Tristram Is Still Burning

A handful of survivors. A village that was a town before the madness came. A cathedral rising over the ruins of an old monastery, strange lights in the empty halls, sounds no one can explain—and somewhere beneath it all, the source of everything that has gone wrong. This is where you begin in Diablo, standing at the edge of Tristram in January 1997, and this is where you begin now that it’s back on GOG for about €10.

The original Diablo more or less invented a genre. The action RPG as a concept—the loot loop, the dungeon crawl, the compulsive one-more-floor pull—all of it has ancestors, but Diablo is where it cohered into something you couldn’t stop. A mad king, his missing son, a mysterious archbishop: pieces of a puzzle you assemble while slaughtering through sixteen floors of increasingly terrible things. Blizzard built something that felt genuinely dark at a time when most games were still embarrassed about darkness.

I remember the particular quality of those dungeon graphics on a CRT monitor in a poorly lit room—the way the torchlight flickered and the sound design made it feel like something was always just behind you. You can play it that way now, original SVGA graphics at 20 FPS, exactly as it shipped. Or you can run the patched version built for modern machines, with proper Windows 10 support and higher resolution, which makes it playable without making it unrecognisable.

What holds up isn’t really the graphics or even the mechanics, which Diablo II and its successors improved on substantially. It’s the atmosphere. The game has a compression to it—a focused, oppressive dread that the later entries sometimes traded away for scale. Tristram is a small place, ruined and half-empty, and that smallness gives the horror somewhere to live. You feel the weight of what happened there in a way that a larger game might have diluted. Ten euros is a reasonable price for that feeling.