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READY LOAD "D:IRATA.RPT" PLANET IRATA COLONY REPORT ========================= M.U.L.E. (1983) filed by Mitchell Brunk, colonist since 1983 |
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> ARRIVAL In the summer of 1983 I was nineteen, I'd just finished my first year of engineering school, and I spent every dollar from a summer job at a lumberyard on an Atari 800 and a disk drive. That fall a friend in the dorm came back from the store with a game called M.U.L.E., and the four of us, Ray, Russ, Ed and me, played it nearly every night until Thanksgiving. I failed a chemistry exam that semester. I regret nothing. Sixteen years later I'm a substation engineer for the electric company here in Dayton, I have a wife, a mortgage, an eleven-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, and this spring I went up in the attic for the Christmas lights and came down with the Atari instead. It still works. The disk drive still works. The M.U.L.E. disk still loads. My kids, who have a Nintendo 64 and a Pentium II, looked at the screen like I'd brought home a typewriter. Three weeks later they were fighting over who got to be the Flapper. We've played most Friday nights since. This page is for anybody else who remembers, and for anybody who doesn't and should. |
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> HOW IT WORKS Four colonists land on Planet Irata (spell it backwards) with a little money and a lot of empty land, and have to build a colony that can feed and power itself before the ship comes back. If you don't have four people, the computer plays the empty seats. The Atari 800 has four joystick ports across the front, and M.U.L.E. was made to use all of them. Every month in the game goes the same way: 1. LAND GRANT. A box moves across the map one plot at a time, and when it's on a plot you want, you press the button. Whoever presses first gets it. Then sometimes there's a land auction for an extra plot. 2. DEVELOPMENT. Each player gets a turn, and a timer. You walk your little guy into town, buy a M.U.L.E. at the corral (a Multiple Use Labor Element, a robot that looks like a mule), take it into one of the shops to outfit it for food, energy, smithore or crystite, then lead it out to one of your plots and install it. If you've got time left, you can go hunting the Wampus, a creature that blinks on and off in the mountains and pays a bounty if you catch it. When you're done, you go to the pub, which ends your turn and pays you money for the time you had left. 3. PRODUCTION. Your M.U.L.E.s make stuff. Then something happens: a random event, good or bad, to one player or to the whole colony. 4. AUCTIONS. Everybody buys and sells, one resource at a time. Buyers line up on one side of the screen and sellers on the other, and you push your joystick to walk toward each other. When a buyer and a seller meet in the middle, goods change hands. The store buys and sells too. This is the part where friendships end. What the resources do: food decides how much time you get on your development turn, so if you run short, your turns get short. Energy runs your M.U.L.E.s, and a M.U.L.E. without power doesn't produce. Smithore is what the store builds new M.U.L.E.s out of, so when the colony runs out of smithore, nobody gets a M.U.L.E. Crystite is just money, but it's a lot of money, and it's hidden under the ground and only shows up in the harder games. The land: river plots grow food. Plains are best for energy. Mountains are for smithore, and the more peaks on the plot, the better. At the end, when the ship comes back, the game rates the colony as a whole, and the richest colonist wins. |
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> THE RACES Before the game you pick what kind of creature you are. There are eight: Mechtron, Gollumer, Packer, Bonzoid, Spheroid, Flapper, Leggite and Humanoid. Most of them start with the same money. Two don't: FLAPPER gets extra money to start. It's the one for beginners and kids, and it flaps. Nicole has been a Flapper every game since April and will not discuss it. HUMANOID starts with less. It's the expert's choice, and the joke is that the human is the one at a disadvantage on this planet. I play the Humanoid now, partly as a handicap and partly because my kids think it's very funny to watch Dad be the poor one. |
> FRIDAY NIGHT ON IRATA
The best thing about M.U.L.E. with kids is that it's a game where you have to cooperate and compete at the same time. If one player starves, the colony suffers, and at the end the game grades the colony as a whole, so a hungry neighbor is everybody's problem. So you'll see an eleven-year-old who's been gouging his sister on smithore all night quietly sell her the food she needs so the colony makes it. Then gouge her again next month. That's the whole game, and it's the whole family too. And the music. Everybody in this house can hum the M.U.L.E. theme. Heather hums it doing the dishes. I'm sorry, Heather. |
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> MORE * STRATEGY: resource by resource, month by month, and what to do about the random events. * THANK YOU, DANI: a few words about the person who designed this game, who died last summer. If your Atari was the 2600 and not a computer, Ron Gutierrez has a whole page about it, his 211 cartridges and the console he got for Christmas in 1980: The Atari 2600 Shrine. |
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