Following the recent release of #AssassinsCreedValhalla , now is as good a time as any to dust off the paper I did for @HistoryFestival in 2017, tracing the weird and wayward history of vikings in video games. Keep your hands inside the cart at all times; this'll be a bumpy ride. Our journey begins back in 1982 with the release of 'Viking' for the TRS-80. Glumly hailed by its manual as ‘𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 the best simulation ever written for the colour computer’, the game lets you tread the perilous path of 8-bit resource management on the way to Valhǫll.