I’ve grown up on Blizzard games. Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo were some of the first PC games I've ever played as a kid. In fact, it was Diablo and the first incarnation of battle.net chat that got me into programming. Between the lack of any real internet security back then and the open-source examples of battle.net chat bots and numerous tutorials, it was a great way to get started programming.

Diablo, in particular, was my gateway into programming and all the nerdy subcultures that came with it. It was one of my favorite games to play, and I found myself continuously being drawn back to the game. The humor, the action, and the setting were perfect. It was also incredibly challenging to play as a 12-year-old. I probably shouldn’t have been playing a game called “Diablo” at that age, but here we are. Its difficulty led me to first download third-party cheating tools, precursors to the modern-day Cheat Engine. After a while, I learned how to edit these tools to further tailor the game to my play style. This ranged from creating my own items, spells, and even classes. While the base game allowed you to play a Warrior, Sorcerer, and Rogue, I’d often create my own characters, giving warriors the ability to use spells or sorcerers to more efficiently use swords. Everything was all pretty rudimentary, reusing existing animations and image assets, and the game would often crash, but I was having fun.

Then I took the leap online.

It started with trying to play Diablo with a friend over the modem in peer-to-peer mode. Being in the middle of nowhere, this quickly became insufferable, with high latency and constant disconnects. I think it was their older brother who told us about battle.net and suggested we play there. This was about a year or two before I started using the online handle of underlost, and so, as any early teen online, I took inspiration from my favorite sources of media from Final Fantasy VII, Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, and Star Wars, with some of my earliest handles being along the lines of xDeathScyth99x, Xx_Vegeta_xX, and deadBobaFett, among a few others.

As we started playing online, I quickly learned a lot of the same cheats and hacks I had grown accustomed to in single-player no longer worked online. I was even introduced to “crash items,” in-game items with corrupted code that caused your entire game to crash upon trying to pick them up. One of my first experiences with this was a run-in with a user named Muerto, a regular in the Bounty Hunters channel. They convinced me they had a “really cool item” they wanted to give me in-game, only to proceed to troll me for the next half-hour, repeatedly crashing my game and suggesting we try again.

I’ll be the first to admit I should have caught on a lot sooner than I actually did to what was going on. But after everyone had a good laugh, this started to open my eyes to what was possible in an online setting. There was a brewing community hidden in plain sight comprised of individuals who were hacking the game in ways I never thought of. But now, playing online over Battle.net opened the door to so much more—not just to the games, but to chat bots and everything that went along with that subculture as well.

A brief note on IRC

Before I get too far into battle.net though, I need to first talk about IRC. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. Think of it as the ancestor of modern messaging apps like Discord or even Slack. Most popular in the mid-90s, it’s what something like Discord is today…but with minimal account verification and the ability for anyone to build their own app to interact. Built-in moderation tools barely existed, and just about everything had to be custom-made.

While the majority of its users were mostly harmless, a smaller subset of hackers and other creative nerds took it a step further, oftentimes to show off their skills for a quick laugh or to try and take over other channels. This involved anything from flooding channels with bots, spamming, or any other means to kick out the channel operators, or ops (moderators), and claim the channel for yourself. Bit of an aside—a weird standard for most chatrooms at the time was whoever was in the room the longest often held control to kick or ban others. For the most part, we didn’t have the luxury of servers or rooms that could remember your identity and restore your moderation tools.

So what does any of this have to do with battle.net?

The original battle.net was largely built on the same concepts as IRC. You could even rewrite IRC clients to chat there. Even the same concepts of IRC existed; whoever was the first/only user in a chat channel was given complete control. With that came the same tomfoolery of warring between channels and groups for fun (and trolling). Blizzard even had documentation on how to build your own chat bot.

There was something about this that really enthralled me, almost as much as playing Blizzard’s games. Maybe it was the FOMO of missing out on peak hacker culture, or maybe it was just the creative aspect of creating something from lines of code. All I knew was that by the time I was 14, I grew a bit bored of actually playing the games. I probably spent more time in Visual Studio reverse engineering the battle.net protocol than actually playing. We idled in the old Diablo public channel "Bounty Hunters." We had contests to see who could make our bots do more interesting, dumb things, who could make bots to automatically win games in Starcraft, or…in my case…get the most losses in Warcraft. Out of which is how I created ulost`bot.

Fast forward to June 2000, the release of Diablo II, the most anticipated PC game of the year. I finally returned to playing on battle.net and not just using it as a chat room. People were also now using bots in a different way. A lot of new channels popped up, with players spamming as digital auctioneers, listing prices for items.

Online video game economies are strange and fascinating, and something I hope is being studied. They reflect real-world economic principles, and can quickly create their own systems of value based on supply and demand. While Diablo II had its own in-game gold currency, it quickly became useless for the most part. Within weeks, certain rare items rose to ranks as the game’s unofficial trading currency. One such item, The Stone of Jordan, was the most popular. A lot of factors played into this, with it being one of the most powerful items in the game and also the smallest (taking a 1x1 slot). You could easily carry dozens of them on a single character.

If the item was supposed to be so rare, how did it become a common currency?

It turns out years of battle.net, Warcraft II, Diablo, and Starcraft turned a lot of us nerds into hackers. While the majority of users were playing legitimately, some of us were immediately looking for exploits and trying to actively be the first to not just reach the max level, but create third-party cheat tools too. As a result, duplicating items (“duping”) became a thing pretty fast. Over the years, there were a lot of different ways to exploit this, but the most common was to force enough latency in the game for it to become out of sync and more or less crash the game instance.

As more and more people learned to dupe, it caused the Stones to become the new currency of choice for a while. People like me didn’t make it any less easy by sharing scripts to speed up the process. There’s a problem when you can create something from nothing though. You break the laws of supply and demand and create absurd levels of inflation. At first, a single stone could buy you just about anything. The next thing you knew, it was 10, even 20 stones just for the same thing.

Diablo II’s first and only expansion came out a little over a year after its release. While this initially reset the economy by introducing a ladder system—a ranking system anyone could join with a new character. Top players would get high-quality items, and eventually, it would reset and start over again. The problem was, as a young teenager, I had limited free time to ever reach any worthwhile ranking.

I was also an immature, greedy teenager. I still wanted more. But so did everyone else. At this point on battle.net, keyloggers and malware were as prevalent as they were on Limewire. It was common to go in a public chat channel and see all kinds of spam and people phishing trying to steal your account. I was always curious.

I had discovered a "God Mode" hack someone was using to phish for passwords. It was a complete scam of an app written in Visual Basic. It didn’t actually allow you to cheat though…it did nothing more than watch when the Diablo II.exe was running and log all keystrokes that took place within the first 5 minutes or so. It then connected to some Polish SMTP server and sent an email with all the recorded content. Using a standard hex editor, I was able to find the username/password and SMTP server address.

Now I had access to the email where all of the accounts were coming in! Back then, there weren’t login notifications, so I could remain undetected as long as I downloaded copies of the emails without deleting or opening them first. Then I just had to make sure I could log into the accounts, strip off any good items, and be out before the original hacker even knew. I’d make sure to only take a few good pieces I knew would sell, leaving the rest for whoever else to scavenge. Occasionally I’d get lucky and find what I was really looking for—a character on the Ladder system.

I went on to do this for a few months, remaining undetected, even finding a few other hackers with other keylogging apps running the same scam. But after a while, others also figured out the same thing I did with the email login. Soon I found myself in a race to pickpocket accounts before other hackers could log in. It soon also became apparent my copycats wanted to make themselves known. They started going so far as stripping everything, sometimes even deleting characters for fun. Eventually, I just changed the passwords altogether, locking out even the original owner from the email. A few stragglers would still come in, but this mostly finally ended.

I decided to take the average phishing attack further, and this time write my own app. The idea was, “What if I actually made a hack that did just what all the fakes promised?” I started with something simple. A maphack. A simple "Click here to reveal the map” button. And you know what? It actually worked. It was even undetectable by Diablo II’s security component, Warden, for a while.

But the real problem was getting anyone to try it at first. At this point, people were far too skeptical to try it, and for good reason.

I’d like to think what I did next was my first foray into marketing. I went on to create a few different online personalities and accounts, each with their own websites on free platforms like Geocities and Yahoo. Under different usernames, I posted a couple of versions of my app in chat channels and forums. Pretty much where everyone else spammed their own sales. The difference from other spammers though? I started drama between my own accounts, accusing my fake accounts of ripping each other off. And it worked. People love internet drama, and the downloads started coming in.

But, it also did more than advertised...After the user logged in, in the background it opened a new connection, changed the user’s password, and a popup would open with the new password. I thought it was funny. No items lost, no accounts permanently stolen.

I eventually stopped playing Diablo II altogether and moved onto other games. I still occasionally logged in to talk to old friends, and reconnected with others once more when I started playing World of Warcraft, but that's for another story.

In the end, what started as curiosity turned into a lifelong path that shaped how I view technology and creativity. Those early days of hacking games and pushing ethical boundaries were about more than just breaking rules; they were about discovering the possibilities of creation and connection in a digital world.

I’ll admit, I sometimes cringe at some of the choices I made as a naive teenager, but I think that’s pretty normal for anyone. Still, those experiences taught me valuable lessons about responsibility, ingenuity, and programming; lessons I never learned in school. As I grew older, they also made me more aware of the moral and ethical implications of my actions, something I continue to consider in everything I do to this day.

Looking back, Diablo and battle.net weren’t just games or online platforms…they were where I first learned to tinker, create, and figure things out for myself. It was little messy, sometimes chaotic, and honestly a little ridiculous at times, but those moments sparked something in me. It laid the foundation for my love of technology and showed me just how much freedom and creativity it could offer.