NorwegianMafia was a free, text-based multiplayer game in the browser. You ran your own mafia from a Norwegian municipality, built casinos and factories, hired gangsters and fought over all of it with your family. Once an hour a new tick arrived, and a round lasted weeks. The game built on an earlier game of the same name from December 2001.
- 35 000
- 500–1000
The front page through the years
How norwegianmafia.no looked, at 1024 × 768, the way most people saw it back then.
2003 
2004 
2005 
2006 
2007 
2011
Timeline
December 2001
The first game
NorwegianMafia builds on an earlier game of the same name from December 2001. Three betas came before the numbered rounds.
April 2003
A new free browser game
Gamereactor wrote about Norwegian Mafia as a new free browser game: one tick an hour, players placed in Norwegian cities and about 500 places in the first round.
October 2003
Round I opens
After months of beta testing the first round opened. Two weeks later the game had just under 6,000 registered players, according to ITavisen. You earned money from shops and workers in about 30 cities, and bribed spies with drugs.
December 2003
10,000 players and NRK P3
Round I ended with 10,000 players, five times as many as the round before, “beyond all expectations”. NRK P3 ran a feature on the radio show Pullover. The next round was built for 25,000 players, and the servers were posted to Oslo over Christmas.
January 2004
Round II, rewritten
Round II was completely rewritten in ASP.NET with its own mafia engine in Delphi. Shops became casinos, the map became every municipality in Norway, and #norwegianmafia on IRC got a webchat. By February 18,000 players had registered, and the game slowed down when everyone came home from school.
The municipality image from 2004 January 2004
“Trønder mafia” in the papers
Byavisa Trondheim wrote about the “Malvik boys” Ronny Rosvold and Geir Kottum and their game: “Geir was the first to get the idea for the game. While he was playing a similar online game, the idea of a mafia organisation infiltrating Norwegian municipalities took shape.” Geir had the idea, and together they created a flagship among Norwegian browser games. Datakjeden donated a computer and Song Networks sponsored the line. Fædrelandsvennen wrote the same week that 10,000 young people had played Norwegian Mafia over the past year.
March 2004
From 200 to 19,000 in a year
Malvik-Bladet wrote that 200 players registered in spring 2003, and 19,000 a year later. “We do it because it’s fun.”
2004
Horse track, lottery and SMS ticker
Manual 3.0 added the horse track, MafiaLotto, four kinds of espionage and an SMS ticker where your greeting scrolled across the screen for 3 kroner.
December 2004
Under PlanetMafia
norwegianmafia.no now showed the game through PlanetMafia, a larger game portal from the same team. Registration for each round happened there.
June 2005
Round XV and a new server
New front pages with the revolver, a new server and TDC Song as main sponsor. 2,732 registered players and 144 online. PlanetMafia was put on hold while the crew built a new game portal.
29 September 2005
Player meeting on IRC
109 players met the crew in #norwegianmafia. Almost 7,000 had tried to register since the move from PlanetMafia, about 18 percent had premium, and premium was halved to 10 kroner to pay for servers and prizes. The crew ran the game for the fun of it, and real money was never to become a factor in the game. Four new helpers were introduced.
November 2005
Over 10,000 players again
“Now over 10,000 registered players!” the news said on 10 November 2005. Round XVII ended on 25 November, and the crew had started a podcast and a blog.
2005
Game of the year
NorwegianMafia won “Game of the year 2005” at the game portal 1001 Spill, “strongly helped by a large fan base”.
The award from 1001 Spill April 2006
Round XX
Round XX ended, and the winner was interviewed on the front page. Summer 2006 brought speed rounds and a new forum, and in August the autumn round, round XXIII, began.
October 2006
“Welcome to the NEW NorwegianMafia”
New design, new forum and new features. Drugs were replaced by alcohol smuggling, the manual moved to a wiki, and the round gathered 7,327 registered players with up to 329 online. The crew took on ten new moderators.
July 2007
The first meetup
The crew and players invited everyone to “the first ever official NorwegianMafia meetup” in Nesna in Nordland, 13–15 July 2007. The same spring the game ran a special Havoc round.
June 2008
A loyal community
The game carried on with a smaller, loyal community. A new round in June got a few extra days before the start, so more players could sign up.
March 2010
Still running
Rounds were still running, now with accounts tied to a mobile number and families of at most 15 members, and a core of regular players kept the fights going.
2011
NorwegianMafia on Facebook
A new version was built for Facebook, now also in English, and run by Smartad IT. The front page promised month-long rounds and an archive of old screenshots and toplists.
How the game worked
The buttons are the originals from the 2006 menu. The Norwegian terms are the game’s own.
- TICK
- Once an hour the mafia engine calculated income, delivered orders, moved gangs and settled battles. A full tick could take 8–10 minutes, and it was “NOT necessary to shout on IRC” about it.
- Casinos were the main income, with two workers each. Attackers took over casinos: two gangsters per casino.
- Factories for bats, revolvers, tommy guns, cars and fighting dogs grew in square metres and needed workers.
- Gangsters were sent out in up to three gangs. An attack took four to five ticks to arrive, and you could not attack your own municipality.
- The family had a leader, custom ranks, a forum and a mass-message centre. “Families belong in every mafia society!”
- You chose one of Norway’s municipalities and could never move. The municipality was an alliance with its own forum and a continuous mayoral election.
- The horse track ticked every half hour, and there was “no formula” for the winner. MafiaLotto was drawn at 10:00 and 22:00.
- Telegraph, logbook and watch post: messages, the last 50 events and every gang on its way to you.
- Points were the value of everything you owned. Your place on the toplist gave your rank, from Sivilist (civilian) to Gudfar (godfather). New players were protected for their first 72 ticks.
The community
#norwegianmafia
IRC was the heart of the game, first on irc.norwegianmafia.no and later on QuakeNet. Families had their own channels, and rule number one was “The operators are ALWAYS right!”
Prizes every round
Top players won real prizes: MP3 players, DVD burners, mice and games like Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournament 2003, paid for by premium accounts and sponsors.
The meetup in Nesna
In summer 2007 the first official meetup was planned, with a train from Trondheim and a bus from Mo i Rana. “It could be great fun to meet people you otherwise only talk to on IRC.”
Today
Smartad, the company that ran the game, no longer exists, and the old websites are gone. Today the founders are behind NorwegianMafia again, through CreatorsJourney AS and Muttok AS. The Facebook page from 2011 is still there, the last living place from that time.
» Siste 15 meldinger
« Vi har nå "endelig" klart å sette en lanserings dato for Norwegian Mafia. »
Carlone @ 23.12.2003 14:21
« vedder på at det ikke starter før i februar »
eYep0k3r @ 23.12.2003 14:15
« Jaja, må ha en god jul da folkens... »
Mamma^^ @ 23.12.2003 14:40
« Norwegian Mafia eier alt... Bestem klokkeslett da.. »
Buddha @ 23.12.2003 14:42
[19:03] <Muttok> Klarer vi ikke å passere 100 brukere på kanalen da? ;)
[19:08] <Muttok> Det er nesten 7.000 som har prøvd å registrert seg på NorwegianMafia, noe vi er fornøyd med.
[19:16] <Muttok> ny pris blir 10,- (halv-pris, kostet 20,- før)
[19:23] <aksel> vi forholder oss 110% nøytrale og objektive.
[19:46] <Muttok> målet har bestandig vært å gjøre det enkelt
[19:53] <ZatH> vi vil ikke gjøre virkelighets penger en faktor i spillet
[20:00] <Ib> Angelou, Sir_Lance, Falkor og Nervopus
[20:00] <DonRasili> (trommevirvel2)The prizes
How players remember it
«Er det noen som har prøvd spillet? Det er sinnsykt kult.»
«jeg spiller dette og er oppe i hammerfest, jeg har 100000 poeng.»
«Sykt underholdene, men det tok MYE av tiden vår.»
«Eg har spilt litt over 2 år og synst at dette er eit fantastisk spill å spille.»
«Nordic Mafia er vel lagt ned, men Norwegian Mafia ble vel startet før Nordic.»
«Så var det noe som het gangsterhood og norwegian mafia.»
The crew
NorwegianMafia was built and run by a small crew, with moderators and helpers from among the players.
- Muttok Geir Kottum
- Zath Ronny Rosvold
- Zlash
- Mr. Fuglem Thomas Fuglem
- Ib3N
- noVa
- Wlffrsether
- erz
- aksel
- xmonic
- Uflidd
- |DuffMan|
- Masta
- hoofbite
- OndSofa (RIP)
- DonRasili
- microman-
- Angelou
- Sir_lance
- Falkor
- NevroPus
- JonasSR
Sources
This history is based on the pages from norwegianmafia.no 2003 to 2013, collected in our own archive, and on press coverage and forum threads.
The archive
- Manualen: Butikker og arbeidere
- Skjermbilde av beta3-grafikken
- Forsiden, desember 2003
- Forsiden, runde II
- Manualen: FAQ, februar 2004
- Manualen: SMS Ticker
- Kommunebildet, april 2004
- Manualen: Crew, august 2004
- Forsiden via PlanetMafia, desember 2004
- Forsiden, runde XV
- Premiene, runde XVII
- Logg fra nettmøtet 29. september 2005
- Vinnerne, oktober 2005
- Premier, runde XVI
- Topplistene, januar 2006
- Årets spill 2005 hos 1001 Spill
- Forsiden, desember 2006
- Om spillet og utviklerne, 2006
- Nyhetsarkivet 2005-2006
- Om NorwegianMafia, manualen 2006
- Treff i Nesna 2007
- Forsiden, mai 2007
- Ticks utsatt, juni 2008
- Forsiden i Facebook-tiden, 2012
- IRC-reglene
Press
- Norwegian Mafia - Nytt gratis nettspill
- Norwegian Mafia - Back in business!
- Nytt Norskt web-basert spill - Mafia
- Bli Norges største mafiaboss
- Pullover
- Ber om 10 000 til internett-spill
- «Trønder-mafia» satser på internett
- Malvikmafia herjer landet
- Månedens feil skjema
- Allsidige Anders
- Ronny lagde ukelønn-app i .NET MAUI
Do you have screenshots, logs or stories from the game? We would love to include them. Send them to [email protected].