

Dan Bunten and M.U.L.E. - gmkoliver
http://www.filfre.net/2013/02/dan-bunten-and-m-u-l-e/

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gnosis
_"Dan Bunten was an idealist from an early age. At university he protested the
Vietnam War, and also started a bicycle shop, not to make money but to help
save the world. According to his friend Jim Simmons, Bunten’s logic was
simple: “If more people rode bikes, the world would be a better place.” When
he watched Westerns, Bunten was an “Indian sympathizer”: “It just seems like
such a neat, romantic culture, in tune with the earth.” A staunch anti-
materialist, he drove a dented and battered old Volkswagen for years after he
could afford better. “I felt like I sold out when I bought a 25-inch color
TV,” he said. That 1960s idealism, almost quaint as it now can sound, became
the defining side of Bunten the game designer. He campaigned relentlessly for
videogames that brought people together rather than isolating them."_

It's quite fashionable to be condescending towards hippies and the 60's
counterculture these days, but I find them incredibly inspiring.

I wonder how different today's gaming world would be were more game designers
and studios more concerned with expressing their idealism through their games
rather than squeezing out a few more FPS, making prettier graphics, or making
games according to tired formulas.

~~~
gillianseed
Heh, I quite agree.

Maybe it's me projecting but I've always been more of a fan of Jeff Minter for
what I perceieve of him as being a really cool down to earth dude rather than
his games (despite me liking many of them).

~~~
vidarh
Jeff Minters autobiography series is a fun read:
<http://minotaurproject.co.uk/lshistory1.php>

Someone just needs to get him to keep writing - last post was 6-7 years ago.

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bhauer
MULE is one of my favorite video games of all time. It has been years since I
last played (via emulation) but it's one of those games like Warcraft II and
Starcraft where I find it's all to easy to say, "How about one more round?"

The music is burned into my mind.

I haven't done a search, but I assume there are some modern homages to MULE?

Edit: Only 30,000 copies were ever sold? Just goes to show how uncommon it was
to own a computer back then. I think I still have my disk and cardboard flip-
case somewhere... I should dig that up.

~~~
Kronopath
There was the free Planet M.U.L.E., from 2009, which had online features and
updated graphics.

Here's some videos: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LiqbEvEnrg>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1W52wQUkKc>

Unfortunately, the website for that game seems to be gone.

~~~
discostrings
Planet M.U.L.E. is still around--at least as of a week or two ago! I haven't
played in a while, but I check the site everyone once in a while to see if
there's any news and whether people are still playing. Here's a cached version
of the site from January 29th:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130129005307/http://www.planetm...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130129005307/http://www.planetmule.com)
. I'm guessing they're just having minor issues.

I highly recommend it!

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unimpressive
Old video games are particularly interesting as artifacts because they
implicitly highlight the capabilities of hardware and the sort of peripherals
that could be expected during that period.

One of these days I'm going to find the time to sit down and play Colossal
Cave Adventure.

And then after that maybe I'll find somebody willing to play Spacewar! with
me.

~~~
ts4z
If you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, they have a
PDP-1 running Space War.

The day I played it, the docent giving the demonstration was Steve Russell.

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jbattle
I loved this game as a kid - I remember getting my whole family to play a few
times, what a blast!

It's touched on briefly in the article, but another thing I remember from this
time in gaming is a short-lived but fascinating push to make the makers of
these games public figures. It wasn't a ton of games, but I think it was EA
(ECA back then) that would include pictures of the game design team and a
brief blurb inside each of their games.

