Diablo 2 (2000) – PC
AKA: “Wait, our son doesn’t even have to leave the house to hang out with his friends? This can’t be good.”
There’s nothing quite like your first online gaming experience. Playing with all of your friends at the same time, meeting new people from around the world, willingly handing over all your gear to a “trustworthy hacker” so that he can “duplicate” it for you because you’ve never been betrayed before and don’t understand how the world works… such great memories.
Not only was Diablo 2 an amazing RPG, it was also the first video game that actually taught me social skills and how to stand up for myself. This was a time before anti-cheating technology was really any good at all, so Blizzard’s Battle.net was essentially the wild west of video games. You would join a game and see people with so much health that the numbers went off the screen, and others wearing all white gear as some sort of hacker status symbol. All too often you would see text pop up saying “That’s not fair, how did you kill me in the town?!” Followed by, “Not telling, thanks for the gold!” The only way to survive was to band together with others, or to fight with your words and appeal to their conscience (that’s right, trolls had hearts in the early 2000s).
This level of social interaction in a video game was completely new to me, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
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