Development and history

The making of DikuMUD was first announced on Usenet by Hans Henrik Stærfeldt March 27, 1990. At the time Tom Madsen, Sebastian Hammer, and Stærfeldt were the only developers, joined by Michael Seifert in June 1990. Stærfeldt stated that their intention was to create a MUD that was less messy than AberMUD, less buggy than LPMud, and more like Dungeons & Dragons.

The first DikuMUD was in working development as early as October 1990 and officially opened publicly running at freja.diku.dk port 4000 on February 3, 1991. In March 1991, the first public version of DikuMUD, known as Diku Gamma 0.0, became available for download at beowulf.acc.stolaf.edu. Hans-Henrik recalls versioning it Gamma because the team felt the source code was neither good enough to be called an alpha nor beta release.

A second DikuMUD server appeared in January 1991, running at hayes.ims.alaska.edu. Other Diku Gamma MUDs appeared in March 1991 running at eris.berkeley.edu, followed by a multiprocessor version running at sequent.berkeley.edu. By early April 1991, there were DikuMUDs running at spam.ua.oz.au, goldman.gnu.ai.mit.edu, bigboy.cis.temple.edu, and elof.iit.edu.

The DikuMUD running at freja.diku.dk was later moved to the server alfa.me.chalmers.se where the original game continued with the same player base (persistent world and player files). The release of the Diku Alfa source code was in July 1991 and it is uncertain if the release was labelled alfa after the server it was running on or if the team felt this was the first alpha release.

After 1991 Hans Henrik Stærfeldt and Michael Seifert hereafter continued with the development of Diku II and were joined first by Lars Balker and later by Ken Perry and Tim Perry.  Among major components Hans Henrik added a compiler that would parse world files as well as a “DIL” coding language allowing world-builders to script their zones. Michael added a DIL byte code interpreter as well as a Dijkstra shortest path algorithm to allow NPCs moving around and Eliza the MUD therapist. Diku II also features significantly enhanced game system (inspired by RMSS), guilds, a mail system, smart NPCs, and quests.

In 1994 Michael Seifert made a sponsorship agreement with the beer company Tuborg.  In return for selling virtual Tuborg in a virtual Inn, Tuborg would sponsor the setup of a Diku II dial-up BBS server in Copenhagen. The dial-up service ran in Michael’s closet in Denmark for several years until the Internet became more pervasive for home users, Diku II thus became the first publicly available MMO in Denmark. The Tuborg beer, and analytics/reporting tools,  can still be found in the GitHub version of DikuMUD II. The BBS version of DIKU MUD had no impact on the availability of the original DIKU MUD server which remained available via the Internet.

In 1996 Michael Seifert moved to California, USA and set up DikuMUD II on the domain Valhalla.com (originally running as valhalla-usa.com), and moved the original DIKU II server and original player base to this new service. Valhalla MUD was running on a local Internet server with the intent to try to further commercialize the game. The first such attempts included a small monthly fee from users. But that strategy was quickly scrapped because it essentially moved the player base to other free (Diku) MUDs. After a few other attempts a workable model was found whereby players could buy virtual items, such as e.g. equipment or homes. The setup however never generated enough revenue to become a commercial success of scale.

Valhalla MUD was operated by Ken Perry from 1998 – 2020. Since 2020 Michael Seifert, Ken Perry and Tim Perry have been maintaining valhalla.com, currently running on DikuMUD version 3, with the same uninterrupted player base and world files reaching all the way back to the initial launch from freja.diku.dk in 1990.

The Valhalla MUD logo was chosen from a competition among MUD players and Hans-Henrik Stærfeldt designed the artwork inside the logo.  The Danish consultancy Pentia, which was founded by Michael Seifert, uses the base Valhalla MUD logo without the artwork.  The logo with the artwork was also coincidentally “borrowed” by the Royal Danish Theater for their outdoor play “Thor” which was setup in Dyrehavsbakken in 2006.