Diablo II
The dark, click-to-loot dungeon crawler whose endless hunt for better gear defined turn-of-the-millennium PC gaming. You clicked, monsters died, loot rained, and Battle.net kept you up until dawn.
Developed by Blizzard North and published by Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo II arrived in North America on June 28, 2000. You picked one of five character classes — Amazon, Necromancer, Barbarian, Sorceress, or Paladin — and clicked your way through randomly generated dungeons and wilderness, moving, attacking, and hoovering up loot sorted into escalating tiers: normal, magical, set, rare, and unique. The randomness meant no two runs, and no two item drops, were quite the same.
What turned it from a great game into a way of life was Battle.net, Blizzard's free online service, where up to eight players could party up and grind together. The chase for one more upgrade — a better rune, a rarer unique — kept people playing for years. The 2001 expansion, Lord of Destruction, added a fifth act and two new classes, the Druid and the Assassin.
It sold a million copies in its first two weeks and four million worldwide by June 2001, earning a Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling computer game ever at the time. Its loot-and-level formula became the template that action-RPGs have been chasing ever since.
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