If you have extra time at the end of a round you can try to catch the wampus for money.

Danielle Bunten Berry

The creator of M.U.L.E. was actually born Daniel Bunten. As "Daniel," Bunten got his start in the gaming industry by programming text-based games in the mid-1970s. Shortly after designing a few games for SSI, Bunten produced M.U.L.E. for Electronic Arts in 1983. He followed that up with another classic game called Seven Cities of Gold, which was an exploration/strategy game based on the history and conquest of the New World. Bunten's later games, such as Modem Wars, Command HQ, and Global Conquest, all pushed the envelope with regard to multiplayer gaming and networking.

It was in 1992 that Bunten underwent surgery to become a woman. Sadly, Bunten died only a few years later in 1998 from lung cancer. An Internet version of M.U.L.E. that she was working on at the time was left unfinished, but her legacy lives on, as she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Game Developers Association.

Getting good plots of land is the key to victory.

M.U.L.E. (multiple use labor element) is an economic simulation/strategy game set on the planet Irata (which is Atari, backwards). You start off by selecting from eight different alien races. The game is separated into discrete rounds, and during each round you can claim a plot of land on which to develop and harvest resources. River plots are good for food, flatland is great for harvesting energy, and mountain plots are ideal for mining. If you claim neighboring plots, your production goes up synergistically.

M.U.L.E. derived its name from the donkey-shaped labor robots you need to purchase for working on your land. These robots need to be led to your plot of land, installed into its house, and outfitted for harvesting each of the game's four distinct resources. There is a time limit in each round for doing all of this, but if you have extra time left you can earn extra money by hunting the wampus (an elusive creature who inhabits mountains) or simply returning to the pub and gambling to end your turn. After each round of land grabs and M.U.L.E. installations, a random planetary event will occur, such as a pest strike on one player's food supply or sunspots which would increase everyone's energy production. A round of auctions then occurs, where players can buy and sell surplus resources to each other, or buy from and sell to the house. Pricing fluctuations for planetary surpluses and shortages are accurately modeled.

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.

Put it all together and you have a game that is pretty fun in single-player, but an absolute blast in multiplayer. The game's ability to host four simultaneous players on the Atari 800 (with its four joystick ports) is also light-years ahead of its time. It would be more than a decade before we'd see four controller ports become a standard feature on a major game console.

I grew up in a big family with three older brothers. Between them and friends, it was never difficult for us to fire up a game of four-player M.U.L.E. We had some pretty heated matches, and somehow, it never seemed to get old. I specifically remember one day when we discovered that one of our joysticks was broken. We unscrewed the casing and found that it was still possible to "play" by touching the contact points directly with our thumbs. We were so desperate to have a match that one of my brothers played by holding the bare circuit board in his hands.