Crazy it's been 40 years. I bought this game when it came out and played it a ton with all my friends. Super fun multiplayer game. I broke out my Atari 800 last year for my birthday and played MULE and Star Raiders all weekend, both are still great.. I also play MULE on my SteamDeck (Emulator) regularly still. It's one of those games that has held up incredible well. I've not seen a good clone/knockoff/reboot of it (well any that I actually like enough to play), which is too bad, great game.
Awesome! I still have my Atari 800 kit in mint condition, with two drives, original joysticks, and probably a bunch of stuff I've forgotten. Oh yeah, my Star Gemini 10X printer is in the attic. My Commodore 1702 monitor needs "re-capping" though.
My first job (at 15) was working on a software store, which was when MULE came out. I disagree with this: "which sounds much better than the Atari original despite the lack of a fourth voice." We had the Atari and 64 next to each other and would load up MULE to argue about which platform was better. I thought the music on the Atari was better in some ways, although the Commodore's synthesizer chip was pretty cool.
Side note: I own an Ensoniq keyboard, which was made by former Commodore peeps. And, of course, its disk storage is non-standard junk. Still not as bad as the 1541 though...
One thing EA nailed was packaging. Simple but "high-end" cardboard folders (like gatefold album covers) with cool art on them. I still have my original ones of Archon (great game) and... Music Construction Set maybe?
All their early stuff was uniform sizing, intended to be analogous to albums. Treating the programmers/designers like 'rock stars' was an intentional move.
That reminds me, I still have my original MULE disc and packaging, you're right they were really nice / very stylish for the time. Like mini-LP's, square and very distinctive. The original batch of games (I believe) included MULE, Larry Bird & Doctor Jay Go One-on-One, Hard Hat Mac and Pinball Construction Kit... I might be missing one or two.
As for reboots, Offworld Trading Company is kind of in the spirit of original M.U.L.E. In fact, one of the things you can use in the game is called a MULE, very likely an homage to the OG. Sadly, Offworld Trading Company has a pretty badly flawed end-game: An opponent will suddenly buy your company out, a process that (as far as I can tell from multiple play-throughs) cannot be blocked once that opponent gains enough momentum. Meaning you can be playing along, your money going up rapidly, making no mistakes, and still suddenly lose.
I think an Offworld Trading Company without the "buy shares of opponents" game mechanic would have been a really great successor to M.U.L.E.!
My older brother and I used to play this head-to-head on my Commodore 64. He almost always won, but I never gave up. Thanks to random events in the game I sometimes won, too.
Last month I bought a gadget that allows the C64 to use 4 controllers instead of 2 because THIS GAME has an unofficial update that supports 4 controllers. Proceeded to play it at my Commodore Computer Club meetup here in Seattle. Great multiplayer game.
C64 supported 4 players out of the box as well. Two joysticks, which were hotseated for each players turn. And two of the users used the keyboard for the auction phase. It worked well enough.
We must have played this for years on the Atari before discovering market "collusion" quite by accident when pressing both player buttons simultaneously mid-auction. It was features like this, and much around the auction implementation that was so novel and utterly playable. Brilliant game.
My favorite tactic was to monopolize SmithOre, and then buy/release all the MULEs so everyone after me couldn't build anything. Apparently a need for MULEs causes SmithOre to skyrocket.
That was Bill's advice in the manual, along with some gamesmanship to try and convince other players that you meant to get a river plot, but ended up with a mountain plot due to bumping the joystick...
Mine was basically ignoring all the mining, get as many food plots as possible, and focus on energy and food. Worked well against the computer, they believed there will be enough supply. But I actually bought out the warehouse and then drove prices extremely high.
So I sold food energy at a higher pricepoint than the ore. Often the AI players couldn't afford food / energy anymore and therefore their production collapsed and they did not have enough food to have enough time to change the installations on their plots.
Oh great, now the song will be stuck in my head for a week! :D
I bought an Atari 130xe in my early teens because a friend had a giant box of game disks that I could copy. One of those games was MULE. My dad and I played the hell out of it.
RIP Dani Bunten; an amazing game designer/developer.
M.U.L.E. was amazing. One of the many little retro masterpieces from the 80s which influences the latest game I've been building (Slartboz: see my bio here if curious.)
I remember being intrigued and trying hard to understand this game when I was a kid playing it on my C64. I also remember being a bit sad when 20 years later I tried it again on some emulator, and still couldn't understand it. Maybe now 10 years later, I should try one more time. Third time's the charm, right? Maybe there is a good youtube tutorial on how to play it by now. Anyone got a good link?
Ha I vaguely remember that manual! But as for how I acquired the C64 version, pretty sure my father bought it along with all his copies of Compute!. Honestly though I have no idea because I was about 8 years old. I definitely didn't read that manual on revisiting it, so I should give it a go now. Looks pretty complicated I have to admit but I bet it's worth giving it a good try this time ;). Thanks for the link!
Didn't realize the history to this one! I bought the NES cartridge cheap from a video rental store that was making room for 16 bit titles. IIRC I grabbed it because it was one of a smaller number of games that supported 4 players and I had the 4 player adapter. Always dreamed of having a couple friends who were strong at the game - excited to try online!
We had a lot of fun playing this in our family on the Atari!
I had a mobile version of it on iPhone, but then it was taken out of the store. I stopped playing it for a while and unfortunately my phone decided it was taking up too much space and removed it. Now I can't get it back. I was very disappointed when I found that out.
The 4 player games were a bunch of fun. We eventually explored various anti-competitive strategies, including trying to monopolize SmithOre, buying and releasing M.U.L.E.s, and more. Lots of shenanigans during auctions as well.
It literally was an AT AT. In an April 1984 article Dani Bunten said it was based off of Alan Watson's Star Wars toy without the guns on the side of the head!
