The Early Beginnings

• The Powers of Northern Lights
• Code and Bugs
• The Goal
• Thanks

Northern Lights was opened officially June 6, 1992 by Anna Eklund, also known as Vitastjern. In the early beginnings she had plenty of help from Gjermund Sørseth (also known as Nicknack), one of the original authors of the dirt-code.
To begin with there were not too many players on Northern Lights. This suited Vitastjern fine since she had started with the plan that she'd use the mud to learn how to program in C and have some good fun in the process. However, she soon discovered that maintaining a mud takes quite a lot of time and dedication (surprise, surprise) and that she could do with some help with the programming and administration of the game.

The Powers of Northern Lights

In the fall of 1992, Sfinx, ErIC and Westley were appointed as Archwizards. ErIC also became a coder. The archwizard crew grew as more and more players discovered Northern Lights and the workload for the powers increased. Karin, Tracelor, Doc, Galadriel, Eri, Doomdark, Art, Cux, Malificent, Ozymandius, Jabberwock, Hex, Ithor, GreyJew, Jar, Sethbean, Dregarexter, Kalzar, Clio, Caspian, Og, Andrei and Leeloo all are (or have been) powers of Northern Lights.
Peloquin, Jar, Jabberwock, Doomdark and Cux have been named Patrons of the Realm after doing Northern Lights great service.
All the time Vitastjern has remained as the sole Goddess of Northern Lights.

Code and bugs

The changes, additions, bug-fixes and bug-adding that has been done to the mud code has mainly been provided by Vitastjern, ErIC, Ithor and Kalzar. Doomdark has also been of service.
The source code is a heavily modified version of dirt3.0 and we are constantly in the process of adding new interesting zones and puzzles in the hopes that the players will find Northern Lights an exiting and challenging environment.

The Goal

Vitastjern decided early on that diversity on aberMUDs was A Good Thing(tm). When she started playing with MUDs in the fall of 1989, most of them looked pretty much the same. After being without telnet access for almost two years, she returned to the aber scene in February of 1992. Nothing had changed on the MUDs. Almost every zone (area) known to the aber community existed on at least two different muds. Players would learn only one zone and then do it reset after reset until they had scored enough to become wizards.
This pretty much defeated what Vitastjern thought was the main idea with the MUDs, namely to explore and discover new and exciting things. With this in mind, she decided to work towards a diversity of aberMUDs, so that the mudtype as such would have a greater chance to survive and attract new players.

After a while, Northern Lights certainly managed to attract players. It has since it was opened, grown to become one of the worlds most popular (if not the most popular) MUDs of aber type. The goal is to create challenging puzzles, a friendly environment for the players, and a place for people to relax and have a good time for a while.

Thanks

A heartfelt thanks goes to the following people:

• Richard Acott, Alan Cox and Jim Finnis for creating the original versions of AberMUD.
• Nicknack (Gjermund Sørseth) and Alf (Alf Salte) for writing the original dirt code that we have since added to and changed almost beyond recognition.
• ErIC, Ithor and Kalzar for being excellent coders and good friends.
• The powers of Northern Lights - you have always advised me well (and bopped me over the head when I needed that too).
• South, Iguana, Kender, Nicholai, Flyer and many others for their help with different coding issues. Suede for sharing with me ideas and the bugs he finds on his mud (but the bugs never seem to work here... ;)
• All the good people that have spent their time and imagination writing the zones for Northern Lights (they are too many to be listed here, but the credits command on Northern Lights will list the names of them all).
• Jabberwock, Sendog, Rowlf, Ravyn and Crimefighter that made the beautiful NL banners that can be seen on these pages.
• Gervaise (Austin Plunkett) who created the beautiful raytracing of Puff and of The Temple of Paradise.
• Ellyll (Alf Nathan) for revamping the homepage and his mother (Mair Perring) for the beautiful painting of the aurora borealis (northern lights) and the unicorn used as a background.
• All the players of Northern Lights. Without you, all this would be worth nothing...