Fun with Diablo back in the old days

I got a Christmas card from my old buddy Darryl yesterday(his wife even made him sign it!) and I was reminded of the time he was over at my place, circa 1995 or so to watch the hockey game and I made the mistake of showing him the new computer game of the year "Diablo". Diablo was a really cool psuedo mouse button mashing RPG where you picked a little guy and ran around this town and these dungeon tunnels underneath it killing monsters while in search of loot. It was one of the earliest multiplayer games that utilized a bunch of central servers whereby you could hook up and play the game with up to three other players from around the world. In most cases these were your buddies, but in some cases, they were total strangers. And that's where the fun began.

So I showed Darryl how to start, how to choose a character.
"I want to be the cute chick!" he said.

"The Amazon  Rogue? sure, she's a great character! What do you want to call her?"

"How about Betsy Buttmunch?" Darryl said (I've changed the actual name he used at the time because the real one is unprintable)

"Uhh, ok I guess..." I said, not sure if the name would be accepted. It was.

Darryl said "Ok Ok, what do I do!" and we went through the intro, got him a little javelin to poke into baddies and he got himself killed a few minutes later, reappearing in the village again and to our suprise, there was another player there! He had entered the game while we were in the load screen. It was then I realized that I had set up a Battle net game purely out of habit. That meant the game was open to anyone in the world, they could come in and play or just chat. Darryl was slightly confused and tried to kill the guy. Since he was a newbie it didn't work and the person typed at him to "STOP IT!".

"How do I talk to him?!?!" Darryl asked. I told him to hit the enter key, type what you want and press enter again. Darryl typed something mean but very very funny. The guy responded very politely. I felt I had to add..

"Oh yeah.. sometimes I've noticed that when other players see the Amazon Rogue character, they assume it's an actual real-live girl playing. He probably thinks you're a girl.."

"Interesting.." said Darryl..

I'm not sure why some male online players think that. In my experience(before Everquest and World of Warcraft), it was the opposite. In the old days girl players took men character personas so nerdy online men players would not hit on them. I went down to watch the 2nd period of the hockey game and left Darryl upstairs on my computer. What a mistake that turned out to be!

When the hockey game ended I went back upstairs to my computer room and Darryl called out to me from the top of the stairs:

"I got three guys fighting over me here.."
My god he did. There were three fighters standing around chatting with him, text filling the chat line.
"One of them's giving my girl swords and armor and stuff but I don't know what to do with it.. And.. " He turned around and smirked. "I have a date after!"

"What!?" Turns out one of the players lived in Ottawa and during the marathon chat and flirt session Darryl had used his fake computer feminine charms to set up a rendezvous between this guy and his computer game persona Betsy Buttmunch at the 24 hour waffle house in Vanier later that evening.

I reached over and shut the computer off on him at that point. It was funny but getting out of hand. Darryl wanted me to drive him over to the waffle house so he could try and pick the guy out of the crowd and laugh at him but I dropped him back at his place after that.

Ahh, the good old Diablo days..