Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswright1664 | Hacker News Reader

I’m Chris Wright, mentioned in the 2nd link. I had the original idea, as the article says I commissioned Stefan to write it for me as I had next to no coding skills back then (apart from HTML and PHP). I ran a fairly successful SNES emulation site (I knew the teams behind Snes9x and Zsnes well) and was looking for a gimmick to boost traffic. Stefan took things off in his own direction with the Graal makeover (we never actually got threatened by Nintendo legal) and we lost touch. There was a house in the game that was ‘mine’ and credited me with the idea.

Half related fun fact: I was also behind the very first leak of the SNES Starfox 2 ROM onto the web. One of the devs, which I prob shouldn’t name (though I think it is common knowledge now) was a fan of the site. He got in touch and we did an exclusive interview and ROM release.

View on HN

Hey man. Graal was an intimate part of my life growing up. I had thousands of hours logged on Valikorlia and a few hundred on other playerworlds. It was a good idea. It's where I first started programming; graalscript was my first language.

It's sad to see it go. I really wish we could have a game experience that had the community graal did. There's not much with that level of involvement for players anymore; it's all now downstream of ivory towers and extremely restricted.

Likewise! I played a ton of Graal Online during my adolescence and owe my programming career to its level editor (NPC scripting). I was able to learn how to program without reading much documentation outside of reading its command sidebar and inferring from others' NPC scripts. Thinking about it now, they did an outstanding job making it very straightforward to learn and use.

If you remember Konidias he's been working on a game in a similar art style named Cloudscape, details can be found on Steam!

Seconding graal being hugely formative for me, and I still think of it often.

It was my first real social experience online, and inspired in part the hobby projects that led me into software as a career. Thanks so much :)

I think it's pretty sad how a lot of these projects, that not only had a lot of effort put into them, but also had an impact on a lot of people's lives, they just sort of unceremoniously fade away into obscurity.

Graal Online doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Like there ought to be a tomb stone.

There is a German Wikipedia article[0] and it's mostly readable through Google Translate[1] (I made a static snapshot).

[0] - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graal_Online

[1] - https://archive.ph/77B1o

In typical wiki and also typical German fashion, the article is very technical, focuses on things like technical requirements rather than the story, descriptions or definitions.

Similar story to others here, Graal was hugely formative in 98-99 era. Learned how to script in part to create interactive levels and became a Game Coordinator for a period. Thank you in part for creating it!

Random memory: using infinite gold hacks and the suicide dagger (which would the drop gold for other players) over and over hour hours inside the throne room or the castle west of Burger Refuge.

Loved Graal growing up! Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com