Diablo is (Sort of) Reborn thanks to Good Old Games

If you haven’t heard the classic Diablo has been re-released by GOG.com. It’s $10 as of this writing, I picked it up immediately. I experienced many ‘firsts’ with the original Diablo in 1997. It was my first guild experience, first action RPG and my first experience with cheats and how destructive they were.

The introduction of Battle.net simply connected clients to each other and the clients were trusted to do whatever they wished. ‘Trainer’ programs started to compete for who could break Diablo the most. There was nothing to lose, nobody could be banned. It had no copy protection other than a simple CD check, no CD keys or DRM. Any copy of a Diablo CD, CD-R, ISO, etc could connect to Battle.net. It was the wild west, great and terrible. Blizzard eventually declared they had no plans to sell Diablo again and mired in bots and cheats it faded away as abandonware…only not quite.

A dedicated fan base maintains patches for modern Windows (Diablo Patch, Belzebub and Strange Bytes being the most popular) and archive.org even made the full game ISO download available. Thankfully Blizzard never shut off their Battle.net server(s). So why buy a new GOG version? Well it gets pretty complicated when you compare features but basically GOG provides a classic Diablo experience without dealing with patching, modding or keeping an ISO mounted.

GOG provides you with two versions. Diablo Classic is a fullscreen only original SVGA graphics version with Battle.net access. There’s no scaling for resolution so unless you make changes to your monitor it’s going to stretch that 640 x 480 to your monitor’s aspect ratio resulting in an ugly picture. The other option is enhanced with custom resolutions, windowed and full screen, v-sync and a few other visual enhancements but can’t connect to Battle.net, LAN only. It’s the best running Diablo patch to date and the only real reason to buy the GOG version.

So far I haven’t been able to get any of my favorite mods working with either GOG version since it comes with an updated Diablo.exe named 1.09 V2 and I really wish it had cloud saves through GOG Galaxy. It runs great though on all four Windows 10 systems I’ve tested. No messing with an ISO, patches or mods. I’ll have to try Hamachi to play with friends online in a virtual LAN. I hope GOG encourages more people to play this classic and stay away from the cheats!

EDIT!! – GOG has added Hellfire to their version so the steps below are now obsolete. You can read my new blog post about that here.

P.S. I’ve figured out how to get Hellfire working on the GOG version but it requires a CD or ISO of Diablo.

1. Install  GOG Diablo to a folder outside Program Files (C:\GOGDiablo for example)
2. Install Hellfire to its default location (C:\SIERRA\HELLFIRE
3. Copy the contents of the HELLFIRE folder to your GOG Diablo folder – DO NOT OVERWRITE the GOG Diablo files.
4. Insert or mount your original Diablo CD or ISO
5. Run Hellfire.exe from your GOG Diablo folder