Back in the day, as a kid, there was a free shareware game that I played an obnoxious amount of times: Graal. Not the shitty “Graal classic” we have today, (it’s a shell of its former self), but the original Graal 1.4.0; I searched EVERYWHERE and I couldn’t even get a blip more than old forums about the game reminiscing about the “good old days”. It’s widely believed that Stefan wiped the OG versions of Graal from the map, but he didn’t. But not only have I found it, I’ve found nearly all the player made creations for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180312164234/http://nekoroy.com/graal/index.html
The site is long since abandoned it seems, but it has EVERYTHING for the classic graal, from clients to server backups to player made levels, etc, and what’s more I actually got the 1.4.0 client running nearly perfect on my steam deck. This, for me at least, is my holy grail. I have a lot of nostalgia for this old game from before it got destroyed for the shitty “new” version we have today, and with it a lot of memories flooding back to me. Probably doesn’t seem like much because hardly anyone knows or cares about the original Graal, but for me, it’s huge, and I just wanted to share I guess.
Graal!!! I put an absurd amount of time into this game, and eventually developed for it. I remember how exciting it was when Stefan gave me access to the New World project – it was actually very good, but the team ran out of steam and they dropped it most of it. What ended up being released was a hot mess.
I remember I got a house on the river and snuck in a money hack into the server. As an event master, we had to use our own earned money to run events, and that seemed ridiculous. So I’d use my money exploit and run a ton of events for people to make the game more fun. It worked for a long time until Stefan found it.
The original version was so good, it’s what got me into game dev and programming as a teenager. What a cool nostalgic memory.
Man, it was a HUGE impact on my childhood. I would’ve loved that. I just want the original to come back to life; looking at all these old versions and walking around really threw me for a loop. I’m sure there was a lot of dirt behind the scenes I was too young to pick up on, but I’d go back in a heartbeat if we got OG PC Graal back.
I hear you.
It honestly is not that difficult a game to make now days, maybe I will whip up a new version?
And by new I mean I would go back to the roots and make a multiplayer “Zelda: A Link to the Past” inspired project with players having the ability to edit levels etc. – making the original Graal would be really straightforward.
My whole teenage years were about that game, might be fun to revisit again.
Duuuude that would be AWESOME.