Blizzard Entertainment is the powerhouse game developer behind some of the biggest and best hits in computer gaming. With competitor Westwood (who did the Command & Conquer series), Blizz essentially owned the real-time strategy game market with its seminal Warcraft (1994), Warcraft II (1995), and eventually Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002). These last two are still widely played today, which — in a world of flash-in-the-pan hits — should tell you something about their quality.

Blizz’s other major line started in the midst of all that RTS goodness with Diablo in 1996. It’s still viewed as a high point in the constantly evolving “D&D” hack-and-slash dungeon crawl genre. A sequel followed in 2000 even more successful than the first (many of Blizz’s games have set sales records, only to be later beaten by other Blizz games). Blizz, of course, found even greater heights of success by combining the lore of Warcraft with the dungeon-crawl motif in their genre-dominating entry into the MMORPG market back in 2004.

So, anyway, the stage is set: company makes consistently excellent products going back 14 years, right? In today’s world, you’d sort of expect them to stumble and start to suck, most notably in terms of customer service. Well, turns out, not so much.

They announced a third Diablo game this summer, so I’ve been vaguely wanting to replay D2 again for a while, but I had no idea where my disks were. When I accidentally found them today (when looking for something else), I was momentarily elated until I realized that they dated from 2000, in an era well before OS X, and would require an OS 9 or “Classic” capable Mac to play. (Or a PC, naturally — Blizz has consistently also released its games on the same day for both PC and Mac, and put both versions on all the disks.) Classic is now a long time ago in the Mac world, and Intel-based Macs can’t even run it. This meant I couldn’t play, at least with these disks.

I pointed my browser over to Blizz, and discovered that D2 was available for download for only $19.95, which made me kinda happy (not because I could give them money; because it was available at all), but then I thought to call to find out if I could get a new download based on my 8 year old license key. As it turns out, yes, yes you can; you just create an account at the Blizz store and use their “add game” feature; you type in your license key, and thereafter you can re-download that game (in its most current and up-to-date version) from their site whenever you like. This works for Starcraft, Warcraft, and all the expansions, apparently, in addition to Diablo, Diablo 2, and its Lord of Destruction expansion.

The whole process make so much sense I can’t stand it. It’d be so easy for Blizz to just blow off people in my situation — it’s not a significant revenue stream either way, and God knows I’ll keep paying my WoW bill, and will probably buy both D3 and all three games of Starcraft 2 when they’re released no matter how they handled this. Instead, though, somebody at Blizz realizes that surprising customers with good service is always good business, and that’s a lesson far too often lost.

Cool.