It may come as a surprise to some, but online multiplayer gaming didn’t begin with World of Warcraft or even EverQuest. Back in the 1990s, long before broadband and GPUs were household staples, we had Multi‑User Dungeons – MUDs. These were text‑based online worlds you connected to over telnet, and they came in all flavours: social hangouts, Dungeons & Dragons–inspired adventures, exploration‑heavy quest worlds, and everything in between.
One of the most beloved of these for my uni group was Northern Lights, hosted originally at the Computer Society of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden (alber.ludd.luth.se 6715!). It later moved under the care of its founder, Anna “Vitastjern” Eklund. Sadly, a catastrophic server failure a few years ago destroyed the world and its source code. As Anna wrote in a recent facebook message:
I’m sorry, the source code is not available due to the catastrophic failure of the server. Furthermore I promised the authors of quite a few NL‑specific zones to never give them out, so I am against people reverse engineering them without the authors’ consent.
If you get hold of the base dirt3 source code that NL and other MUDs were built on, please have fun with it, but make it your own work and place.
NL existed for 31+ years. Let it rest now.
For many of us, NL was a formative part of early online life. And for me, it also brought back memories of Eiru, a MUD based on the same codebase that I ran in UCD Netsoc in the late ’90s. That world, too, has long since vanished.
But the story doesn’t end there.
A few weeks ago, I got in touch with Amy Antonucci via Facebook. She was still in touch with Alf Salte, the original author of the Dirt MUD engine, itself descended from AberMUD (a rabbit hole for another day). Alf still had the original Dirt source code and gave permission for it to be made public again.
So after more than 30 years, the code that seeded Northern Lights, Eiru, and countless other MUDs is available on github.
This codebase hasn’t been touched since 1994, so getting it running again has been… educational. Let’s just say I’ve become reacquainted with gdb. I’ll write more about those adventures in future posts.
For now, though, I’m happy to share that the Dirt MUD engine, complete with zone files, is on GitHub: https://github.com/albertw/dirt
If you’re interested in retro gaming, game history, or just want to poke around a piece of online‑gaming archaeology, have a look. Bug reports, fixes, and pull requests are very welcome. And if anyone out there has old patches, zone files, or stories from the Dirt lineage, I’d love to include them.
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