Trivia / Diablo

Page index

• Diablo
• Diablo II
• Diablo III
• Diablo IV

Series-wide examples

• Ascended Fanon: Wild rumors spread, for no apparent reason, of a Secret Cow Level in the first game. There wasn't one. Blizzard, taking it all in good fun, made "thereisnocowlevel" a cheat code in Starcraft... and then put a Secret Cow Level in Diablo II.
• Similarly Named Works: Diablo is not to be confused with an old Puzzle Game of the same name by Manuel Constantinidis, involving connecting pipes.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • The original game had a rumor of a "secret cow level" that the player could access by clicking on a certain cow in the town of Tristram. Although this rumor proved false, in Diablo II the developers put in an actual cow level in homage to the rumor, with its "secrecy" in It Was His Sled territory; similarly, a secret Cow quest was added to the third-party expansion Hellfire, although it wasn't a genuine "Cow level". The phrase "There is no cow level" is also a Classic Cheat Code in Starcraft and a loading screen tutorial tip in World of Warcraft. (It's false; there is a cow level. Thunder Bluff is full of Tauren◊, 8 foot bipedal cows.)
  • Possibly referenced with the exploding cow corpses in Tristram in Diablo II.
  • The Diablo II instance of the secret Cow level was again referenced in one of their most recent April Fool's jokes: an advertisement for their new "Diablo 3 body pillow" featured a disclaimer at the bottom warning users "do not transmute the pillow with Wirt's Leg and a Tome of Town Portal."
• What Could Have Been: Diablo was originally pitched as a turn-based single-player game on DOS and got changed to a real-time Windows 95 game from Blizzard's urgings. The isometric view was inspired by Xcom. Furthermore, David Brevik had thought over the concept a fair amount throughout high school until college (due to getting hooked on Moria/Angband at the time); as the story goes, he had objections to such a sudden and massive shift, before actually playing his own implementation that night and fully hooked on the idea from then on.

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