Hey what’s up? I’m still in the process unsure of what to do; right now I could care less about Unixmad and his so-called administration. The dude never played or made anything for the game; what’s most important right now to me is getting a history of Graal Classic as it was, since Unixmad is pretending Graal has very little history, is just a bunch of servers, and whatnot.
Really, Graal is a story written by the players, and Graal Classic needs to be immortalized as it was. I am creating a vault of historical players, some key facts about them, Graal Classic key locations, items, and so-forth long before all the junk started cluttering everything and it became an amusement park. I don’t expect you to, but I would really appreciate it if any of you would come over to All Graal and help filling in the story of what Graal is by adding any content and stories about any of the players, items, experiences, etc. To me, the Legend of Graal was created between 1999 to the end of 2000, with some inspirations following. A lot of elements about the game need removed, revised, etc.
Like Zelda & Mario, Graal has a very real story with common characters, personalities, creatures, items, places, and themes; this is what needs to be preserved and turned into the iconic unchanging conceptual representation of the game. We’ll probably never see Unixmad or any of the current “staff” do anything with it, and I’m past the point of expecting him to right his wrongs—because really all I care about is preserving the true story and legacy.
Graal has lots of history dating back to early 1998 when it was called Zelda Online. There were at that time lots of various graal websites, fansites and even Graal webrings. Most of which has long since closed down but you can find some stuff using archive.org if you know names of websites, old graal people, guilds and where to look.
Tons of Graal history can be found in the levels many of which contain information, links to sites and even emails, it is VERY obvious that the levels, graphics, NPCs and other stuff were ALL made by the players. Examples are plentiful in for example Graal 1.1 http://nekoroy.com/graal/files/graal1.1.7z and the Graal Classic levels http://nekoroy.com/graal/files/Graal…January2000.7z
This is just a starting point, but one could waste a lifetime going through all of it.
History of the Graal Client
Graal has it’s origins as small Java programming projects Bomberman and Java Zelda on January 17th 1998 the idea of which came from Chris Wright (SECAIN) of the SNES Emulation Centre and was published on Stefan Knorr’s (Informatik studies at University of Rostock Germany) page Stefan’s Page in 1998 Stefan’s Page in 1999 the first available incantation of Java Zelda is Java Zelda v1 later followed by Java Zelda v2
Later on Java Zelda, Zelda Online was renamed to Graal and put on Stephane Portha’s Cyberjoueurs Page around December 7th 1998 (in fact Stefan Knorr made ALL the Java and other games for Cyberjoueurs/Stephane Portha) These are essentially the Java games from Stefan’s Uni-Rostock page and Java Graal is just a reskinned Java Zelda with different levels.
The PC Graal Client was and still is (up until version 6.1 when Stefan Knorr left) made using Delphi, DirectX and a mismash of compiled code and libraries. Gradually the zelda levels, tilesets and graphics were replaced with slightly different levels and tiles (Graal still to this day using heavily Zelda ripped off graphics and styles) and the world became what is know today as Graal Classic or Graal The Adventure. Versions 0.1 (1stGraal) through Graal1.1.9 saved online player data and most other things to files locally such as saved games to .gsave files or guildcodes to .gcode files ect… This obviously made cheating and messing with the online game super easy and effective and “many lulz” were had. From Graal 1.2 onwards a server side account and guild system is used with an increasing amount of actions being moved from clientside to serverside in future versions for the purpose of preventing cheating.
Also TONS of Graal stuff was put on free webhosts such as Geocities, Lycos, Angelfire, XOOM, ect… Some of it may remain on archive.org or other places.
Not only did geocities have many graal fansites but so much stuff like dragonball z and pokemon pages or fetish pages…
Learning to be a wizard with search engines, downloading things and plugging in random names and terms from memory yields some impressive results. Also talking to people, people like Clops, Lycia and others. I think Clops still frequents Graalians and a few other places.
This is only the tip of a very interesting iceberg. Dare we delve deeper?
Oh wow, cool. Okay you guys are interested. Yea, well I’m veeeery interested. The forums are still active, I just privatized them because frankly I don’t need my content getting janked again necessarily. If anyone wants access, message me on these forums and I’ll set you up an account with access. For now however I am designing a story based on Graal’s actual history, and so I am restricting access to this. And yea I’ve been checking out some of the archive.org sites.
[QUOTE=Spooon;n182739]I’d join your forums but the religious stuff makes me feel awkward. Sorry, mate.[/QUOTE]
I’m cool with whatever anyone’s cup of tea happens to be, I have no shame.
if anything was to theoretically make someone feel awkward I would imagine it would be having other people in real life even know I play/played Graal at all in any time during my life, not religion. I am astonished how everyone here somehow doesn’t already feel awkward beyond the point of no return.
In my opinion nothings wrong with religion or stories or awkwardness so long as it does not kill people, chop off body parts or harm children it’s fine by me.
Wanna feel awkward? check out random stuff on deviantart, or The Five Nights at Freddie’s or Steven Universe fanboys… or the Sonic Fanfics… It’s a mad awkward world out there.
