Diablo 2 - Alpha Version - Gameplay (June 1998)

Sadly, nothing about these gameplay videos is new. He just takes already known videos, strips the sound and the title cards of the original gaming magazines they came from and adds his intro and outro. His material seems to be mostly from my thread on BetaArchive, diablo-evolution.net and the Diablo 2 Artwork disc on archive.org (Edit 3: or a gallery derived from it, such as the ones on MobyGames). It's also possible he used my YouTube Channel or my Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 galleries.

Yesterday, I had a weird exchange with him: I commented on his video where he showed screenshots of Diablo 1 from (allegedly) November 1995. I asked if they were authentic. He responded and confirmed they are authentic. Then I posted a list of reasons why I believed they were fabricated by pasting the old interface onto PreRelease demo screenshots. Minutes later, he set the video to private.
(The health bar had the wrong filling direction,
the interface showed things we have never seen that early, such as the automap and the large full screen dialog text,
the text in the bottom bar had the wrong font, the wrong spacing and displayed texts that are not consistent with screenshots of that time,
Griswold and Ogden were in the wrong places for early versions, etc.)

Also, he is certainly not Tyler Thompson or an original developer. According to his comments, he is from Germany, played the demo of D1 in 1996 and bought the game in early 1997.

Edit: As for that Alpha 0.4 video: Alpha 4 was a mod for the PreRelease demo made by the team of Diablo-Evolution.com (they later switched to .net). He likely used Diablo Alpha v4.21c which has a launcher and interface graphics created by me back then. It is not an authentic alpha of Diablo, and we never claimed it was.

Edit 2: The version info, feature list, progress etc. at 2:52 in the "Alpha Version 0.4" is also fabricated. He likely pasted it into the mod's exe (which we renamed to dll, but whatever) to replace the original text.
 
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Hi, @Hallfiry! Thank you for your post, for bringing these things to light, and also for the links. I am especially enjoying your thread on BetaArchive! Regrettably, this is my first time ever seeing this forum, but I am so glad to know about it now. It looks just like my kind of place. I also subscribed to your YouTube channel. :)

Regarding "Everless", it's unfortunate to hear that he is presumably ripping off your content, and possibly others, and passing it off as his own! For me Diablo II (and of course the original game) has an everlasting, mysterious, almost otherworldly appeal. I still enjoy reading up on it, "discovering" materials, and watching videos on it as I did as a kid in the late 90's/early 2000's. Thanks again, and I hope you stick around, and continue to share with us on The Moving Caravan.
 
Welcome to the forum @Hallfiry and thanks for letting us know about this. I’m looking forward to looking at your content including your Diablo Alpha modpack.

On another note, if he isn’t Tyler Thompson then you might be Tyler Thompson haha.
 
As it happens, I am not Tyler Thompson either. ;)
I'm just a random person on the internet.

That old mod is now pretty outdated. A new, clean and promising project was started by someone else a while ago under the name of Pre-Ablo:
https://pre-ablo.com/

(I guess the only thing missing is the claw interface, which I had ripped from screenshots and injected into the game files.)
 
lmaooo "pre-ablo"... I have to give props for that name. It rolls off the tongue :p:LOL:
 
It'd be funny if the actual Tyler Thompson someday discovered this thread lol.

WILL THE REAL TYLER THOMPSON, PLEASE STAND UP?

where-in-the-world-is-tyler-thompson.jpg
 
Lol we have started a Tyler Thompson meme I suppose.

Also the pre-ablo just opens a possible post-ablo mod.
 
Oh boy, I just noticed the screenshots in this video are also fabricated. None of them are real. He simply took modern screenshots of some sort and pasted the (rather rare) large potion belt from the old screenshots onto them (I suspect he took it from the palace shot below, since he must have seen it as "palace ingame.tif" on the artwork CD). To vary it up, he replaced a few of the potions each time, but forgot to reinsert the hotkey numbers and sometimes fudged the alignment a bit.
As far as I can remember, that belt does not show up again after later 1998.

palaceingame.png





To hide the original source, he sometimes even had to crop videos. This one from German magazine GameStar was cropped at the top to remove their watermark:
1. His upload


2. The unaltered video
 
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Dang, it appears you're right. I just went back and carefully watched the Diablo 1 Alpha 0.4 video. We have hard evidence that it's fake. You can see this by looking at the life/mana globes once they are depleted.
Notice how the home-made Alpha 4.21c has the smokey pattern on the orb, while high quality screenshots of the real alpha show it is entirely clear. He indeed modified the Alpha 4.21c.
 

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galaxyhaxz said:
Notice how the home-made Alpha 4.21c has the smokey pattern on the orb
Click to expand...
Indeed. I literally drew that shadowy bit myself in 2011. I'm not sure why I did it on the red orb, but if you look at the blue one you'll see, its left edge is always dark, because I had trouble moving the sprite.
 
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Man, this is disturbing. It'd be one thing if he told people these are his own concepts/creations, and thereby "fan-art", but he's literally passing this content off as being original/authentic....

Per his video titled 'Diablo 2 - Alpha Version - Gameplay (July 1999)'

"In this video, I present the Alpha Version of Diablo 2 from July 1999. Diablo 2 was released in June 2000. This video material is an absolute rarity. The song featured in this video is also by Matt Uelmen, who created the music for Diablo 1 and 2 and was created in January 1998."

I hope other Blizzard North/Diablo fans that follow him on YouTube will find this thread!
 
Manny said:
Per his video titled 'Diablo 2 - Alpha Version - Gameplay (July 1999)'

"In this video, I present the Alpha Version of Diablo 2 from July 1999. Diablo 2 was released in June 2000. This video material is an absolute rarity. The song featured in this video is also by Matt Uelmen, who created the music for Diablo 1 and 2 and was created in January 1998."
Click to expand...
I love the claim of it being a rarity. The issue of GameStar that had this video is from a time when the magazine sold about 330,000 copies each month. I even own several copies of that exact CD (issue 8/99) myself.
 
Yikes, nice catch Hallfiry and galaxyhaxz with the corroboration. What a weirdo, passing it off as the genuine article... I've shared this thread in some Discords where those videos were posted to help inform people that it was faked, thanks to galaxy for sharing it in the Phrozen Keep Discord.
 
Hallfiry said:
To hide the original source, he sometimes even had to crop videos. This one from German magazine GameStar was cropped at the top to remove their watermark:
1. His upload


2. The unaltered video
Click to expand...

Amazing job on exposing this. It's funny that someone actually recommended this person's channel to me. But there was something about the videos that just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe just the usage of all the old D1 graphics? Not sure...

GameStar is a german magazine/channel that I have known for a long time(I am german btw). Maybe the only big german gaming magazine with the some of it's integrity left.

Nice to see this old gem of a video!

The commentary doesnt really say much that we cannot see on screen already:
He mentions how the kicking can be used to knock enemies back.
Funnily enough, he thought that the Maggot Young crawled out of the death Maggots body, not noticing the egg that was layed, hatching just the moment the Maggot dies.
He called the Golem pretty weak, which it actually looks like in this demo. 😅
Some comments about the graphical effects were made, like the rain drops splashing on the water in Act 3.
He also didnt know the name of the some of the spells, including the last one, which looks like similar to the Nova from D1.
The Demo got rated as 'Ausgezeichnet', which can be translated as excellent.

Edit:
In his copied video Everless mentions a shrine that does not exist in the final version of the game. Despite the shrine literally being named Fire Resist Shrine and the german commentator from the original video mentioning how this shrine "gives us the ability 'resist fire'"(qoute).
Either he never played D2, or he can't read english AND can't understand German! Or he can't tell that the graphics of the shrine got changed.
 
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So, after I commented if he could explain why the orbs in the Alpha 0.4 video have dark regions I drew myself in late 2011, he decided not to answer my question, but instead took the video down.
 
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