About Valhalla
History
Valhalla's story starts in Copenhagen in 1990. Five students at DIKU, the computer science department of the University of Copenhagen, set out to write a better multi-user dungeon than the AberMUDs they had been playing: Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert and Hans Henrik Stærfeldt. Their game, DikuMUD, opened to the public on 3 February 1991 and its source code was released that summer. It became one of the most copied game engines ever written. Most of the text games that followed, and the shape of later online worlds like EverQuest, trace back to it.
The authors did not stop there. Stærfeldt and Seifert kept building what became DikuMUD II, with guilds, quests, in-game mail and smarter characters, joined along the way by Lars Balker and later by Ken and Tim Perry. A Tuborg sponsorship paid for a dial-up server in Copenhagen in 1994, which ran for years from Michael's closet. That second engine was never published; it simply kept running, with the same world and the same players, as Valhalla. In 1996 Michael moved to California and the game came with him as Valhalla-USA, then settled at valhalla.com in 1998. From that year Ken Perry ran the game, with Tim keeping the servers alive. Michael went on to write DikuMUD III, the engine Valhalla runs on today, and in 2020 released it as free software on GitHub, the same year the original DikuMUD sources were re-released under an open license.
More than three decades on, Valhalla is still here, still run by the people who built it, with areas written by generations of volunteer builders. It is ready for you to slay dragons, find your fortune, make friends, and have a good time.
The website through the years
- 1996
- valhalla-usa.com. Pages on how to telnet from Netscape, Internet Explorer, a Unix shell or X Windows, a players' address book, and a FAQ explaining why Danish players were sent to the dial-up server at home.
- 1998
- The move to valhalla.com; the counter on the front page started on 22 January 1998.
- 2001
- A full builder's library: the VME manual, DIL language reference, quest and guild tutorials, plus maps, clans, socials and a newbie guide for players.
- 2005
- "Home of the Valhalla Mud Engine V2.0", the frames-era site that lasted more than a decade.
- 2020
- DikuMUD III brings the browser client: play over secure WebSockets with no telnet program at all.
- 2026
- This site, rebuilt to work as well with a screen reader as with a mouse.
The engine
The game runs on DikuMUD III, which is free software on GitHub. If you are curious how a MUD works, or want to help, the source is there to read.
Credits
- Michael Seifert
- Author of the Valhalla MUD Engine (DikuMUD III) and co-author of the original DikuMUD.
- Administrators
- Whistler (Ken Perry), game administrator. The person you will actually meet in the game.
- Papi (Michael Seifert), engine author and administrator.
- Bakka (Tim Perry), the benevolent one who is never on and never seen, but keeps the servers running.
- Palio (Kathy Perry), co-owner of the game alongside Whistler for many years.
- Builders and players
- More than three decades of areas, quests and stories were written by volunteers. Thank you to all of them.