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Hall of Fame Game M.U.L.E. To Be Ported To PC
DebateUSA writes "If you ever played the game M.U.L.E. on the Atari or Commodore computer
systems in the early 1980's, there's a company producing a new version for
the PC.
" Ah, resource allocation.
If you're gonna report a story about a port, then make sure it's actually a port, and not a remake. Remakes, even using the same title (re: Hasbro Asteroids) aren't the same as the original, they always monkey with it, and it's never the same.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
You make a good point-- for all the nostalgia being thrown around on the topic of old computer games, it might be nice once in a while for someone to summarize for those of us who weren't there.
MULE, however, was a game I recall from my childhood. Both the idea and the execution were quite simple-- the premise was that you were part of a 4-person colony on a distant planet called "Irata." (Get it?) The game proceeded in 12 rounds-- each round began with a land grab, in which each player would select a parcel of land on the planet's surface, although some parcels were more desirable (and thus, more contentiously sought after) because of the natural resources they contained. Once the land grab was completed, each player would have the opportunity to exploit the resources on his or her plots of land by purchasing, equipping, and deploying MULEs ("multiple use labor elements"-- i.e. robots). Each parcel could be used to either grow food, generate energy, or mine Smithore.
After each player had his or her turn to deploy MULEs, the game yielded a harvest on each parcel, depending on the suitability of each parcel for the use it was put to, various economies of scale, and random events that increased or decreased the production of certain goods planetwide or on a local level. Phase 2 of the round-- the auction-- then began.
Each commodity was placed up for auction, and a player could either elect to buy or sell that commodity in that round. Thus, if you produced only food, you'd need to buy energy during the auction, since you need energy to run your MULEs. While the colony maintained a store which bought or sold excess quantities of each commodity at fairly reasonable prices, because of supply and demand, predatory buying or selling, or a disaster at the store, players would often find that the store was out of stock and their fellow competitors were the only source of necessary commodities. Consequently, you would wind up paying exorbitant prices demanded by the monopolist with the goods. In this regard, the game rewarded, at least on the surface, highly cutthroat play. I say "on the surface," because the game also required the players to achieve a colony-wide level of success by the end of the game, and a player who extorted his fellows might become the richest player in the game, but the colony might be declared a failure overall, making the victory phyrric.
That's the general outline of the game, although there were lots of little touches that made it more complicated. The reason most people recall t fondly was because it was because it was a game that required some critical (and fast) thinking, but was designed to support lots of different strategic approaches-- you could be a land baron, keeping other players from obtaining important parcels, even though you never developed them yourself; you could focus your strategy on one commodity and hope to control the market; you could play a balanced approach; you could screw people surreptitiously, etc. The game was simple to learn, and primitive in its execution, but was conceptually rich and rewarded those who planned ahead. It also introduced a lot of interesting competitive economic concepts like economies of scale, supply and demand, monopolies, etc., that had not been incorporated into computer games before. And although the graphics were primitive, the characters involved had a whimsical feel to them and it had a funky little theme song that was catchy.