...the art work alone was awesome.

Civ 2 for me

Game manuals are a lost art :(

I sometimes pick up copies of old games I never owned but always wanted (or played at friends' houses, etc.) -- just so I can have the physical media with the awesome manual full of artwork and so on. They are becoming harder and harder to find!

I fondly remember the Ultima VI manual, complete with cloth map. Those were the days :)

Ultima IV for me.... Good times

Ultima Underworld 2. I can still remember the joy of reaching a high enough level to kill one terrible beast after having to load goodness knows how many saved games after the bastard had killed me yet again.

The first Diablo manual had great background stories and mythology. When I watched Constantine for the first time, I realize it had the same setting as Diablo!

They reuse some religious themes etc, but other than that they are not related what so ever...

I mean the whole idea of heaven and hell fighting for power and that they are not supposed to have any physical influence, but the demons of hell sneak in anyways, not just by mental influence but physically as well. That's how the Diablo 1 story begins, with the corruption of the Archbishop (I remember way too much lol).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Heaven

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim

I think this is why it was so epic.

As a kid evil is the worst thing ever. No 'bad guy' quite compared...

Until Diablo

For me it was the Bard's Tale. A demo of Skara brae and a couple of levels of the first dungeon was put on a magazine cover in the UK months before the game came out.

I played that demo to oblivion, I can still pretty much remember all the street layouts

The Bard's Tale - I had that for my Commodore 64 back in the day. Absolutely loved that game. I'm pretty sure I would mourn the loss when members of my party died.

Someone at G3 had the music from the Inn as their ring tone (go figure) and when their phone rang I was instantly back in the game even though I hadn't played in over a decade by then.

"Name the endless byway"

Absolutely the same addiction here. Even the identical looking houses (at least on the CPC464) I'm pretty sure by muscle memory I could find the Guild and dungeon entrances, I did them so many times.

I loved that game so much I finally, last week, made it to Orkney to see the actual Skaea Brae. Little bit of artistic licence taken, but Orkney is an amazing place to visit regardless.

Reading the game manual was one of my favorite rituals when I couldn't actually get to play the game for a while, amazing memories.

Caesar II was that one for me— got the game for Christmas and then immediately was in the car to visit family for a week.

"Plebs are needed!" is still a phrase between my brother and myself whenever we need an arbitrary increase of effort.

I met a friend, who I am still friends with today by lending them my Diablo 1 manual in class. That was an amazing manual.

Yeah, the day I bought the game, along with my best friend and PC gaming buddy, after playing for hours, we stayed up really late as I read the manual aloud. Ahh memories.

I had the exact same experience. That was also my first true adolescent introduction to the female form with the full page rogue showing some rather PG-13 characteristics.

I did something similar with a set of manuals for a Microprose B-17 simulator. Thing is that one of the manuals where more of a history text book going over all the tech and such used to guide the bombers to their targets.

original Heroes of Might&Magic. Had a great deal of lore with the mails of Lord Iron First to his brother.

That manual and the warcraft/starcraft manuals are responsible for a large part of the person I am. I was 10 at the time, and the universes that Blizzard created got me into gaming, from there into social gaming (m:tg) and then into computers and programming so that I could make my own games.

Ditto. I tried to write a .pud editor in QBasic in about the summer of '98 or '99, and built a WarCraft fan site for my Kali/Engage gaming clan with entirely hand-coded HTML and some random and probably terribly-insecure cgi-bin Perl scripts for guestbooks and whatnot. I probably learned more from that than any single other time period in my tech career.

I miss the days of actual boxed games, with real manuals in them. So much nostalgia for going to the mall and finding a rare treasure that would run on my decrepit 586 in the back of EB Games, then reading the manual cover to cover a couple times waiting for my mom to finish up shopping and drive home.

I hope I still have my Warcraft, Lords of the Realm 2, Close Combat 2 and Civilization 2 manuals somewhere.

Are you me? I had this exact same experience with the Diablo 2 manual.

I did the exact same with the Warcraft 2 manual.

What's better is that your name is a reference to Exuma - Baäl [1] from 1970

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94GLSGVRWg

I remember bringing the manuals for Civ II, Black & White, and Morrowind to school. Oh man, I miss manuals

Black and white!!! I forgot about that too. I also read it about 100 times for The Sims

That must have been the longest vacation ever.

For anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc.

Also here's the original design doc: https://www.graybeardgames.com/download/diablo_pitch.pdf

There is a slowly but steadily progressing engine being developed at https://freeablo.org/

It's such a shame there's no modern spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. The aesthetic and gameplay was great.

Path of Exile

This game is incredibly good. It's everything Diablo 3 should have been.

Yep. Just started playing it. It's like Diablo 2 with materia from FF7. Perfection.

This is exactly how I describe it to people. I've been playing since closed beta and put more than 1000 hours into it, still can't beat all the end game content (in a good way)

Inability to zoom out more kills it for me. Feels too much like diablo 2 at 800x600

One of biggest downside of that game for me.

Fortunatelly at least few years ago there was publicly available zoom hack that obviously will get your account banned, but it's not something I would care about in F2P game like ever.

If you adjust the aspect radio by playing in windowed mode and keeping it full-width while lowering the height, you gain significantly more visibility. I imagine playing on an ultrawide display would have a similar effect.

Granted, it wasn't built to support a zoomed out camera so some controls behave poorly at the outer edges of visibility.

Grim Dawn

Torchlight? Although it is a few years old.

...and Torchlight 2.

I've played both but they lack the replay value of Diablo II (with/without expansion). There are a number of improvements to mechanical things when compared to the Diablo series but I felt that the Torchlight games were quite repetitive after a while. Though diablo 2 had a lot of grinding, I did not feel that way about it at the time. I've spent countless hours in Diablo 2 and Diablo 2: LOD but I could only play both Torchlight games put together for ~ 2 weeks or so.

Grim Dawn is pretty darn close -- definitely check it out. Torchlight and Torchlight 2, while a bit lighter in atmosphere, have music composed by Matt Uelmen (Diablo & Diablo 2 composer)! Very nice stuff indeed.

David Brevik, the creator of diablo is currently working on an indy game pretty much by himself called It Lurks Below. It's kind of like if terraria merged with diablo. You have to survive by growing crops and you get items by venturing lower and lower into the world using your pickaxe. It's still in pre-release on steam, but even at this stage I played it for quite a number of hours and found that it had a surprising amount of depth.

It's certainly not on the same level as diablo, but it is worth checking out if you are into those kind of games.

I really wish Blizzard would not have shut down Blizzard North and would have let Brevik continue working on his vision for diablo 3. That's life I guess though.

I was never a huge Diablo fan, but I could always appreciate the things people liked about it. I gained new respect for it from watching Brevik's GDC postmortem [0] from a couple of years ago.

I love the idea that it was originally a dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM and would love to play one of the early builds before they changed to real-time combat.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

That sounds really cool! Terraria is an excellent game and I kind of liked that its monsters were in the same vein (i.e. scary, evil. Especially liked when I dug through the ground to find the underworld... ha). The loot system is insane.

Its a little hard to replicate the gore and fear of the original game though; and the fighting does seem a lot more involved in D2 than in Terraria.

I've heard about this game but what exactly is it that makes people say it's a mix of Terraria and Diablo, besides the creator? It looks almost identical to Terraria to me, which also has you building on the surface and descending deeper and deeper into the world.

Isometric ARPGs are niche now, but there's still games being made. Off the top of my head:

- Titan Quest (just got an update and a new expansion!)

- Grim Dawn

- The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

- Victor Vran

- Path of Exile

- Warhammer 40000 Inquisitor - Martyr

- Torchlight 1 & 2 (I wish Runic games hadn't imploded...)

It is unfortunate that most of these don't have the same level of randomness than Diablo has, but they're pretty good games in their own right.

I played path of exile years ago and it was great.

Now it's even better, and even more addicting...

Me too! It was fantastic. Ironically, I stopped playing a few weeks before it came out of closed beta (just didn’t have time and then never went back to it... now its changed so much I feel a bit overwhelmed by the thoughts of going back to it)

I actually heard about PoE on HN too, back in 2012 :)

The latest update has a sort of dungeon building mechanic and its so so good. Highly recommend trying it out again. The art & graphics have improved a lot since closed beta too (I was there ... just never left)

Thanks for the comment! I may give it another look.

(although a big reason behind why I haven’t is that I mainly play on consoles now, will have to see how well it runs on my shitty machine!)

Way too complicated compared to Diablo.

Sadly the complication is "skin deep". Thanks to some odd choices when designing defenses, your best bet for survival is piling on as much life boosters as you can muster.

After that it is all about picking up as much damage boosts as you can (again there is some weirdness there because one type of boost is stronger than another kind, and the only way to tell the two apart is by the wording) for how you want to kill stuff.

Yea it's too bad that the actual complication is more an obfuscation of game mechanics. That and the game is quite grindy compared to Diablo2 even if you know what you're doing. A single player version with support for mods could've been very nice. Sadly it's online only.

It's online, but multiplayer/co-op is optional.

Exactly, so unfortunately no potential for modding.

The latest update (Incursion = large dungeon building) is super good and worth coming back for

> - Torchlight 1 & 2 (I wish Runic games hadn't imploded...)

Runic is dead now? Oh sad. I loved the Torchlight series :( Torchlight 2 is the Diablo 3 the world wanted.

I actually preferred the first one over the second.

/ducks

Yeah, they sold to Perfect World Entertainment which then closed the studio so they could focus on thrice-damned "games-as-a-service" (http://archive.is/yIC0z).

Grim Dawn is incredible. Second expansion comes out this Fall!

Victor Vran was great, def worth picking up. Works well with a controller too.

Blade : Edge of Darknes (aka Severance: Blade of Darkness ), could count as some kind successor on 3d and the grand father of Dark Souls.

That game had _the best_ weapon play ever. I truly feel it never got the recognition it deserved. Unfortunately it came out in close proximity to Rune, which had a much more arcadey feel, and, I think, may have stolen much of the audience.

If you're interested have a look at FromSoftware's actual Dark Souls (spiritual) predecessors. In particular King's Field. The setting is very similar; although the gameplay is very primitive, it has the same feeling of exploration and similar difficulty. Also it's 1st person (quite innovative for the time).

Bloodborne on the PS4 is pretty much exactly what I imagined Diablo III could have been. It’s so close but it’s also quite different.

Path of Exile?

Path of Exile is a spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. https://www.pathofexile.com/game

PoE...great game, spent 200+ hours on it, but I wouldn't be able to tell you which class I was or which was the final boss. It's just not as memorable as Diablo. I can remember clearly my Diablo 2 characters and even the items I had. Or it could be just me getting old...

Did you play since 3.2? They finally "finished" the main game and there are 10 acts now (in 2 parts) and I'd say that since the final boss is the only one that gets a cinematic cutscene .... bit more memorable these days!

The lore for PoE is actually super deep and fascinating (as we as dark, even Diablo would be like "damn dude, that's hardcore" about some of the stuff that goes down), but it's much more in the background and you have to pay close attention to pick it up. The game takes on a different feel though when you dig into the lore and start to understand and recognize the stuff that you come across. I kinda like this design actually, makes it feel more satisfying and mysterious, but it is also convenient because you can ignore it if you're not interested (PoE greatly emphasizes many repeated playthroughs for people unfamiliar).

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/History_of_Wraeclast has some of the background story.

edit: Didn't read the the "spiritual" part of the "spiritual successor". Though you could argue diablo 3 is, I would not be so bold. You should still try diablo 3 if you haven't.

Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor. If you just want something similar to diablo 2 I suggest torchlight or titan quest.

Diablo 1 is tricky because it was so much closer to rogue likes (probably because originally it was one). I would love to see a game that has a more subdued and methodical pacing but with less town hacks :)

>Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor.

Diablo 3 is in no way a spiritual successor to D1 and 2. Yes, it's much better than it was at release, but it is still very much a streamlined, mass market friendly ARPG. Modern Diablo gameplay consists of leveling (1-2 hours), finishing your season journey (another 2-3 hours, maybe), getting your free super-powerful six piece handed to you, and then grinding paragon levels and filling in a couple of gear spots here and there.

It in no significant way resembles the Diablo of old. If you want a true sequel try PoE or Grim Dawn.

I guess I didn't read spiritual in the successor part though I am not sure what that means. I can see how they games are different enough that saying diablo 3 is a spirital successor is probably not useful. I don't think arguing about what it means would be fruitful, so I concede the point.

> Yes, it's much better than it was at release, but it is still very much a streamlined, mass market friendly ARPG.

How is this bad? It seems like you are implying it is. Also how is diablo 3 mass-market and diablo 2 not?

> Modern Diablo gameplay consists of leveling (1-2 hours), finishing your season journey (another 2-3 hours, maybe), getting your free super-powerful six piece handed to you, and then grinding paragon levels and filling in a couple of gear spots here and there.

Agree, that is how I play it. This is slightly hyperbolic but not that far off. It took me about 2 days of playing to get to T13 (the hardest difficulty). This could be made more interesting but I kind of enjoy tweaking my build and min-maxing :)

> It in no significant way resembles the Diablo of old. If you want a true sequel try PoE or Grim Dawn.

Which diablo? Diablo 3 is a true sequel, you just don't like it, which is fine.

To be fair, OP was looking for a modern spiritual successor (not sequel) of which D3 is not.

Agreed, which is my bad. Though spiritual successor is kind of squishy idea it's probably obvious they were not considering diablo 3 as being in the running.

> How is this bad? It seems like you are implying it is. Also how is diablo 3 mass-market and diablo 2 not?

It's not, it's just a different approach than what most ARPGs (including D1 & 2) take. ARPGs tend to be information heavy, customization heavy, and hard to get into as a result. That's not the way blizz went, which is fine, but it turns off the hardcore ARPG fans.

>Agree, that is how I play it. This is slightly hyperbolic but not that far off. It took me about 2 days of playing to get to T13 (the hardest difficulty). This could be made more interesting but I kind of enjoy tweaking my build and min-maxing :)

Which is perfectly fine :)

Sure, I was simplifying things a bit, but the fact that you (or anyone else) can get to ROFLSTOMP levels of power in a couple of days is a departure from most ARPGs. Min-maxing in D3 is essentially "Is the tooltip green?" You have a handful of stats you care about, defined by your 6 piece (which you were handed) the vast majority of the time, and all you're doing is making incremental improvements to those few stats as you grind rifts. Not much depth there. Paragon levels are too strong and should just go away IMO.

>Which diablo? Diablo 3 is a true sequel, you just don't like it, which is fine.

We're talking about a "spiritual successor" here. In other words, a game that builds upon the core gameplay concepts introduced by Diablo. Diablo 3 is not that. It does not resemble D1 or 2 in tone, setting, or gameplay (aside from running around and killing stuff obviously.)

I have yet to find a single person who would argue that D3 is an evolution of the original design as opposed to a complete re-imagining of the genre. Hell, it's not even a loot focused grind any longer.

I couldnt get into D3 because there is too much focus on the items, I think the items should compliment the character, not the reverse

Then you simply don't like ARPGs, period. ARPGs are loot games. The entire point of these games is literally grinding for loot. Loot makes you strong, not levels. You want a different genre, which is fine, but change the loot part of an ARPG and you're left with an RPG.

...what, exactly, do you see in PoE that resembles Diablo 1? I can't think of much beyond the camera view angle.

Primarily tone, aesthetic, and depth. Of course they didn't copy the systems 1:1, but it _feels_ more like diablo than diablo 3 ever did. I realize that I'm using vague terminology, but you'd be hard pressed to find fans that don't agree.

We're talking about a "spiritual successor" here, not "add up how many aspects of PoE are identical to D2." I know you said D1, but few people make or care about that comparison. D2 is the most popular and the latest entry in the series that people who were turned off by D3 care about.

I'd describe PoE as more of a spiritual successor to Diablo 2. There's a lot of weird aspects of D1 which were removed in D2 and later games -- for instance, spellbooks, elixirs, and randomly generated quests.

As a concrete example: PoE's schema for items (normal/magic/rare/unique, maximum of 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes) is almost a carbon copy of Diablo 2's item system.

To be fair, the only commonality between Diablo and Diablo 2 was in:

1. The Atmosphere. (Except for most of Act 1, and Acts 2 and 5.)

2. The Name.

Diablo was a slow, tile-based click-and-slash dungeon crawler. Diablo 2 was... Something else entirely. Blast/teleport[1] through everything at top speed to farm bosses. Non-linear power curves. Incredibly high emphasis on gear[2]. Far less tactical, and far more forgiving to mistakes.

In that sense, the gap between Diablo and Diablo 2 was probably bigger then the gap between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. The core gameplay loop of Diablo 3 is the same as Diablo 2 - it's just that getting your first set of end-game gear is a bit faster, and there's less emphasis on farming bosses. And the ham-fisted story is in your face.

[1][2] Enigma... And the rest of the ladder-only rune-words are a game-breaking abomination. They were supposed to be balanced by the rarity of high-end runes, but in practice, those runes are plentiful, because of duping and botting.

Sure. When I (and others) think "spiritual successor to Diablo" we're almost certainly thinking of D2, not so much D1.

I've noticed this in the fandom too, how come? Was D2 just much more popular than D1?

Yes. D1 was groundbreaking, but D2 was/is the most played by far (and was also groundbreaking, maybe moreso.) It's still played by many today, D1 not so much.

Enigma wasn't an abomination by itself, since the runes were incredibly hard to drop. It was the fact that they were easily accessible through trading from people exploiting dupe bugs and botting. These issues aren't fixed to this day in D2.

You mean we have equivalents of the following:

TPPK ggnore Trust drop tests for joining clans? Griefing with no admins with slow? Buying a zephy on eBay for 600$ Team VIP custom imported items? Going legit on east and wtf pwning kids in bugged gear because you understand mechanics? Having a perfect defense Shako Dropping a full inventory on someone that died in cow level to pop them Having a second account to bot on because everyone and I mean everyone is botting A game made playable and enjoyable by map hack MF stacking and having zero resistance as a result and dying cuz lag DCing while muling Rust storm and logging on to find that everything on your zon was duped and she is naked.

I can go on, Diablo 2 was much more than most remember it, and much more than it is today.

Diablo 3 is a fun game for laid back grinder with some fun mechanics. You feel powerful but dear god it’s not diablo 2, it never will be and shouldn’t be compared.

There was (hopefully still is) a thriving community of D2 single player enthusiasts that had a very welcoming crowd and managed to avoid the craziness of battle.net[1] at the Single Player Forum of diabloii.net[2]. To this day, it's maybe my ideal of the internet done right (though its in-page ads seem a little more obnoxious now than I remember).

It had fairly strict rules w.r.t. documenting what mods you play with[3] but most folks used certain baseline tools such as infinite stashes[4] that greatly helped with playability.

The pace in single player is significantly slower without overpowered items, but also significantly more tactical. And there were often seemingly absurd self-imposed constraints imposed to make gameplay harder on yourself (no uniques, etc.). Here's one player who made it through hardcore in all difficulties (Guardian) doing full clears with a naked Amazon[5].

While not as extreme, and maybe it'd be insignificant on battle.net, I had some of my most satisfying D2 moments there[6].

[1] Good luck getting enigma and other overpowered runewords in single player.

[2] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/forums/single-player-forum.3...

[3] There was a vibrant trading scene but this helped discourage cross-contamination between, say, a vanilla player's items and those of a player who enabled ladder-only runewords.

[4] GoMule and ATMA may have been my first exposure to Java programs.

[5] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads/how-far-can-superdav...

[6] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads/finally-my-first-gua...

There were similar, but in my experience, more vibrant, communities for Diablo I (DSF, LurkerLounge, RBD). Variants (Self-imposed restrictions) were far more prominent in Diablo I [1]. Pretty much everyone in the DSF maintained at least one or two variant characters, even if it was just a naked mage or a SNOB.

Diablo II, especially after LOD, just didn't feel as fun with most self-imposed restrictions. Too much power creep came from gear and patches, enemy health and damage scaled too much, and due to immunities [2], too many strategies for dealing with problematic enemies involved running past or parking them. In Diablo I, with its tile-based movement system, this had to be done incredibly carefully. In Diablo II... It's much more difficult to be boxed in, and if things don't work out well, just save and exit, and reset the level.

[1] https://www.realmsbeyond.net/diablo/variants.html

[2] Immunities worked much better in Diablo I. Every character had a reasonable answer to immune enemies. In Diablo II, with its locked skill trees, there was much less headspace for dealing with them - unless you use overpowered gear!

Agreed. This game gets a lot of hate left over from its rubbish launch state, but the game as it exists now is easily my favorite game in the genre since the original. They've very much done what Blizzard has always done best: take a great game and make it accessible but without losing the depth. It's actually the first game that really got me to even give a shit about the high-level buildcrafting. Best 20€ I've spent on a game in a long time.

You need to look harder. Path of Exile and Grim Dawn are absolutely spiritual successors to Diablo.

It's not modern, but I founded/work on a revival of the 3D ARPG MMO created by the studio founded by the creators of Diablo/Diablo 2 (Flagship Studios), Hellgate: London (https://london2038.com). In almost every sense Hellgate: London was intended to be the direct successor of Diablo 2, created by the same people, but on an even more ambitious scope. Sadly the game failed to stay profitable and the servers shut down in 2008. A few of the team members from Flagship Studios went on to found Runic and create Torchlight, another spiritual successor.

Reading this reverse engineering, I can see a lot of similarities between Diablo and the Hellgate systems.

While I really liked the idea of Hellgate: London the subscription model they attempted to push was a huge turn-off. It was more like Diablo/Diablo 2 than it was an MMO, very few people playing together in an instance. This means that it had comparable costs of Diablo 2 with battle.net.

The subscription model looked more like a cheap way to squeeze extra money out of players. Charging extra for additional content (like Lord of Destruction for Diablo 2) would make a lot more sense.

Not quite the same, but the D&D bases games scratch the same itch for me. Baldurs Gate (2 is easier to get into), Neverwinter Night (prefer the first), and recently Pillers of Eternity was a fantastic throw back.

Even better: you can get most of those DRM-Free on Gog!

I played and loved both Diablo 1, 2 and 3, SP only. At 37, I still play D3 sometimes (SP).

Can somebody explain why D3 is not the "spiritual successor"?

It dropped a lot of the themes, pacing and mechanics of Diablo 1 and 2.

The classic aesthetic of Diablo is a slow-medium paced dungeon crawler rouge like with brooding death metally horror atmosphere and deep lore.

Diablo 3 is fast paced anime esque disney lore slot machine

Path of Exile (free to play) is surprisingly good and feels more "Diablo" than Diablo 3 did. Highly recommended if you're itching for Diablo 2-style gameplay.

You don't feel that Path of Exile is a spiritual successor?

Disclaimer, I'm a big fan of PoE. I've always heard it described as the true sequel to Diablo II. Plus it's free to play, and not pay to win. In my opinion those are huge bonuses to an already great game.

Back in 2009 I put several hundred hours into the diablo 2 mod called Median, which turned into Median XL. Should you ever want a successor to Diablo 2 this was it. The craft that went into this by its original author BrotherLaz was exceptional, who was outstanding at creating content within the games restrictive modding mechanisms. The balance of all the content was just so finely tuned; BrotherLaz really had an instinct for this stuff and the effort really showed. Whenever we complained about anything on the forums BrotherLaz wouldn't just give in to the whining; instead disappearing for a few days and coming back with a complete solution that nobody saw coming, whether that was an overhaul of a whole skill tree or something way out from left field, as if there was a whole room of experienced game designers behind workshopping every idea. But there wasn't. And every time we would all love the mod even more.

BrotherLaz went on to operate under the pseudonym Enai Siaion on Skyrim mods (including the very popular Apolocypse spellmod) but I've no idea what he/she has worked on since then. A content creater to watch out for.

Just browsed their website...this looks massive. Might be tempted to go back to D2 just to try this. Looks like it's still in development all these years later.

From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!

I'm also tempted to reinstall it!

Just leavin dis here https://archive.org/details/Diablo_1996_Blizzard

Yup. I used that 2-3 years ago to play it on my old Windows 98 system.

> According to Jurannok, a Blizzard representative on their Support Forums, the game has been discontinued and Blizzard has no current plans to update it or start selling it again.

> Sources:

> https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/13595100072#post-...

> https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/topic/14611181553#post-...

> As far as I am concerned, that makes Diablo 1 abandonware, so feel free to download this iso, legally.

That's quite a jump of logic! Just because they don't publish it now doesn't mean they don't reserve the right to publish it in the future.

I think abandonware is always illegal, it's just that nobody cares enough to enforce the copyright. Betting on this when you have blizzard with their trigger happy lawyers seems risky, IMHO.

Assumed abandonware, anyway. Some companies have legit given the rights over to the public domain for stuff. Hasbro releasing the encryption keys and rights to Atari Jaguar comes to mind.

http://www.atarihq.com/news/1999/990514.html

True. The Id software releases are another major example. I am very gratefull for these gifts.

But 'abandoned' implies forgetting or not caring. If a company actively takes some action to allow access, the word 'abandoned' doesn't seem appropriate anymore.

What do you think about the word 'donated' or simply 'licensed'.

Haven’t played Diablo 1, I grew up with Diablo 2 (I’m a bit younger lol), but for me D2 represents the most memorable athmosphere in gaming. Man...that music in Act 1...

Years later I bought 2 copies of D2 to replay it. Needed 2 because no shared stash to transfer items between characters.

I played stupid amounts of both. In early highschool I was sick for a few weeks, and spent all of it playing D1. One afternoon I decided I needed a drink, so I got up and as I turned around I saw a Hidden melting away into the aether. I decided I should probably break for half an hour or so.

In late highschool I remember walking home from school and seeing a newspaper on our front lawn, and in my head I tried to press the 'tab' key to activate the popup telling me what it was.

As far as the music goes, I honestly can't recall any D2 music nearly as easily as the D1 music comes to mind. The town music is obviously the most iconic, but the caves and hell soundtracks give me goosebumps every time. Combined with the sounds of magma demons, and vipers, and balrogs, and mages. Oh man, those were the days.

What I like about this code is how much direct it is. No fancy abstraction. Brutally to the point with switch() and if() and that’s it!

These archive.org people are really awesome.

Who is involved from archive.org?

I meant the community of people at archive.org - but also the staff building the tools are awesome and their stance on abandon-ware.

This code was automatically decompiled, though, wasn't it? The original is likely quite different.

I don’t think it is vastly different in terms of program structure. They lost variable names and maybe some optimized intermediary calculations, but functional calls and branches are usually preserved through decomp (unless some compiler optims have been activated)

Could you provide an example to corroborate your claim?

This, maybe: https://github.com/avast-tl/retdec/blob/master/README.md

There is a talk presentation linked in there that gives nice explanations and examples.

I used to do a lot of decompilation of Java apps back in the days. It’s easier to decompile but still, all intermediary variable names disappeared ^^.

Alright, let's take a look at these remaining bugs that never got fixed... puts on Godly Plate of the Whale ;)

my dude

edit: this guy quests

Having never played Diablo, is there any way I can still play it on a modern computer?

Yes! I actually played it through last year.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/wiki/index#wiki_diablo_i_gam...

I've also used this HD mod that adds some characters from Diablo II, better multiplayer, and increases the difficulty:

https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/download

Thanks! I'll try it out. Did you liked the game?

Play balzebub it’s awesome. I grew up on D1 and it’s my favorite

Of course! It wasn't my first time playing it had just been years since my last playthrough.

What is the legality of something like this? Really cool project!

I think as long as they don't include DIABDAT.MPQ or any of the content / texture files from the original game it should be ok.

It is. And it's mentioned at the bottom of the github page, too: "This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."

This seems legally questionable given that all of the source files have a copyright notice from Blizzard indicating distribution without written permission is prohibited.

No one is distributing them. If you have the content files, you can point the open source engine to read them.

The guy on Github is distributing the source files which have a Blizzard copyright notice on them saying not to distribute them.

Which is really weird. Because the code is reverse-engineered and I'm 99% sure the author used Hex-Rays Decompiler (due to variable names, etc).

Looks like he pushed a change to remove the copyright notice: https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8...

What do you mean?

https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/blob/master/Source/...

This seems like distribution to me.

Oh, sorry, I thought the comment I was responding to was nested under the 'freeablo.net' discussion, and not the main thread. You're right that this person is distributing stuff they shouldn't be. I'm guessing it will be removed from github shortly.

There is no way this is not a derivative work of the engine of Diablo, assets or not it is blatant copyright infringement. That said I don't think Blizzard is going to make any attempts at enforcing it considering similar projects for other old Blizzard games.

It's super illegal. Irrespective of whether you need a commercial release of the game in order to actually play Diablo with this engine, the fact is that they're distributing a derivative work of software copyrighted and proprietary to Blizzard, which is illegal under copyright law without authorization. And that's not even getting into due diligence w.r.t. other IP concerns; there could be third-party code or trade secrets in there.

There is no cow level..

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/69604/what-does-i...

These are not the cows you are looking for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlGQpvl_IA

QA tester on Diablo 2 Expansion here.

There was sort of an infamous bug I found on the old D2 Expansion discs that let you bypass securom as well as play as expansion characters in non-expansion games using non-expansion discs. In fact, once you put in the D2 Expansion disc, all the configs got copied and if you switched to the regular non-expansion disc you were able to retain all the expansion features for as long as you had your PC on ;)

We should clone this repository before Github gets sent a DMCA takedown notice.

>"This work is being released to the Public Domain. No assets of Diablo are being provided. You must own a copy of Diablo and have access to the assets beforehand in order to use this software."

Just because someone says what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it is. IANAL so I don't know but the source files have Blizzard's copyright warning in them

And now that MS owns github there's reason to believe they're going to be more active/compliant about bullshit DMCA take down requests.

GitHub was always super compilant in regard of DMCA.

MS will change nothing.

It wouldn't be a bullshit takedown request. The source code even had a copyright notice before the repo owner "removed the fear factor".

https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution/commit/bb01c6f084b8...

In fact, when you wrote your comment, those notices were still there, so you have no excuse for writing such an ill-informed comment.

The copyright notice was fake, I was the one who typed it up originally and removed it so people don't think this actually came from blizzard.

It will be interesting to see what happens on Blizzard's end. I won't be surprised if the repo gets DMCA'd. It's not a big deal to me either way, I did this for the learning experience.

In the early aughts, Blizzard took down bnetd due to

> alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and violations of their games' End User License Agreement (sometimes referred to as a clickwrap license) and DMCA anti-circumvention prohibitions [1]

and that was just open-source server software, not even a game.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand...

That won't stop a cease and desist, though. See also: FreeCraft, bnetd.

Though I actually think this will be a good test of how GitHub's new owner reacts when faced with an issue of community versus corporation.

OpenRCT2 has been chugging along happily for quite some time using the same approach (run the binary through IDA Pro). Now, certainly, they don't have a known-draconian copyright owner like Blizzard watching the IP, but I think it falls into the same infringement area.

The repository is ~1mb. Far less than most websites.

You need the actual game DVD to bootstrap it. It’s a brilliant way to side step any copyright concerns for modding under first sale doctrine.

Agreed. I believe some of the open source rebuilds of various SimCity titles use the same tactic.

So many fun hours spent playing with friends and talking about it!

Thanks for the work and trying to breathe new life into it. Look forward to new generations enjoying it.

I might still have the disks to all except d3.

could be there any effort to conversion to opengl support, or it would be too complex to handle ?

Nothing is too complex to handle, it just depends on how many resources you have at your disposal and perhaps how much interest there is.

Edit: I suppose in this case it would depend on exactly what capability one would have over the original game data which acts as a dependency for this.

It would probably be better to port to SDL2, which can then use whichever rendering backend is best for your platform.

So many gotos..

It's amazing that Chris Metzen's terrible kiddy drawings from the Diablo and Starcraft manuals got him promoted eventually to creative lead.

metzen created the diablo universe (with roper) and the starcraft universe (with phinney). he had a bit more involvement than some drawings in manuals.

Still, the pencil drawings in the manuals looked like EGM envelope rejects.

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