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.

  • p5yk0t1km1r4ge@lemmy.worldOP
    0·
    7 months ago

    Oh man, where to start? It was basically a player driven legend of Zelda (top down, snes graphics) game. Are you familiar with littlebigplanet or dreams on playstation? It was basically the first community driven game based on creations from other players, and it’s approach to scripting and level design was easy to pick up and learn (for its time). You could make entire games with it, even custom items. The game was released in 1999, so by today’s standards it is pretty basic I think, but still. It’s not perfect, but it was fun. It had its own campaign and allowed you to make your own essentially. It also had a really cool customization system. You could design your own skins, shields, swords, weapons, etc. Some of the more devoted among us even made custom music, and then you could import them all to the game. It was both offline and online too, with its own dedicated servers, and online it functioned as an mmo where you could contribute your levels and houses, if they were approved. There were actually multiple servers with their own expansive worlds aside from the main server. The big thing for me was just exploring what everyone made; the internet was fledgling and new back in those days, and it was awesome as a kid to learn other kids were out there making things. Sure, there were adult creators, but most of these creations were made by kids between 10 and 16. Now though I’d say it functions as a really cool time capsule of a simpler time. The fun came in sharing, creating and playing other creations. If you’ve never played it, you may not find it nearly as great as I do, honestly. The nostalgia hits hard, but overall I’d say it’d be worth at least poking around for those without it, just to see it. Hell, I won’t ever turn anyone away from it though. I think it’s important to archive a piece of obscure internet history like this and to also spread the word to anyone else who played it back then. I’d love to give the game new life.

    As for files? I’d say just download the last known version of the game before they got rid of player creation, the offline campaign and forced it to always be online. The file to download is Graal 1.4.0. It contains all you need to play it, and please note, a good chunk of what’s in the game is from kids who are full grown adults now. If anything, treat it as a museum. If you do want more, the jedi level pack is a good pack to play around with.