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.
As someone who has never heard of Graal, despite being plenty old enough to have done so, what would you suggest for the best files to download? Can you give a quick summary of what the game is and why it’s fun to play?
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.
The part of player created content sounds more like Second Life or VR Chat, but 2D. Or a 2D Roblox, minus the evil corpo behind it.
Looks like it was a multi-player Zelda-like with user made campaigns.
I can see why that would be a hell of a lot of fun.
Graal is the French name for grail… No wonder it was hard to find.
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.
Neat. I remember me and my friends trying to come up with enough stuff to build our own world. Pretty sure we didn’t but still cool to see all the player built stuff.
Looks like 1.4.1 is the first Graal Reborn revision. Don’t see a 1.4.0 anywhere. Are you running the server as well or just the client?
Ah they used to publish server lists and clients/servers for graal, but looks like they were threatened and shut that part down. Too bad.
