Diablo

You walk down the steps into the cathedral cellar, the first zombie lurches out from around the corner, and you tell yourself: a classic isometric hack-and-slash. Three hours later you get up from the monitor, it's dark outside, and you have no idea how it happened. This is Diablo.

It came out in 1996 from Blizzard Entertainment and turned the action RPG genre inside out. The setting is simple: the medieval town of Tristram, sixteen procedurally generated floors of demons beneath it, and at the very bottom Diablo himself waits. No branching story, no hour-long intro cutscenes. You descend and you kill.

The control is the mouse and only the mouse — you click where you want to go, you click what you want to attack. It sounds primitive, but that simplicity is deliberate and it works. Your character develops through attributes, and three classes offer quite different experiences: the warrior is a straightforward axe, the sorcerer a glass cannon, the rogue balances between the two. The inventory is a tiled square where you arrange items like Tetris.

Every run through the dungeon looks a little different and every session hands out different loot. This exact loop — kill, grab, check, return — worked then and pretty much still works. It's a habit that's hard to climb out of.

What has aged worse? You only save in town, and when the game kills you deep in the dungeon, you trudge back down on foot. The inventory fills dizzyingly fast and the walk back to town to sell repeats endlessly. And the game is dark, visually and literally — on a dark 90s monitor you couldn't see a single thing in some rooms.

Even so, Diablo remains a landmark game. It didn't just set the template for its own series — it defined a whole subgenre now called "diablo-like" or ARPG. A dungeon crawler with randomly generated maps and endless loot. Blizzard didn't invent it from nothing, but they gave it a shape and a pace that everyone else immediately chased. In 1996 it was a technical and design shock.

It suits anyone who wants to see where the genre began — without modern hand-holding, tutorials and checkpoints every two hundred meters. You can finish it in one long evening, if you can resist taking the next day off. Download it free.