The games industry has definitely seen its fair share of wild marketing stunts over the years. But the custom-made, human-blood-cooled gaming PC Blizzardthat gave to a fan as a part of its promotion for Season 2 of Diablo 4 might just take the cake. Somehow, it’s still alive and kicking two years on.
The winner of Blizzard’s bloody battlestation giveaway — a streamer who goes by Storms888 on Twitch — has revealed that the infamous PC is still in “virtually perfect” condition.
“I haven’t seen any drops in performance since the day I got it,” he told Aftermath in a recent interview. “It’s incredible for streaming/recording. Right now I’ve been streaming Battlefield 6 at ultra settings with easily over 200+ [frames per second].”
This technological marvel-slash-monstrosity first made headlines in 2023 when Blizzard announced the giveaway to promote Diablo 4‘s vampire-themed sophomore season, titled Season of Blood. Storms888 says he hasn’t upgraded the PC, which he hopes to pass down to his children.
“I have not upgraded it,” he said elsewhere in the interview. “And yes, the custom nature of it does play a role. I don’t want to change any aspect of it for the novelty factor — would love to give this to my future kids some day — as well as the technical limitations, since the CPU and GPU have custom water blocks mounted on them, and I’m not experienced with messing with those.”
As for whose blood is cooling the PC, Storms888 says that still isn’t clear. Due to its coagulative nature, blood obviously isn’t the ideal fluid for hardware-cooling, and Storms888 believes Blizzard likely mixed some red blood cells into the PC’s standard cooling fluid rather than dumping gallons of pure human blood into it.
“There was a donor slip that specifically said it was a confirmed blood sample/donation, but that was all,” the streamer said of the blood’s original owner. “[Blizzard] did not specify any need to replace it, although they did give me a replacement vial/bottle of blood. This did leak a ton though. I had to put the bottle in a separate bag. It appears that the coolant is mostly regular standard coolant and that they had added red blood cells inside of it. They did not specify what the ratio was, but it’s dark red.”
Bloody technical difficulties aside, Storms888 says he plans to use the PC as long as it runs.
“I will keep using it until a [Nvidia] 4090 [graphics card] and [Intel] 14900k [processor] are no longer serviceable for modern games,” he said. “Overall I am still shocked to this day that I won it. The majority of my life I’ve had absolutely terrible computers. … This genuinely has been a life-changing experience, and it’s opened up so many doors for me professionally with streaming.”
