For those who want to listen without music, you can watch here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TfFD_yr3DsE.html Note I haven't made any other edits, so some cuts may be a little weird without the music queues.
Excellent series. It's crazy that the D2 speedrunning scene took off ten years after my run. Kudos to those brave souls grinding away in the early days. I remember being chagrinned when people pointed out my ignorance about quick potion management, especially because it was a game I played semi-regularly. I think I learned the Baal throne parking trick from Mongojerry's old threads from 2003 about his passive necro project, called "Maldar, the Magnificent." You can still find the threads but the pictures are gone it seems. He would bait out and park every pack using curses and bonewalls if I remember right, pretty funny how chaotic everything got. Maybe someday you'll be doing a vid for the history of D4 speedruns.
I found it surprising that the roguelike randomness put so many people off in the early days. Games like Binding of Isaac are popular speedrun games nowadays *because* of those mechanics.
That's kinda funny that people started speedrunning diablo 2 only 4 years after release. I remember myself playing a lot of Diablo 2 when it was released, and then even more LoD. Anyways, at that time I was just a kid, living in a small town, I had no internet, so I couldn't download any patches or read guides, so I was left alone with my version of LoD. And that version was a pretty hardcore one. There were no synergies, and no way to reset your stats. So you had to have a build in mind before starting to spend those precious skill and stat points. Early game was really tough since most of the time you had to run with unspent skill points, because most of early skills sucked late game. And oh boy, what a godly feeling that was when you finally reach level 30 (or whatever lever gives your char the most op skill) and you could just finally start to use a skill that kills. And every time I wanted to try new a build I had to start a new char. So going through the game from start to finish in one day wasn't something particularly rare for me. Yes, it was a quest for a whole day and it could last for 8 to 12 hours depending on a class, but still. Turns out I was a speedrunner before it became mainstream :) However, I never tried to really SPEED run, you know, maximizing effectiveness, spending skill points on skills that effective early game, that stuff... I was just playing my game at a decent pace towards a build that I wanted to see in the end. Cuz, you know, I thought that Normal and Nightmare suck, and only on Hell true experience of Diablo 2 can be felt. So I was aiming at reaching hell as soon as possible and it usually took me couple days. Oh.. what a sweet time that was... I had so much spare time to literally live in the world of Diablo, not so much any more :) I regret nothing. Long live this godly game!
I cant believe you only had a few thousand views per video. This will definitely change now with the sucess of your latest video. I have binge watched almost all your content today and I can only say good fucking job. Keep up the good work!
Great series! I only stumbled on this by MrLlama mentioning it on stream, i had a hard time finding this video actually (searched for "history of diablo 2 speedruns"). I've always wanted Summoning Salt style videos on D2, now we have them :) (and i think there's room for many more)
I remember rushing my chars on my families second pc back in the day when I could simply stand at the red portal of the cow lvl in hell and be lvl 70+ in half an hour before exp penalty was a thing. good times!
I think this might be what you're after? ru-vid.com/group/PLA7428627AB5D4398 That's a 4-hour run, not 2-hour. Looking through all the old SDA posts there seemed to be other commentaries which were all hosted on what are now dead links, sadly. Siyko seemed to be one of the few SDA members with an email in his profile which might be worth a shot? (I won't link here for privacy purposes but that should give you enough to start tracking it down).
