Games development is a long, arduous and expensive process. Players know this, even intuitively, and so the assumption is that anything that appears in a finished video game serves a purpose. Why else would developers waste their time designing graphics and coding something in? Just for decoration? That wouldn't make any sense. And yet apparently Blizzard North had plenty of opportunities to mess about when they were making the first Diablo game, as their dungeon crawler featured numerous cows dotted through the game that, well, didn't do anything. They were purely decorative. They just thought it'd be funny to have a load of cows standing around, mooing, providing no use to the player. Of course, with that presumptive nature that everything in a game should serve a purpose - it's like the geek version of the Native American "use every part of the buffalo" - players in the early days of the internet pooled their resources and started spreading a rumour that if you clicked on a particular piece of bovine furniture in Tristram a particular number of times, you would be transported to a secret cow level. Which of course was a load of nonsense, but that didn't stop people from trying it, wasting hours of their time and probably falling prey to RSI as they repeatedly pointed their mouse at every cow in the level, hoping to find the right one and the right number of clicks. Blizzard eventually came out and debunked the hoax, but liked it so much that they actually did put a secret portal to go fight cow warriors in Diablo II.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
