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THANK YOU, DANI =============== < BACK TO THE COLONY REPORT |
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When I opened the M.U.L.E. box in 1983, the name on the design credit was Dan Bunten, of a small company in Little Rock, Arkansas, called Ozark Softscape. I didn't know anything about game designers then. I figured games came out of a factory somewhere, like toasters. M.U.L.E. was the first game that made me wonder who had made it, because it felt like it had been made by a person with a sense of humor and a point of view. In 1992, Dan Bunten became Dani Bunten Berry. I've used the name she chose everywhere on this page except when I'm talking about what was printed on a box in 1983. Dani Bunten Berry died in July of 1998, of lung cancer. She was forty-nine. I didn't hear about it until this spring, when I got the Atari down from the attic and went looking on the Internet to see if anybody else still played. That's how I found out, sitting at the kitchen table with the M.U.L.E. disk next to the keyboard. I'm not ashamed to say it got to me. |
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> THE GAMES These are the ones I know about. I've played the first two on the list. I'm hunting for the others. M.U.L.E. (1983). Four players, one colony, published by Electronic Arts. THE SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD (1984). Exploring the New World as a Spanish conquistador, on maps of the Americas, or on whole new continents the computer makes up for you. MODEM WARS (1988). Two players, two computers, connected by modem. In 1988. COMMAND HQ (1990). A world war game, also playable by modem against another person. Before M.U.L.E. there were earlier business and sports games for other companies, and after Command HQ there were more. What strikes me, looking at the list, is how many of them were about playing with somebody else. Even in 1983, with no Internet, she was making games for a room full of people. |
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> WHAT I THINK SHE GOT RIGHT Most computer games in 1983 were you against the machine. M.U.L.E. is you against your friends, and also you with your friends, at the same time, and the game is built so you can't forget either one. You can try to crush everybody, and you might win, but if you starve the colony doing it, you've won a ruined planet. The game makes you think about that without ever giving a speech about it. She said something once, more or less, that nobody on their deathbed ever wished they'd spent more time alone with their computer. I read that this spring and thought about my kids sitting on the floor in front of the Atari with joysticks in their laps, yelling at each other about the price of smithore, laughing so hard Heather came in from the other room. Sixteen years after it came out, her game got my family out of four different corners of the house and into one room. I can't think of a better thing to say about a piece of software. Thank you, Dani. |
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