M.U.L.E.

M.U.L.E. was part of the group of games that launched Electronic Arts in '83. It won numerous awards (including Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame) and sold reasonably well (despite being the most pirated game at the time according to the publisher of CGW). Curiously, it happened as a result of the fact that Trip Hawkins (the founder of EA) couldn't get SSI to sell him Cartels and Cutthroats. I convinced him we (at that point I had formed Ozark Softscape and had 5 employees) could do it better. I took the auction from Wheelers, the graphic real-time aspects from Cytrons, some of the production ideas from Cartels and let it evolve where it needed to. This was the game that taught me the value of play-testing where you watch and talk to real people about the game while it's under development. After all, games are a form of communication that can only be confirmed by checking whether it works against an audience.

A couple of design pieces really pleased me about this game. I think the auction with the sellers on top and the buyers on the bottom of the screen and a timer was particularly cool. Sellers would walk down the screen thereby lowering the price they were offering to sell at and buyers would walk up the screen raising their bid. When the two met, units of commodity would zip from the seller to the buyer. This led to a lot of dickering and cajoling by the players trying to get each other to move closer using all types of justifications to support their inability to move themselves. When the timer started running down, this could lead to a lot of frantic maneuvering.

Another neat thing was the invention of the MULE itself. In order to make the auctions interesting, there had to be commodities that players needed and also made (so some became sellers and others buyers). From a strategic game model what was needed was some way for players to say I want to produce commodity 'A' on plot 'X' but text entry or even menu selection seemed uninteresting. What if your picked up a machine somewhere and dragged it to your property to produce what you wanted. This machine eventually became a Multiple Use Labor Element that you got from the coral in the town, dragged into an outfitter shop of the right kind for the commodity you wanted and took out to your land and deposited there. Voila we had the info the model needed and with the addition of a timer, we had an interesting play element.

My only disappointment with the game is that it only exists on long defunct hardware and it looks awful (since those machines only offered 48K of memory and I used it mostly for program rather than graphics). I almost got a Sega Genesis version through EA in '93 but at the Alpha phase they insisted on adding guns and bombs (or something similar) to bring it up to date. I was unable to comply. I'm still amazed at how well loved it is (there are a number of web sites devoted to it) and I'm hopeful I can find a way to bring it to life again—possibly on the internet.—Dani Bunten

Links

• World of Mule is by far the most encompassing resource about the game and its clones, and it has some info about the other Dan Bunten games as well.
• ExtremeMULEing is a game tournament database.
• M.U.L.E. Manual
• Home of the Underdogs has the Commodore 64 version wrapped up with an emulator.

Similar Games

• Traders
• Robot Rascals
• Subtrade: Return to Irata

Reviews and Appreciations

• M.U.L.E. is addicting as hell, Steve Steiner remembers:

  There are so many twists and little bits that add replayability to the game. As we've all come to know, even in this age of awesome graphics and realism, multi-player rules! Playing against your friends is so much more fun than going at it by yourself. Also, because the game's economy winds up changing from game to game, each time you play is a new experience. You might go through one game where everyone is producing energy, so it's worth didley, and then the next game energy is worth more than gold (oops, make that Crystite) so the colonists with energy control everything. I am also leaving out the arcade element of the game completely. You have to usher that crazy M.U.L.E. onto your plot of land, under time constraints, and if you miss-step and press the button and you're off your house—the laughter of your friends begins as your M.U.L.E. high-tails it out of town. Crap.

• M.U.L.E. is to gaming what Citizen Kane is to movies, Tom Chick quips, everyone knows how great it is, but do you know anyone who's actually played it?

  Here's the thing about M.U.L.E.—no one else has made a game quite like it. It did not begin a genre. It did not spawn an army of clones. No one is describing games today as it's like M.U.L.E. meets Diablo or it's like M.U.L.E. meets SimCity. It's one of those rare games that can't be described in the context of what we know today. People might say of Civilization: they broke the mold after they made that one. But for M.U.L.E., they didn't even have a mold. For this reason alone, M.U.L.E. is worth playing on an emulator.

• Because we never got tired of catching the mountain wampus, is Bob Colayco's reason for listing it under the greatest games of all times:

  What sets M.U.L.E. apart is its incredible depth and its four-player aspect. The game is both competitive and cooperative. For example, in early rounds, smithore is a profitable resource to produce and sell, but when the mid-round meteorite strikes and a new mineral called "crystite" becomes available, most players will be tempted to try to grab land around the meteor strike and produce crystite almost exclusively. However, M.U.L.E.s are constructed out of smithore, so if the four players can't collectively agree to produce enough of it to meet planetary demand, the prices of M.U.L.E.s could skyrocket, therefore hurting everyone. It is also possible to collude with another player during the auction rounds, locking out other players from making purchases of needed resources. If that wasn't enough opportunity to screw over someone else, a player who has a lot of cash and is well into the lead in later rounds could spend his round time purchasing and releasing every single M.U.L.E. in the corral, preventing other players from developing their land.