I think we all ended up here for similar reasons for the most part.
a little pre-reborn backstory: I started Graal in November of 1998 as Viper.
King Clops of the Baddies “back then known as (Baddy)” and most of the other players were pretty cool guys and showed me the ropes.
Once in awhile someone would troll or grief but I liked it and everyone else liked it and back then with the limited features, it made things a little more fun which is why people like PACHUKA were pretty legendary.
almost everyone had some sort of guild site or fan site not only was it okay and normal, it was pretty much expected and nobody was threatened, DMCA’d or attacked prior to 2000 for having a website, graal files or a private graal server, in fact it was an everyday thing and supported by Stefan Knorr known then as “Bomber”
I played pretty regularly between late 98 and 2002 I even briefly had my own guild known as (LoD) or Legion of Doom for about a year.
The last straw for me was when Stephane Portha “known as Unixmad” started firing and making up lies about people such as Mafukie and Godspeed and saying things like “if you want credit for you work then go jump off big bridge, everyone remember you dead !”
It got so bad people started making joke sites about Unixmad and the staff in particular SG111’s Soundoff in mid 2001ish, SG111 “Shane” asked me and a few others to contribute, it lasted until about 2002 when Unixmad, Angel, Nova, “e”, or someone working for G.O. exploited the vulnerabilities in the NewsPro CGI scripts to post false messages and do a false flag against me while simultaneously threatening/bribing Mafukie who was then hosting SG111’s Soundoff on his host “realgamers.net”. “Complete side-note but all the cgi-bin/perl stuff back then was super insecure namely newspro and yabb”
Unixmad and his lackeys at G.O./CJ got exponentially worse from there on… also G.O. was no longer free or really possible to play, nor did I want to around. that time between 2002-2004 was when the mass exodus happened due to forced trial and the player-count dropped off to where it is today on PC “about 10-50 on the biggest servers on prime times”
I made a brief return around 2005-2006 with some of the “anti-unixmad”/“anti-graal” sites, forums, people, irc channels and stuff. Mainly because they supported and hosted files and private 1.3.9 Gservers and “sticking it to the man”
Me, Jellyfish and a few others briefly went around getting LAT jobs on main playerworlds and ones in development, I basically just showed the recruiters some random level/stuff from an existing levelpack and they were all like “OMG THAT’S GREAT!, YOU’RE NOW HEAD LAT WITH TOP LEVEL RC!111!” without even checking. then we replaced it all with “KIM JONG IL’S GOATSE LAND” we even got some big main servers like UN and Valikoria a few times. Jimmies were Rustled, lulz were had or something.
Good people like 39ster, Matriark Tervel and others came along and completely recoded the 1.3.1 and 1.3.9 Linux Gserver codes with completely new and original codes and stuff, others came along and worked together and eventually OpenGraal was born. It was probably about 2007 or something, I just naturally floated from once place to another with random months and years of hiatus in-between while doing better things.
I hang around here because once in awhile I can find a fun graal game and reminisce of old times and also poop-post without fear of Darlene banning me for “offending someone”
