This past Friday, April 7th, I hosted a Diablo LAN party with my cousin Kevin and friend Garcia. We planned for it in advance which allowed me to come up with some cool ideas. Thankfully, Garcia had the wherewithal to take pictures! I am going to document them here!
The first thing I came up with was the potions! I bought custom potion bottles and filled them with Kool-Aid and Gatorade. Then, I bought LED lights that would fit on the bottom of the bottle. It really – really – came out well. They looked like little potion night lights! Absolutely wonderful.
Next I made custom scrolls from the most recognizable character from the Diablo franchise: Deckard Cain. These scrolls were a written from Cain’s perspective as a rally cry! I printed it on aged paper using the Diablo font ‘Exocet’. Getting the picture of Cain and Map on there took a bit of work, but it turned out nice! I took a picture of a scroll, here:
Next, I had the idea for an inside joke we’ve shared since 2010 while we were having a play through of Diablo 2. In the game, you can hire mercenaries who will fight along side you. In our 2010 play through, I hired one named ‘Raldin’. I kept dying and losing all of my gold. Every so often I would get frustrated and yell “Guys, I died again! I lost fucking 4500 gold! And where….THE FUCK…is Raldin?” After a few times of saying this, we realized how hysterical it was and laughed as hard as I can remember. In reality, Raldin had no effect on me dying and I was just looking for a way to justify the losses. It became an inside joke with us to say “Yo where the hell is Raldin?” I wanted to bring this idea to the LAN in a creative way. What I came up with, was this:
The hoodies took the most time to create. I really wanted the Diablo font on the front. Problem is, most online merch creators only have a limited amount of fonts to choose from. I came up with the idea to simply write out each item of text into GIMP really big. Convert the font from raster to vector in the SVG format. Added transparency to the background and saved it as an image. I placed this inside of the designer and it came out PERFECT. You would never know it wasn’t their font! It came out CLEAN. They actually screwed up Garcia’s original hoodie and I had to pay $15 bucks for a replacement.
We attempted to play Diablo 1. However, the game is from 1996. The TCP and UDP protocols were not standardized yet, and it used a protocol which no longer exists anymore: IPX. You can move ‘wrappers’ over from Starcraft (1998) which allowed you to wrap the IPX traffic into a UDP datagram and allow it to work normally. However, we already started later than we had hoped and I didn’t want to spend hours fixing a game we would potentially quit out moments later. We moved onto Diablo 2 Remastered. I absolutely loved it. Garcia got his second win late into the night and we really got into it. Kev however got tired and was not having any fun. I decided to call it around 3:30am. The next day Garcia had told me he would have played 4 more hours. I wish I had known! We were really on a roll later in the game.
I do wish it had lasted longer. When I think about the fact it passed, I feel sadness. I am unsure if that sadness arises from my expectations not being met, or the fact that it came and went. I put my heart and soul into this and I just wanted it to be a night we’ll never forget. I can’t say that it was bad. Not by any stretch!