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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 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
Cellphone makers take note.
The article got it just right -- it didn't try to hide the fact that Dani had transitioned, but it didn't make it the central fact, either. Which is a Good Thing, as there's much more to a person than just the fact of having had SRS or not.
Dani would have been the first to tell you that, too -- she had a very negative view of her transition, and posted an article on her web site (which didn't make it onto her memorial site) advising people considering transition not to. I disagree with her perspective on that (stop for a moment and parse the name "Futaba-chan" :-)), but there's a lot more to being trans than just transition.
BTW, she changed her last name to "Berry" when she transitioned.
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