Diablo
Hyper Spooky Game #2
Type of game
A slow descent into hell, with swords thrust into the demon's flesh and, above all, with mental blows to the player's head.
Release date on our machines
January 1997, the scariest winter of my life.
Developer
Blizzard Entertainment Inc. and more specifically Blizzard North, aka the best studio in the universe, according to my standards at the time.
Publisher
Blizzard Entertainment Inc. distributed in France by Ubi Soft Entertainment Software
Diablo : available on Battle.net of course, on the XBox Game Pass, and GOG.com! Hurry up and get it on this site, before Blizzard blocks it too!
The first scene of the encounter with Diablo is still very vivid in my mind. I was visiting my best mate Randall Geyser, presumably with a view to spending a day playing Duke Nukem 3D or Big Red Racing on his new computer. But I ring the doorbell and the guy doesn't open. After a solid three minutes, his mother lets me in, exasperated, barely saying hello. It must have been one of those days when she would have preferred not to see me, it did happen from time to time, and she made no secret of it. Anyway, ready to start scolding Randall, I'm walking into the office where the family's famous computer is installed, and I stop, transfixed by what I see on the screen. I didn't hold it against my mate for too long because he hadn't moved from his chair.
First abuse
Like him, Diablo hooked me from the very first seconds, featuring a character who sinks deeper and deeper underground, in an increasingly oppressive setting, forced to fight increasingly frightening monsters. A lot of people rang the bell that day, without any response. Randall's mother was probably playing Diablo elsewhere in the house too (of course she wasn't).
Feedback on experience levels
In this dark, anxiety-inducing world, our character finds himself alone against all comers, save for a few disillusioned villagers. It doesn't take long to put yourself in his shoes, fearing for his life as if you were risking your own, and dreading the prospect of stumbling across a super-powered demon behind every wall, which happens every twenty seconds or so. We're delighted when we pick up a new piece of magic armour that will prevent us from dying on the next level... maybe. Hack'n slash was born. There must be an armada of pseudo-historians of the tenth art with a different opinion on this. My answer: I. Don't. CARE! I fell in love with the genre that day, so it was born that day. The fact that my reaction falls into the narcissistic megalomaniac scope doesn't change a thing. Honestly! I'd never seen such a high degree of customisation of our avatar, since with each level of experience gained, we could choose where to spend each characteristic point, between strength, dexterity, vitality and magic.
Well, I'd already heard about that, particularly in Warriors of the Eternal Sun. Not to mention the hundreds of magical properties associated with the hundreds of weapons, helmets and shields found in chests or on the bodies of our victims. It's thrilling, dizzying and completely addictive. When you find a Godly Plate of the Whale by killing a succubus that you've chased through an entire level, you tell yourself that it's worth having been brought into this world. What's more, when I say avatar, there are three different ones! A strong, dumb warrior, a more agile, slightly less dumb female warrior, and a not-so-dumb but very frail magician. Each of them comes with a unique and somewhat forgettable ability, as well as different limitations in the four characteristics mentioned above. And that's about it, while still being totally insane.
Psychological torture
Diablo introduced me to hack'n slash, but it also made me realise something about the way my brain works that I hadn't realised before. Atmosphere plays a muuuuuuuch bigger role than gameplay in the way I feel about a game. Granted, Diablo excelled in both areas, so it's immediately easier to have a good time. But I think I'd have given up after a few days if the atmosphere hadn't been there. And I wouldn't have looked forward to Diablo II as the ultimate virtual messiah, and I'd have said I couldn't give a shit about ARPGs, as they're called these days. And I wouldn't have failed my education, and I'll stop there before I cry. All that to say that if it hadn't been for the crazy atmosphere, Diablo would have been a really good game.
Thanks to it, Diablo has reached the stage of an ultra-cult marvel that you can't live without until you've destroyed three or four mice, clicking around like an idiot. A fog of sadness constantly envelops the fallen world in which the character evolves. We chat with the inhabitants of Tristram, the cursed hamlet where this whole story began (dead people waking up, demons torturing the souls of poor locals, an archbishop who has somewhat condemned the whole world with his nonsense, among other entertaining activities), while we recover between two massacres of bloodthirsty creatures. They do try to talk to us in a somewhat jovial tone, but you can feel the thick layers of depression underneath.
The side quests, which appeared randomly during a game, added a touch of darkness to the whole thing. I particularly loved the quest for the poisoned water, or the one that had you confront hundreds of skeletons crammed into a single room. But when you leave the falsely comforting confines of the village, and plunge first into dank dungeons, then into mouldy catacombs, into caves studded with lakes of lava, and finally into the underworld itself... that's when you really start to freak out. I've lost count of the number of times I've flinched when an invisible ghoul appeared in front of me to slap me in the face, making the noise of a tubercular patient who'd already been dead for three days. Or when a scavenging little quadruped jumped on my back, well hidden behind a sarcophagus. What do you do in these cases? We scream, exactly.
Mind you, I'm coming across as a drunken barfly: in any case, Diablo had everything it took to make us pre-teens capable of surviving in real society, which may be free of evil bugs, but which is corrupted by capitalism. In the end, this kind of title is much more effective at keeping us grounded than, say... other programmes that look cute but are much more traumatic when you think about it (the plumber who dismembers turtles and steals their money? Or the sweet little elf addicted to rubies who murders everything that moves, including chickens?) The more I've played Diablo, the more I've loved real life, thanking the latter for not being full of horrors out to gut me on every street corner. And that was no easy feat, you know? To love real life, I mean! Sentence from a reactionary boomer, also being very depressed. I could have fitted in at Tristram, that's for sure. In fact, my first name's practically the same. Wow, this is getting weird.
Maestria from hell
While the gameplay sold dreams and the settings promised magnificent nightmares, the music went even further. I consider Diablo's O.S.T. to be the very first videogame masterpiece I ever listened to. I mean, I was already aware of it at the time, whereas for all the other older games, it took me quite a few years of introspection. A big congratulations to Matt Uelmen, who was able to make me understand the beauty of his compositions at the age of twelve, at a time when I thought that Babylon Zoo's Spaceman would never find an equal. I'd read in some magazine something like ‘Matt Uelmen, the manic-depressive guitarist’. Well, sorry mate, but I've never wished so much for someone not to get better. If you have to suffer to sign albums like this, don't seek for help or anything, alright ? I love absolutely everything about this soundtrack. Admittedly, it's still only five and a half tracks to listen to. Its only tiny flaw might come from the music that accompanies the stages in hell. Yes, the ones that are supposed to scare us the most. But the rest... ouuuuuuh! The falsely reassuring guitar that carries the village theme, the distant bells of the dungeons, the buzzing layers of the catacombs, the tormented riffs of the caves... all magnify the terror inspired by the rooms littered with corpses, and the tunnels from which nameless horrors emerge. I could have listened to it at any time, I think, if I'd known any way of doing so. Unlike Wipeout or Heroes or Might and Magic II, the songs didn't play on a hi-fi system. In any case, you don't have to slice up zombies and were-goats for hours to get attached to all these gems of sound. But you do slice eventually, and it makes you even more obsessed by what you hear. Whenever I'm feeling a bit blue, I put on one of these hyper-disturbing tracks, and I immediately love life again.
Moment of Haunted Nostalgia
To be allowed to sleep at Randall's house, his parents had to be in the right perfect mood, and Jupiter had to be aligned with Proxima Centauri and Aldebaran at the same time. It did happen, though, a little, very rarely. I never found out why his parents were so reluctant to let kids sleep around their house. Anyway, one day, in a fit of magnanimity, they finally gave me permission. We played Diablo for several hours before going to bed, of course. Probably a playthrough in which we opened the door to a small square room, revealing walls flooded with blood. Then the words ‘Fresh Meat’ rang out, in a voice of crushed limestone. Post-traumatic stress guaranteed.
In the middle of the night, Randall started talking to himself, calling out the names of monsters from the game, frightened at the thought of them climbing the stairs to us defenceless little creatures. ‘An Overlord! A Balrog!’ he whimpered. I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn't respond, as if possessed by his own nightmare. I always suspected that he wasn't asleep at all, and was just fooling around, hoping to freak me out.
He loved pulling pranks like that on me. Except that after a while, I kept seeing strange shadows moving across the stairs, and I ended up hiding under the duvet, scared to death. Years later, we spoke again about that famous night: ‘My mother must have been sorting out the laundry,’ he said at the time, his eyes staring at nothing. But putting away clothes at two o'clock in the morning? Without making the slightest noise? Between two floors? OK, maybe it was only eleven o'clock at night, but that doesn't change anything. This mystery will probably remain unsolved. Maybe there's a clue to be found as to why her parents so often refused to let guests sleep over.