Shooting for the 6 buck game.
Diablo 2 over New Year's Eve:
We were maybe 12-13, drinking from champagne glasses. I was at my best friend's house, dressed pretty tightly in blue denim overalls and a respectable (from my mother's PoV) flannel shirt. My buddy, who was much luckier, just wore pyjamas, like he always did.
His PC was on a desk just by the window, and as each of us took turns downing Mephisto, the other would look outside into a darkness which was not so dark, being illuminated by other people's celebrations - fireworks smashing up into the sky, leaving motes of fire in their trail - and we could see the cars that were parked very clearly because the light dashed over them, and beyond the cars there were the shapes and shadows of the people bringing all the sound and the fury to everyone in the courtyard, and you could see them as though bent over a fire somewhere in a wilderness. Then they would disappear backing up after they lit the fuse, and the missiles would light them up for a few brief moments.
As this was happening we were deep in concentration. Our soundtrack was Eminem, but this was back in the heyday of the Eminem Show, before a protracted absence would produce his late and underwhelming works. Back then he was more furious, more convinced - strangely more tasteful. We were kids but we knew that we liked Slim Shady, so that's why, when we were traversing the Durance of Hate, we sang along with, "these ideas are nightmares to white parents/whose worst fear is a child with bleached hair and who likes earrings." It was music for American sensibilities, and we were a couple of east European kids raised on Cartoon Network and so many action flicks of the 80s and the 90s. We spoke American culture like a second language, which is just as well because all the games we played came from America.
So Mephisto went down, and we tallied our loot. Back then we still bothered to pick up anything that wasn't a Unique so we were increasing our gold by a decent amount, which doesn't really mean anything in D2, where gold is worthless and online trading happens with Stones of Jordan - or real cash. Still, we dived in. It was fun for us, this endless grind, this continual punishment of Mephisto, fueled by our desire to get more loot, more good loot, and sure enough the Uniques were dropping. We may have even had some really good drops, but all in all it was the usual catch of mid level items that weren't likely to help you out much in Hell. We played on, refilled our glasses. I discovered that night that I couldn't hold my liquor, and a decade later this hasn't changed. Though my friends and I are thousands of miles away from each other, there are some thing that never change.
Some of these things we learned playing Diablo: the value of loot, and the lengths to which we'd go to get it, but also the social power of games and the way our friendship was solidified by playing games together, listening to music together, and, that one New Year's Eve, looking out of the window at those others who celebrated in their own way.
Em was still rapping:
"That's why we seize the moment, and try to freeze it and own it
Squeeze it and hold it, 'cause we consider these minutes golden"
Post edited December 14, 2012 by procyon
