Man pays for his Diablo copy 19 Years Later

Take a look at a touching story told at Kotaku. Last week during the Game Developers Conference’s postmortem for Diablo, Shivam Bhatt, one of the fans got an interesting idea while asking a question at a Q&A session.

I asked a question about Battle.net and while he answered, I started checking my wallet

Shivam Bhatt

Then, he counted 40 dollars — cost back in 1996 and, in front of the GDC attendees, he told Brevik that he was going to pay for the copy of Diablo he pirated in 1997.

I was 16 years-old, and my friend had gotten his first ever CD-R drive (1x). It took something like 4 hours to copy a game or music CD, and the discs themselves were hella expensive. We were just excited to try it out.

My friends and I used to drag our PCs and monitors to each others houses for LAN parties, and we didn’t always have the games that everyone wanted to play, so boom, we learned how to copy games to play. Diablo was part of this trend, because Battle.Net meant not having to lug our boxes around. We were all huge fantasy fans, and Warcraft 2 fans, so the idea of a new Blizzard game that was like D&D was just incredible.

As high schoolers, we didn’t all have much in the way of money, and my mom wasn’t about to buy a game like Diablo for me, so copying was the way. It was one of the first games passed around my group like this.

Shivam Bhatt

Bhatt told Kotaku that the friend who first lent him the Diablo disc passed away of cancer. Diablo was their favorite thing to do together. So, Bhatt thought of this payment as of a great way to pay tribute to his friend.

It wasn’t planned, it was just spontaneous act to honour old friend. It is never too late to do the right thing

Source: kotaku