Diablo 1.09

Released for Mac OS in North America on May 8, 1998 by Blizzard Entertainment, the Macintosh edition of Diablo brought Blizzard North's 1997 dark-fantasy action role-playing game to Power Macs roughly sixteen months after the Windows debut. Patch 1.09 (and the 1.09b hotfix) is the final update Blizzard ever shipped for the Mac client, distributed as the Diablo1.09Update.hqx stuffed installer.

Setting and story

The game unfolds in the Kingdom of Khanduras, beneath the ruined town of Tristram, after King Leoric is manipulated by the Lord of Terror into shattering the soulstone that imprisons him. Diablo possesses Leoric and abducts the king's son Albrecht, then fills the cathedral catacombs with sixteen levels of demons, undead and corrupted clergy. The player chooses one of three classes: Warrior, Rogue or Sorcerer, and descends through the dungeon to confront Archbishop Lazarus and finally Diablo himself, ultimately containing the demon's essence in their own body to set up the events of Diablo II.

Gameplay

Mouse-driven movement and click-to-attack combat is paired with hotkeyed spells and potions. Levels are procedurally generated from hand-crafted tile sets, so each playthrough produces a different layout of the Cathedral, Catacombs, Caves and Hell tilesets. Loot is randomized and colour-coded by rarity (white, blue, gold, unique), and a town portal scroll lets the player return to Tristram to identify, sell and gamble for items.

Multiplayer supports up to four cooperative or PvP players via direct TCP/IP, IPX, modem, serial cable, or Battle.net through Blizzard's Mac client. Multiplayer characters live on the local machine in open Battle.net, which is what made hacked items endemic and motivated several mid-cycle patches.

Engine and technical changes

The Mac build runs Blizzard's bespoke isometric 2D engine at a fixed 640x480, 256-colour display. The 1.09 patch line consolidated fixes from 1.04 through 1.08: it restored a distance-calculation change from 1.08 that had broken several skills and quests, plugged a number of Battle.net duping exploits, fixed a sound-driver crash on Windows NT (the 1.09b hotfix), and brought parity with the shareware version's protocol so retail and shareware clients could play together on Battle.net.

Development and release

Diablo was developed by Condor (renamed Blizzard North after CUC International's 1996 acquisition of Davidson & Associates) under co-founder David Brevik, who drew on roguelikes such as Angband and on D&D mechanics. Blizzard pushed Condor to convert Brevik's original turn-based design into real-time, and added Battle.net for the launch. The Mac port followed in 1998 alongside a PlayStation conversion handled by Climax. Patch 1.09 shipped in 2001, after which Blizzard stopped supporting the original Diablo.

Reception and legacy

The PC version holds a Metacritic score of 94 and won Game of the Year from Computer Gaming World, GameSpot and Computer Game Entertainment for 1996. Initial pre-orders exceeded 450,000 by December 1996; sales reached 1 million by late November 1997 and 2.5 million by mid-2001. The Mac edition reviewed strongly in MacAddict and Inside Mac Games, and remained one of the only Battle.net-capable titles on the platform. The community-maintained DevilutionX source port (1.5.4+) now runs the 1.09 data files natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs.