I remember Graal, but where I really sank time in was Era, a modern day mod of Graal. It was so cool, like if Zelda and GTA had a baby. You could get an assortment of weapons, join gangs, get in violent shootouts, I even remember getting blown at a beach house by someone playing a hooker. I think they eventually introduced cars or something. For a middle school kid it was super cool, even though the city was kind of small there was tons of role playing opportunity and emergent gameplay.

Although I’d probably get bored of such a game these days, I’d probably have a lot of fun building it out and watching a community grow from playing it.

I sometimes wondered about the developers who built this game. Maybe they were the age I am now when they wrote it. Is it my turn now to build a game like this for some new younger generation? A circle of life? Eh, I don’t know, I feel like kids these days just don’t play these kind of games anymore on a PC.