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Salon on M.U.L.E Creator Dani Bunten
douglips writes "If you're a hacker of a certain age, chances are you played M.U.L.E. Salon is running a story on M.U.L.E. creator Dan[i] Bunten. Ahead of her time, she insisted that games would be most enjoyable when they involved social interactions rather than just flashy single-player action and graphics."
I think Dan should be better remembered for Modem Wars, Possibly the very first online RTS than MULE. It was great fun playing against a friend of mine in MI who was possibly the best MW player out there on my C64 at 2400 baud.
"Modern" game designers, take note...
I can not even begin to explain how much time I have "wasted" on this game. I'm just glad that as of late, she's gotten some recognition, although after you've passed, I'm not sure it matters. In any event, great game!
Peter: I got an idea, an idea so smart my head would explode if I even began to know what I was talking about.
I probably played it against the computer far more than against human opponents, and it was still always a thrill.
(BTW: for those too young to have played it, the stated example of becoming Energy Czar was almost always an appallingly bad strategy, as energy doesn't keep from turn to turn; whenever possible, I always went for a balanced smithore-crystite portfolio, with some food production thrown in. I generally speculated on crystite as well.)
M.U.L.E. was a great game. I remember spending many an afternoon at my friends house playing this game on the C64 about 10-15 years ago. I liked it so much I purchased it for the original Nintendo. The Nintendo version never recaptured the original glory.
I find myself always searching for remakes of these classics like M.U.L.E., Mail Order Monsters, Star Flight etc. Eletronic Arts should remake those games. I'm sick of all these MMORPG's. There is something to be said about the games you could play in an hour and be done with.
BTW, IRATA spelled backwards is ATARI!
I have always found this type of game to be rather odd. Isn't social interaction what you are supposed to be doing in real life? Why would you want to play a game of what you do in real life? Now blowing up aliens or shooting up Nazis... that is cool, because you can't do it in everyday reality.
It was good. I've lamented over the years why EA hasn't acted to reissue this game, but when I look at it... If they did it would probably be as some horribly delayed, then ultimately released as a pile of crap game. The simple formula worked. And it's probably best to just stick with playing the old C64 and Atari versions on emulators.
BTW, as testament to it's goodness, you see original copies of M.U.L.E. clear $35 on eBay. I've tried to get a copy, just for the manual and been outbid a number of times.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In a profile of a person who had undergone a sex-change operation, you would think they would pay more than passing notice to it. It might not mean much in terms of the *ames* that s/he designed, but what more could define this *person* than his/her struggling with this issue ? Heck, even the book "High Score" dealt with the issue more. I'm just shocked that a profile wouldn't cover one of the more interesting points of a person's life. Imagine a book about Clinton's presidency which only mentions Monica-gate in a few paragraphs.
I think the preference in game type has a lot more to do with personality as opposed to what is the "best" kind of game. Personally, I don't like games like the Sims, Starcraft or Black & White. To me, the focus of the game seems to be a power grab, and that's just not me. There is nothing in my psyche that gives me any desire for power, real or imagined. However, I love a good story. That's why I think I liked Myst so much. There was a lot of rich detail in the graphics which enhanced the mystery of what happened in that space. To me, games like Myst, Riven, Exile and Lighthouse are the perfect escape. You get to immerse yourself into another world so removed from your own that you forget where you are. Turn down the lights and put on some headphones and it's almost complete. To an extent, that's also why I like the Quake series and the UT series. The thing is, I like them for the wrong reasons. I am a lot less interested in getting lots of "gibs" or scoring highly. What interests me more is the beauty of some of the environments, especially in all of the Unreal games. I basically play just to take a look around the next level and kind of pretend that I am really there. If someone makes a Myst-like environment for the first "holodeck"-like systems, I will be an addict.
Keep this in mind though: this is MY preference for a game. I am not saying that the kind of games I like are the "best" kind. The mistake that some people make is that think what they like has got to be likeable because it's "the best". They completely forget all other possible opinions.
Un-news
Cellphone makers take note.
Back in the dawn of time when the C64 was a cutting-edge computer (and I was but a slip of a lad) I knew a guy who was a real warez puppy. Back in those days, it meant that you had a room full of floppy disks - no CDs or hard drives.
I got a few games from this guy, but not that many, mainly because a box of 5.25" floppy disks was prohibitively expensive for me at the time.
I remember asking this guy once what his favourite game was. He had thousands (his list was on fan-fold printer paper, about a 6mm high stack - this was well before email), so I figured it'd be something like Test Drive, or something else graphical and flashy.
Well, his two favourites were actually M.U.L.E. and Castle Wolfenstein (way before id/Raven remade it as RtCW). Personally, I never played them (they weren't flashy enough for my superficial self back then), but I remember thinking that they must be pretty special.
In the mid 1990s, I told people about it, and they acted like it never existed. But then again, some of these people didn't get into computing until Windows 3.1 or so. But luckily, the web came around, and I was able to get an emulator.
Now if I could get Mail Order Monster again? I'd be all set.
trying to explain the genius of M.U.L.E today is like trying to explain the genius of greek comedies
and tragedies..
The comic and quirkiness of M.U.L.E was unequaled until Full Throttle. The child-like simplicity and
the complex interactions was unequalled until Tetris.
The joy of scalping your friends for 150 per unit for energy and food, and the sorrow of pirates
snatching your hard earned crystite will never be equalled.
I will never have fonder memories of games than that those of M.U.L.E and Archon.. Even after all
the computers I've ever owned, the Atari800 will forever hold a special place in my heart because
of those two games..
Rest In Peace, Dani. Your foresight and genius was and still is unparalleled, and your
humanity will continue to inspire us.
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
For great M.U.L.E. theme remixes, check out the MP3 collection at:
http://www.eidolons-inn.de/mule/muledown.htm
They even have an all vocal arrangement: http://eidolon.dnsalias.net/mulefiles/MayBeBop_Mul e.zip
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
Wow! This article--and everyone's posts--brings back the memories I have of M.U.L.E. and of its creator. I met Dan Bunten long before M.U.L.E., after he was gracious (and trusting) enough to send me an un-copy-protected version of Cytron Masters when my commercial copy of it refused to boot on my Apple II+. Of course, I was a big M.U.L.E. fan and spent many hours playing it with several friends on the Atari 800 computer. Years later, I bought a Commodore 64 emulator for my Macintosh just so I could play M.U.L.E. again.
Dan/Dani *was* ahead of her time, largely because of the lack of any technology that facilitated simultaneous multiplayer gaming. Not only did Dani have to invent the game, she also had to find some way to make the day's computers facilitate both input and output for multiple players simultaneously. Think about that! Networking in any form was unheard of, so the multiplayer output had to take place on *one* computer screen. And back then, the entire screen's resolution was minuscule. She did some very clever things to keep multiple players involved in the game at all times, which was quite a feat. In particular, I remember Dani complaining about how flaky the Commodore 64 was and how, after a certain amount of use, when a C64 started crapping out, the only solution was to go to the store and buy another one.
In the end, I think it was the limitations of the day's home-computer technology that kept multiplayer gaming from working for most people. The graphics of the day were just too blocky to entice the average person to sit in front of a computer screen for any length of time, and it didn't help that the programmer had *less than* 64 K of memory for both the program and its data. (M.U.L.E. ran in 32K on the Atari 800!)
As for Dani's gender change, she always remained a mystery to me on that. I only met her two or three times as Dani, and the awkwardness was just too great. I remember asking her (delicately) about her motivations for making the change, and her answer was so cryptic that I have never puzzled out what she meant by it. Still, she seemed to be settling into the role quite comfortably, although she felt that her gender change (plus its public nature within the games community) was hampering her search for a job in the industry.
I wish I knew more, and I would have, had it not been for her illness. I feel deeply that she didn't really get a chance to make her second "life" work, that the cancer overshadowed her new gender role just as she was getting started with it. I'm sorry she didn't get that second chance. I think the world is a lesser place because it didn't get a chance to find out who she would have become.
I have an Atari 800 (you know, the one with the 4 joystick ports) in my cube at work set up specifically to play one game: 4-Player M.U.L.E.
To keep things fair, I have 4 identical Wico "The Boss" joysticks so there can't be any whining after I kick everyone's ass.
We play every now and then... usually on Fridays after work. It's a total blast. One day, David Crane came in(you know who I'm talking about, he designed that game called Pitfall! and I guess some of the OS for the Atari) He was nice enough to autograph my Atari. Very cool. He works at Skyworks now. http://www.skyworks.com.
MULE is the perfect game... simple rules, challenging, complex and dynamic interactions and it wraps up in little over an hour. 4-player is the best and the hardest to master because the computer players tend to get a little predictable.
Overall, I'm a Crystite player... but Smithore can be fun if Mules get scarce. I also like to be self-sufficient, so I always have a least one River Valley food plot and extra energy to keep me going. Also, I buy all the land I can get my hands on! 9-12 plots of Crystite almost always maxes out! I will also screw you on energy and food if it betters my position. I stay in 2nd or 3rd place until the end to avoid "dickage"(the game's way of artifically leveling everybody out.)
I've been playing the board game Settlers of Catan lately, and there are a lot of similarities. check it out here. It's great!
Well, just wanted to confess my love for M.U.L.E. It was quite revolutionary for it's time, and I don't think there have been many games quite like it since.
If you haven't tried it, emulators might be ok, but the best in on the Atari 800. That was the way it was meant to be played!
Lusso62
So how many of you would pretend to sell your energy/food/minerals and then run away a fraction of a second before the timer run out?
Or buy up all the energy/food/minerals just so there would always be a shortage in the game?
Or stockpile a huge amount of energy/food/minerals (whatever your players were focusing on..) and then selling like crazy just to produce a huge surplus and make the prices drop like crazy?
Her homepage: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
Her story:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnsStory. html
Her bio:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.h tml