A trip down memory lane : M.U.L.E.

Yesterday, while pondering on things geekish, I found myself absentmindedly humming the theme from a computer game I haven't played for ten or fifteen years: M.U.L.E.

Ah, the memories: the blocky Commodore-64 graphics.... the skanky carpet and sofa of a friend's family's game room.... the salty snacks and gallons of whatever sugary, caffienated carbonated liquid happened to be on sale from Skaggs Alpha-Beta or Brookshires... the bleary-eyed buzz of stumbling outside and navigating home in the eerie quiet of 3 a.m. in suburbia, or the pale light of impending dawn....

Taking this as the sign from the gods that it clearly was, I did a bit of websearching and found that I am not the only one to fondly remember this long-unavailable game. Earlier this year, Salon published an article about the game's creator, Dan/Dani Burten, which is as much an indictment of the electronic gaming industry as it is the story of one person's tragedy. A planned re-release of the game in the 1990's was apparently dropped when Burten refused to accede to the boardroom boys' demands for "guns and bombs", an incredibly clueless demand in dealing with a game whose unique and defining characteristic was its simple but very nearly pure theoretical model of classical economic competition. It's not as if there's any shortage of guns and bombs in the putrid swamp of indistinguishable, interchangable first-person-shooter games that have flooded the market. (Considering that Burten was at that time undergoing a sex-change operation, the demand for "guns and bombs" was also a particularly unfortunate double-entendre.)

As a result, although the game is fondly, even reverently, remembered by gaming geeks, it is effectively lost in the multiple morasses of corporate indifference, superceded computer systems, and vague confusion about who owns the intellectual property rights. There is a website, World of M.U.L.E., with information about the game and various copycats and clones, and a Dani Bunten Berry memorial webpage with information about Burten and his/her best-known creation, but apparently no readily available version of the game which is compatible with contemporary computers. The closest copycat seems to be something called "Space Ho.R.S.E.", which supposedly is downloadable in a free demo version, but the download didn't go so well over my dialup connection.

Oh well, at least I can still enjoy the cheesy but still oddly catchy theme music.