The Soul Behind the Grail

I was twelve the first time Diablo got its hooks in me.

My buddy and I crowded around one screen — me on a Necromancer because raising the dead sounded metal, him on a Barbarian because he wanted to hit things very hard. We had no idea what we were doing. No skill plan, no gear, no clue. We just knew the Rogue Encampment music was the coolest thing we'd ever heard and that the dark beyond the firelight was full of stuff to kill.

Then we met Blood Raven.

She lit the Burial Grounds up like a birthday cake, raised every corpse we made into more enemies, and kited two confused kids around a graveyard until we were staring at our own gray-and-red death screens. We got thoroughly handed our butts. We also immediately hit “resurrect” and went back for more. That's the whole game, really: it knocks you down, and somehow that's the part that makes you love it.

That was a couple of decades and a few life chapters ago. Somewhere in my late thirties now, with a job and bills and a back that complains when I sit too long — but that graveyard never really left me. When the recent Reign of the Warlock update dropped and pulled me back to Sanctuary, I realized I'd played this game for twenty-six years and never once finished the one challenge that actually scared me.

So I'm doing it. My first and only Holy Grail. I wiped every single-player character off my machine and started from a completely blank slate — no safety net, no old stash to lean on. Just a level 1 nobody and a very long list of items to find.

The dev side of this

By trade I'm a software developer, which means I cope with grindy problems by building little tools to make them less grindy. So alongside the grail, I'm building (and open-sourcing) Diablo gadgets — a Terror Zone notifier was the first one. I'll stream the development too, not just the runs. If you've ever wanted to see how the sausage gets made, or you're learning to code yourself, pull up a chair.

Two streams in one: a man slowly losing his mind to drop rates, and the same man writing software to track exactly how slowly. Quality content.