I love a good puzzle. I have been known to spend hours decoding clues in an ARG until I saw the codes etched onto my eyelids when I closed my eyes. Imagine my delight, therefore, at reading the news that a tenacious Diablo II player may have unlocked the key to the Diablo III release date.
According to Diablo Watch, the super fan had been playing D2 for years, when one day he happened upon a DOL rune. Playing around with it he crashed the game, and got an unusual error message consisting of a string of numbers. These numbers he recognized as a hex code, and when decoded they spelled out the phrase: "Diablo 3 09/09/09." Now, this is fairly unusual practice for Blizzard "It's finished when it's finished" Entertainment, however, consider the symbolism. Knowing the cultural power behind the number 666, it's not hard to see why an inverted number like 999 would be interesting to the developers of Diablo II.
What fascinates me most about this is that we see in this code the first confirmation that the third game was in developer's minds during their work on D2. This would end up being the ultimate easter egg if Diablo 3 does indeed release on September 9th.
