A bit of history: the shareware version of Diablo was a massive download for its time, a whopping 50 megabytes! This is hardly a blip in the new millenium (most HD Youtube videos are bigger when fully streamed), but in the mid 1990's it took three hours to download on a 33.6k modem, and a fair space commitment on your hard drive.
Tropes:
Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: A magazine was trying to establish a link between the shootings at Columbine and video games. They used an interview with a survivor's family, while the survivor was playing the video game Diablo... which was described as "just shooting" and was punctuated by the survivor's character being blown up. The only shooting in the game is done with a bow, and most of the time, your weapon is a sword or other melee weapon.
Disowned Adaptation: The Hellfire expansion was made by Synergistic Software, not by Blizzard North, and David Brevik still hates it. It's worth noting that players have a somewhat better opinion of Hellfire than the developers themselves: while it has its detractors, there are also fans, who not only like more content being added, but love the new quality-of-life features (the increased town speed, the extra affixes, and most of all, being able to play on a higher difficulty on single-player without having to use LAN). Many fans also feel that Brevik's bad opinion about Hellfire is hypocritical: Diablo 2 added lots of good stuff, but also lost the atmosphere from Diablo 1 that Brevik laments about being lost in Hellfire (the Maggot Lair being not so different from the Hive, for example), and much of the Hellfire content was actually Dummied Out content from the original game that was rescued for the expansion.
The game was originally going to have six pages in its spellbook, rather than the four that made it to release. Screenshots of the old six-page spellbook can still be seen in the manual.
The game has never been properly translated into French, but a book with French translations of all dialogue and quest text was released separately. It includes lines from a removedNon-Player Character named Tremayne.
What Could Have Been: Once hackers were able to work through the game disk to check out the content that never made it into the final product, it became clear that A LOT of stuff was axed. Much of this content has since been included in mods of the game. Some examples include the following:
The spellbook originally had as many as 6 pages instead of just 4 — this change happened late enough that screenshots of a six-page spellbook made it into the manual. Some of the mentioned spells that didn't make the cut included Blood Boil, Blood Ritual, Doom Serpents, Etherealize, and Sentinel.
Monsters that never made it into the final product included the Unraveler, the Goat Lord, the Incinerator, the Bone Demon, the Invisible Lord, the Arch Lich Malignus, and the Devil Kin Brute.
There was once another Tristram character known as Tremain the Priest, who was the character that initiated a quest called "Fleshdoom, Wielder of Shadowfang." This quest would have the player seek out and defeat Fleshdoom within the dungeon, and loot the demon sword, Shadowfang, from its corpse. There was also a time when Tremain was considered to be the one that leads the player to complete "Archbishop Lazarus" rather than it being Deckard Cain that does it in the final product.
The quests offered by Gillian the Barmaid never made the cut. One included needing to find and defeat Izual the Fallen Angel within the dungeon, which the player would obtain the Azurewrath sword. The other cut Gillian quest included traveling to a unique surface zone to find and defeat Andariel since she's been leading townsfolk away into the wilderness to kill them off. Funny enough, similar versions of these two quests made it into Diablo II.
Pippin would have offered another quest where he mentions how Gillian had put in a request for someone to clear out a group of "Giant Worms" that have appeared within one of Tristram's house cellars. The player would enter the house that Farnham the Drunk sits next to, and enter into a unique Cave area filled with several dozen Vipers that need to all be killed.
There was a cut quest related to a "Map of the Stars" item. All other info about this unknown item remains a mystery other than there being a cutscene that would have played had the player ended up failing the quest.
The encounter with the Butcher would have played out a lot differently compared to the final version where the player just enters his small room on Level 2 and battle it out. The cut version actually required the player to talk to Wirt first where he hints that you got to use Town Portal within the Butcher's Level 2 room, which would open up a red portal. Said portal would then take the player to a unique Catacomb area that acts as the lair for the Butcher, and even includes an axed cutscene that shows off the Butcher cutting up human corpses before he goes after the player.
The Bittersweet Ending was actually not what was originally intended; Brevik had meant for the player to Earn Your Happy Ending, but the ending animation team disagreed with this decision and completely altered the outcome, without notifying him of the changes. By the time he learned of it, the game was too close to release to redo it, so it had to ship. In the end Diablo II would opt to take this unintended result and expound upon the idea rather than undo its work.
Throw It In!: The game's cutscenes were made by a different team, whom in the words of David Brevik, creator of the franchise, "basically did whatever they wanted". The bit of the ending cutscene where the main character jams the soulstone in their forehead was not planned by the game's creators, but a random addition of the cutscene team. After some back and forth they decided to keep it in, as it nodded to the idea of constantly replaying the game and fighting Diablo run after run. It would eventually become the entire premise of the sequel.
. It's worth noting that players have a somewhat better opinion of Hellfire than the developers themselves: while it has its detractors, there are also fans, who not only like more content being added, but love the new quality-of-life features (the increased town speed, the extra affixes, and most of all, being able to play on a higher difficulty on single-player without having to use LAN). Many fans also feel that Brevik's bad opinion about Hellfire is hypocritical: Diablo 2 added lots of good stuff, but also lost the atmosphere from Diablo 1 that Brevik laments about being lost in Hellfire (the Maggot Lair being not so different from the Hive, for example), and much of the Hellfire content was actually Dummied Out content from the original game that was rescued for the expansion.