About

In my senior year of high school, I had to make a creative project based on Shakespeare's Hamlet for my English AP class over Christmas break. I saw many parallels between A Link to the Past and Hamlet, and considered writing a storyline that would combine the two. I finally ditched that idea and went with something much better: a whole video game that combines the best of both Zelda and Hamlet!

I decided to use Graal, a game engine heavily influenced by ALttP. I spent six days learning the ins and outs of Graal and making Hamlet into a Zelda-type game. I also threw in songs from, and allusions to, several classic video games. The class loved my presentation, and I got to show it to the other AP English class as well.

The project was apparently interesting enough to be noticed by higher-ups. I was nominated to participate in a California Student Technology Showcase sponsored by the California Technology Assistance Project, which would take place in early March at Sacramento, California's capital. To prepare for the event, I revised the game, bringing up to date with the latest version of Graal, and adding and fixing various things.

Downloads

You can download and play the fruits of my efforts below. "The Legend of Hamlet" is supposed to be compatible with Graal. However, the Graal engine changes so often that it is impossible to keep this project up-to-date, or even to guarantee that it will work with a slightly different version of the engine. Therefore, I have also provided a modified version of Graal, so that everyone can have an opportunity to play.

"The Legend of Hamlet" v2.0 hamlet2.zip, 125KB Only works with Graal 2001, not Graal Classic. See included Hamlet.txt for installation and gameplay instructions. graal2001.zip, 4.31MB A modified version of Graal 2001. All the extra levels and images have been removed, so this is NOT a full version of Graal. It is designed to ONLY work with "The Legend of Hamlet," v2.0. Hamlet is not included, so please download the install files for Hamlet above and follow its installation instructions.