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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."
Did Dan Bunton become Dani Bunton in the 2.0 release... I heard he had some new features added. (And unlike Microsoft, a few removed too.)
~Hammy
The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.
-Tony Blair Today, 2003
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...
Warcraft by yourself is pretty fun... multiplayer rules.
Duke Nukem by yourself is pretty fun... playing against someone was awesome.
DAOC, EverQuest, heck even all the MUDs that existed were barrels of never-ending fun.
--------
Free your mind.
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!
As I recall, this was referred to as Edu-Tainment, which fell out of favor when faced by the likes of first person shooters and one-on-one combat games. I still play M.U.L.E. on a 64 emulator and have hacked it various times over the past 15 years. I've had it play as many months as I like, usually by 18 you can see some actualy economic cycles develop, though in the c64 version there's some issues with the money cap. I don't recall which one, but one value rolls over at 32678, the other value does at 65536, which can make for some radical changes in ranking :-)
Still, it's one of my all time favorites. And it Dani was ahead of her time, then those who enjoyed the game, like I did, were also.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here is a link to a pretty good M.U.L.E. clone named Space HoRSE. Not quite the old version, but you can try the free demo for nostalgia's sake.
M.U.L.E. is one of the best games ever.
It has very interesting rules: with other 3 players you land on planet Irata (read backwards!) and start colonize it. Every turn you get and buy new plots, then put artificial mule on it. You not only decide what to produce, but also set price for buy/sell. There is true economy there!
Please notice year this game was released. Please notice hardware it runs - just 64KB of RAM! It's extremely playable and contains multiplayer support (wihout net of course). I don't know _any_ good clone of that game.
To be honest I started playing with Atari800 code, to play M.U.L.E. with my girlfriend (two joysticks support!).
M.U.L.E. is just perfect. Like NetHack or DOOM.
What about a nice round of capture the flag Quake(1/2/3), or some Unreal Tournament? I know people who have cut off all social interaction to gain status on those games.
But in all fairness, how much social interaction did these people engage in anyway?
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
but nobody can say Counter-Strike involves social interactions...
Sure they can. I've played both ways: online and just with bots (in CS and in other games). Despite the shallowness of the social interaction, there is quite a lot of it when the players are human. The way that you form quick non-verbal alliances with teammates to get a certain thing done. The way vendettas come and go. The brainless voice commments...
But that's just it - it's _not_ brainless. I mean, it certainly isn't what one might call intelligent, but it's very human. In fact it's so human that we think it's brainless. But I've yet to see any AI that provides even a dash of the thrill or depth of going against humans - even in a flashy action game.
Nothing wrong with the flashy graphics in and of themselves, but I bet even you would prefer - over the long term - a satisfying game with average graphics to an empty game with flashy graphics.
Also if anyone is interested, see this text preservation of the M.U.L.E. Manual, particularly the text on the back cover, and see the cover art here. Hilarious!
(With all due respect)
That's not a game developer chick! That's a man baby!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
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 don't think there's any doubt that computers have raised the single player game to levels previously unimaginable.
We've gone from puzzle games, crosswords, solitaire and such to fully immersive interactive worlds like Grim Fandango and IL2.
I, for one, think that there's too *much* emphisis on multiplayer these days, to the extent that single player is often totally ignored.
However, all that being said, whether you *think* you are acting socially or not, a multiplayer game of Counter-Strike is an entirely different, ummmm, ball game, just because you *know* those are actually other people out there.
And while I may spend many, many, *many* more hours driving Grand Prix Legends in solo mode it's the online racing against real human beings that gives the game the spice that has allowed it to remain the king of Driving Sims for over 4 years, in a world where a game more than one year old is considered dead.
I'm a geek and a Buddhist. I deeply revere hours spent in solitary concentration and contemplation, even in my recreational hours, but I am *not* socially averse or inept either.
If you think Thoreau was a hermit than if you read Walden for the first time you'll be likely to proclaim him, as did one Amazon reviewer, a "fraud." Thoreau posed an experiment in reducing human living to its bare essentials. He considered social interactions to be one of the things that man cannot truly live *entirely* without and remain a man.
He strove to find the right *balance* between solitude and social interaction.
So should you - and so should game designers.
KFG
For the nostalgic :
http://www.denisleroy.com/atari/mp3/Mule.mp3
Don't you hate that, when at the last minute the guy moves his joystick and runs away from you and you're like "Wait Wait! I'll pay more!" and you keep running and running but you just can't catch him and then bang the auction is over.
I hate that.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
But my favorite computer game, before I really got into computers, was leisure suit larry.
Guess I had a lot of growing up to do.
I'll get around to it someday. Until then, don't forget to buy condoms before you go to the hooker! Ken sent me!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Exactly - Dani Bunten was transsexual. It happens more than you'd expect in the computer realm. I think Slashdot had an article about a year or so ago about someone who had made a huge advancement in the computer field, then disappeared due to being transsexual, and her for the longest time not taking credit for the work she did as "he".
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Dan was also behind one of the greatest games of all time, Command HQ. It is definitely an ancestor of modern RTS games.
Oddly enough I had a hankering for classic games this past weekend and downloaded Command HQ (abandonware) and played a few games of it on Sunday. (I bought this game back in its prime and I still have the manuals, but the media is missing.) If only I could play it over the Internet...
The M.U.L.E. scene is alive and well, even now many years after its release. Ah planet IRATA (which was Atari spelled backwards).
While there is no GameSpy planetmule.com website for M.U.L.E, I strongly recommend World of M.U.L.E as the best starting point.
The Strategies is insightful, giving the designer's own ways of beating their enemies.
For the diehards, there is screenshots of the long-lost sequels: namely the Deluxe Amiga version, as well as "Son of M.U.L.E." which Dani discontinued because of EA's desire to add guns and bombs to her creation.
Finally, is Dani's email letter to the site shortly before her death.
A brilliant creator, I wish she was still around making great works.
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Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
right here.
I don't remember which platform this was on, but I have fond memories of becoming a loan shark. You'd borrow small amounts of money until you got a runious interest rate, and then made a payment of somewhat more than you owed. The "banking" computer player would then become a debtor and would continue to make interest payments to you (officially, you were making negative payments to him). Since there was no logic for him to ever pay the loan off, it was a grand way of getting a healthy balance.
Ah, memories...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Commanding upwards of 30(?) independently-programmable robots across mountains and through forests while under the fog-of-war (no enemy sightings unless your units do the sighting) all in real time! Vaguely based on football metaphor, each side also had a ComCen unit, which was effectively your quarterback. To lose this unit was to lose the game. The Comcen could also launch massively destructive missles, or attempt to shoot down said missles.
All of this in real time, all over a 1200-baud modem. Wow!
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
The correct term these days is "Gender Reassignment Surgery". Not everyone who undertakes a gender transition has this done.
I know of over 20 transsexual game designers. It is like gays in the floral industry. Dani was the best of us all.
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
A 1985 interview with Dan from Antic magazine
A 1985 review of M.U.L.E. from Creative Computing