Help me piece together some Graal history

Hey everyone,

I stumbled across this forum today, as I was starting to get nostalgic about the ‘old Graal’. I played in my early teens, between 2000 - 2003 (approx) and still have vivid memories of playing Graal Online - some of the best gaming memories of my life. I remember the guilds, and was a member of at least 3-4 including LOG (for noobs of course) and TCN, plus a couple of others. I remember when the administrators dropped the maximum amount of hearts from 15 to 14, and the outrage that ensued. I also remember a lot of the great heart quests and the lizard shield / sword quests. Sparring was a great component of the game and I remember trying to both perfect my technique and compensate for the lag from my 56K modem. I eventually got banned from the game for downloading a trainer and equipping pegasus boots, a hack that let me run at top speed over buildings and any other obstacles. A GP caught me running over the bank and picnic tables in the middle of town, and that was the end of the road for me.

So from what I can piece together Stefan is long gone, and his business partner (?) has taken over - gutting all the quests, PVP and sparring etc. but keeping the visual aspect more or less intact - so it’s like a glorified chat room? I downloaded the iPhone app but after a couple of moments of nostalgia I just started getting angry that all the best parts of the game had gone. Then I came across you guys, who obviously get what the old Graal was all about. I would love to download the client but only run a mac unfortunately, so it may be a while yet.

So - can you briefly tell me what happened in the interim? Are all the old quests etc. still intact on the Graal Reborn client?

Thanks and all the best with this project! Would love to play soon.

Welcome, glad to see a guy from the old times here. I remember TCN, LOG and others well. TCN and Horde were probably the largest guilds between 2000 to 2002. Perhaps you knew of me, I was/am Viper and was in Baddies, Jedi Knights and a few others and leader of Legion of Doom (LoD) for awhile. I started in late 1998 and quit around late 2001 to early 2002 but still lingered around unofficial servers, websites, forums and places. I did pretty much everything good, bad and indifferent and was banned probably thousands of times but they really couldn’t stop me or anyone else since I just came back using a socks proxy, vpn or random dialup connection. I am probably #1 on Unixmad and GraalOnline admins most hated of all time list.

and yes Stefan Knorr “Bomber” did leave and/or was thrown out by Unixmad over some sort of argument/disagreement of which the details are unclear.

Stefan now runs Avalonia Online which is somewhat similar to Graal and is on Iphone/Facebook and stuff https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aval…926109239?mt=8 http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=257917 I think Stefan is now better off without the dead weight holding him down.

GraalOnline exists as is but does not seem to have any programmer, web developer or anything outside of a few NPC/Level making volunteers, I doubt any significant bug fixes or updates will be done by them any time soon. The only reason Unixmad has not taken everything down and disappear like he did to Fairyland Europe in 2006 is because he still gets an influx of money from GraalOnline via the micro-transactions by just sitting back and essentially doing nothing.

Long story short, your summary is pretty much accurate, it’s not the same, it’s just a glorified “or rather unglorified” chat room.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vug8NElWnw

As for the Graal Classic server listed on Graal Reborn I would say that pretty much everything is intact from the 2000ish days with a few differences/additions, but much better than iClassic, the only problem is that it is very rare to see other players there.

I would recommend trying WINE for MAC OS X http://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/ that might be able to run Graal Reborn and/or other Graal PC versions.

Hey Viper - yeah I do remember you!

Thanks so much for filling me in, can’t believe how the whole thing has unfolded. It’s such a shame to see Graal the way it is now, just a shadow of it’s former self. It seems like if Unixmad had any sense he would have kept the quests intact and got a dedicated development team in place to build upon what they had. Could have really been a continued force in the MMORPG market.

Still, the way it was was something special at least, and I was glad to be a part of it. I’m kinda embarrassed to say I can hardly even remember my nickname. I believe my account name was Gunblade, and I remember changing my nickname often. I do remember that my account had a strange bug where I could never get my guild tag to work properly. I’d have to go with Gunblade (TCN} instead of (TCN) because the client / system wouldn’t accept it, even after I was added to the guild list. Not even the admins could help me with that one!

I’ve managed to get Wine working and can now boot up the Graal client without too much trouble. Once I figure out the server / account conundrum I’ll drop you a line!

Thanks a lot guys, all the best. - Jeremy