Soon after Robot Rascals disappointed its publisher and its designer, Dani Bunten Berry stood up at an Electronic Arts symposium and admitted defeat. For eight years she had designed games for several people at one computer: four players sharing a keyboard and joysticks, bidding against each other in real time. Robot Rascals had tried to pull the whole family round the screen with a deck of playing cards, and it had flopped. “We’ve failed at gathering people around the computer,” she said, as Computer Gaming World later reported. “We’re going to have to connect them by connecting their computers to each other.”
That was the thread through her whole career. At a time when most computer games were played alone, nearly all of hers were built for more than one person, from the four-player trading game M.U.L.E. to the modem games she designed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She published the games of her first career as Dan Bunten, and they are still credited under that name. In 1992 she transitioned and lived the rest of her life as Dani.
Fast facts
- Born: February 1949, in St. Louis, Missouri; she grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas.
- Died: 3 July 1998, of lung cancer, aged 49.
- Before games: a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Arkansas (1974), then work for the city of Little Rock.
- Company: Ozark Softscape, Little Rock, with her brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing and Alan Watson; its formal name in 1984 was Management Systems Engineering.
- Best known for: M.U.L.E. (1983), Seven Cities of Gold (1984), Modem Wars (1988), Command HQ (on sale by 1991) and Global Conquest (1992).
- Honours: the Computer Game Developers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1998); Computer Gaming World‘s Hall of Fame (2000); the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame (2007).
Four players, one computer
Her first published game was Wheeler Dealers (1978), a business simulation for the Apple II from Speakeasy Software. It already had four players, and she had to build her own hardware to give it “four different input lines”, she told Compute!’s Gazette in 1984. It sold for $50, “an outrageous price”, and she thought it had sold about 150 copies. In later years she liked to tell a smaller figure: PC Player recalled her laughing that it beat its target of 50 copies by ten per cent because she had bought two herself.
Next came three games for Strategic Simulations (SSI): Computer Quarterback, converted from a mainframe game, which let two players call plays at the same time and was her best seller before M.U.L.E., at 6,000 copies; Cartels & Cutthroats (1981), a business game several people could play from printed planning sheets; and Cytron Masters (1982), a real-time battle between robot armies that the real-time strategy entry describes. According to Computer Gaming World, Cytron Masters was the last game she wrote while working as an engineer for the city of Little Rock. From 1983 she also wrote a design column for the magazine, “Dispatches”.
M.U.L.E.
Cartels & Cutthroats had a fan in Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts. “Initially, he wanted my brother Bill and me to do another game like that, a business simulator,” she told Compute!’s Gazette. What the four-person team at Ozark Softscape made instead was M.U.L.E., a game about settling a planet. Each player bought a M.U.L.E., which Compute!’s Gazette described as a “multiunit labor element—a combination robot/telephone/toaster/radio/best friend”, fitted it out to farm food, generate energy or mine smithore and crystite, and traded the results in auctions where all four could buy and sell at once.
The team split the work. Dani Bunten Berry and her brother Bill did the main design, and she turned it into a program design; Jim Rushing programmed the auctions; Alan Watson did the graphics and animation. Their EA producer, Joe Ybarra, told Retro Gamer that development took about six months, from October 1982 until the game came out around May 1983. Rushing remembered that its working title was Planet Pioneers, and that the planet was called Irata, “Atari” backwards, the machine it was written for.
M.U.L.E. won praise, and in 1988 it was one of the first games in Computer Gaming World’s Hall of Fame. It did not make her rich. According to the finding aid for her papers it sold 30,000 copies, and Computer Gaming World thought it “probably more pirated than purchased”. One thing about its players surprised her. “Quite a few women play M.U.L.E.,” she said in 1984. “I don’t know why that is. I do know that we didn’t include any overt violence, and we didn’t make the game cutthroat to the point of hurting each other. There’s competition, but it’s within a framework of cooperation.”
Seven Cities of Gold and after
Her next two games were for one player, and one of them was her biggest commercial success. In Seven Cities of Gold (1984) the player leads Spanish expeditions into an unknown New World. The designers wanted to recreate “the feeling that the Spaniards must have had, standing on the deck of a ship, not knowing anything about what was to the west”, so Rushing spent four months on a generator that could make new continents to explore. Heart of Africa (1985) followed as a semi-sequel; Computer Gaming World later wrote that her heart “wasn’t really in” it.
Robot Rascals, reviewed early in 1987, went back to the family. It was a scavenger hunt on a distant planet, played with the computer and a deck of real cards that players stole, swapped and passed on. Its disappointing reception was, in Computer Gaming World’s word, “an epiphany”.
Connecting computers
The answer was the modem. In a 1991 editorial Computer Gaming World recalled her explaining at EA’s symposium that computers were in the “wrong room of the house” for families to play together on one machine. She and Dave Maynard built code to let EA’s games be played modem to modem, and Modem Wars (1988) was the result: in the magazine’s phrase, “Cytron Masters meets the modem”, a fast battle of infantry, artillery and spies. EA called it “the first game designed specifically for modems”; the online multiplayer entry has more. Only one other EA game, 688 Attack Sub, used the code.
She then moved to MicroProse. Command HQ, which Computer Gaming World said moved beyond the Modem Wars formula, won Computer Gaming World’s Wargame of the Year award for 1991. Global Conquest (1992) let four players connect at once, and was designed, the magazine reported, with the help of a group of devoted Command HQ modem players “to whom, apparently, phone bills are no object”.
Dani
In 1992 she decided to transition, a change she called her “pronoun change”. Computer Gaming World’s founder, Russell Sipe, wrote that at the 1993 Computer Game Developers Conference, which she had always attended before as a man, she came as Dani and spent several informal sessions explaining to friends and fellow designers why it was the right choice for her. PC Player wrote that she never made a secret of it, and told audiences at her talks that it was fine to talk about it openly. She became legally Danielle Paula Berry, and also went by Dani Bunten Berry.
At the next year’s conference Sipe asked her how things had gone, and she told him she had decided not to do it. They had been talking about different things. She meant a new version of M.U.L.E.: “Electronic Arts wanted me to put guns and bombs in M.U.L.E. so I decided not to redo the game.”
She kept working on multiplayer games. In 1995 Computer Gaming World named her and Brian Moriarty, the designer of Loom, as principals of Mpath, a start-up tackling the lag that made internet games hard to play. She spent much of her time consulting for other designers and teaching, as she had done since EA’s early symposiums and the first public Computer Game Developers Conference, where she told the story of M.U.L.E.’s development. Computer Gaming World once recorded her advice on how to balance a game: “Cheat.” And if players complained? “Lie!”
In all her talks, PC Player recalled, she urged designers and players alike to tear themselves away from the computer and take every chance to be with other people. One of her favourite sayings was that nobody on their deathbed ever said they wished they had spent more time at the computer.
Death and legacy
A few weeks before her death, the Computer Game Developers Association gave her its Lifetime Achievement Award. She died of lung cancer on 3 July 1998, aged 49. Computer Gaming World headed its tribute “She Saw Farther!”, after EA’s old slogan, and in 2000 it inducted her into its Hall of Fame as “multiplayer gaming’s patron saint”. Will Wright dedicated The Sims (2000) to her memory, and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2007.
In 2010 her children gave her papers to The Strong museum in Rochester, New York: correspondence, design notes, sketches and program printouts, most of them from 1983 to 1995. Her ideas for sequels to M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold are closed to researchers until 2060.
Sources
- “M.U.L.E.”, Compute!’s Gazette, June 1984, pp. 32–34: Ozark Softscape’s team and roles, the house in Little Rock, Wheeler Dealers (price, sales, the four-input hardware), Computer Quarterback’s sales, Trip Hawkins and Cartels & Cutthroats, women players, Seven Cities of Gold and its world generator.
- Computer Gaming World issue 11, July 1983: M.U.L.E. review; Dan Bunten’s design column and credits.
- Johnny Wilson, “She Saw Farther! Dani Bunten Berry’s Legacy Brings People Together”, Computer Gaming World issue 171, October 1998: her games from Wheeler Dealers to Global Conquest, M.U.L.E.’s piracy, the Robot Rascals “epiphany” and her symposium speech, Modem Wars and Dave Maynard, Command HQ’s 1991 award, her teaching, her death.
- PC Player (Germany) 9/98, September 1998, p. 36: Markus Krichel, “In Memoriam Dani Bunten Berry”: dates, cause of death, the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Wheeler Dealers story, her transition in 1992 and openness about it, her favourite saying.
- Russell Sipe, editorial, Computer Gaming World issue 121, August 1994: Cartels & Cutthroats (1981), the “Dispatches” column from 1983, the 1993 and 1994 conferences, the M.U.L.E. remake.
- “Reach Out and Crush Someone”, editorial, Computer Gaming World issue 79, February 1991: the EA symposium, the “wrong room of the house”, Robot Rascals.
- Computer Gaming World issue 93, April 1992: Global Conquest preview (the Command HQ modem players) and advertisement.
- Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994: “Cheat” and “Lie!”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 118, May 1994, wargame survey: Cytron Masters as the last game written while an engineer for the city of Little Rock.
- Computer Gaming World issue 134, September 1995: Mpath and its principals.
- Computer Gaming World issue 191, June 2000: Hall of Fame induction.
- “The Making of M.U.L.E.”, Retro Gamer issue 23, 2005, p. 72 and surrounding pages: Joe Ybarra on development dates, Jim Rushing on the team, Planet Pioneers and Irata.
- Commodore Computing International vol. 7 no. 3, November 1988, p. 8: Modem Wars as “the first game designed specifically for modems”.
- The Strong, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, “Finding Aid to the Dan Bunten (Dani Bunten Berry) Papers, 1949-2012”, September 2013 (web): birthplace, degree, M.U.L.E.’s sales, the 1992 decision and “pronoun change”, legal name, the 1998 award, The Sims, the 2007 Hall of Fame, the papers and their restrictions. https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2021/09/Finding-Aid-to-the-Dan-Bunten-Dani-Bunten-Berry-papers_091018.pdf
Explore the M.U.L.E. study for the colony, auctions, music, packaging and later adaptations in detail.