About Atrinik
Atrinik's creators shape its game world, and its software is developed in the open, where anyone can follow the work and contribute.
From 2009 to today
Atrinik began in 2009 under founder and original lead Zoey Rose. The 2011 releases were a major era of development, not the project's origin.
Zoey Rose founded and originally led Atrinik. She worked alongside the wider Atrinik Development Team as maps, art, music, quests, dialogue, lore, and code grew through the work of many people over the years.
See the initial 2009 sourceAtrinik's founding sources credited Daimonin and Crossfire. Classic also retains work from Atrinik contributors and appropriately licensed upstream authors. Their repository notices and per-file records—not a blanket claim—remain authoritative.
Read the Classic history and noticesAtrinik's maps, quests, dialogue, lore, art, animation, music, and sound are shaped by its creators, who review what goes into the game. Upstream work keeps its own author, source, license, and attribution; it is not automatically Atrinik-original.
Follow the exact ownership boundariesTwo paths through the same world
The two lines share a project and a setting, but they are separate implementations with different licenses and release readiness.
The current playable line is Atrinik's maintained GPL C lineage, actively coordinated in the unified atrinik/classic repository. Its client, server, editor, libatrinik, and protocol share one version, release notes stream, and coordinated artifact set under GPL-2.0-or-later, with frequent 5.x releases.
The client is a portable Windows download and, since October 2026, a Linux AppImage for x86_64 systems with glibc 2.39 or newer, such as Ubuntu 24.04 and later. It renders on the GPU through Direct3D 12 on Windows and Vulkan on Linux. There is no macOS client.
The replacement is an MIT reimplementation and improvement: a Go server; a Rust client, editor, and shared renderer; a content toolkit; and a new Protobuf protocol. Its repositories use evidence-gated provenance: independent implementation is the default, while an exact, separable historical Classic contribution may be reused at an MIT destination only when a complete-history audit proves it fits one applicable grant's past-contribution and sole-authorship scope. The Classic repository remains GPL-distributed. These foundations do not yet form a complete game release or replace the playable Classic line.
status: the client, server, protocol, renderer, editor, and content toolkit each publish independent releases, and a new Go pathfinding and navigation service is in early development without a release yet. These are tested foundations, not yet a playable game.
How the project works
People set the creative direction for maps, archetypes, stories, dialogue, graphics, animation, music, and sound effects. Every asset keeps its credit and license record.
Source, plans, issues, and release notes live in public GitHub repositories. Changes go through documented ownership, provenance review, tests, and repository validation before they ship.
Anyone can report a problem, suggest an idea, or contribute code or content. Every change passes review, evidence-gated provenance, licensing, and validation checks.