M.U.L.E. was designed in 1983 by Danielle Bunten Berry — credited at the time as Dan Bunten — alongside her brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, and Alan Watson, under the studio name Ozark Softscape, and it was one of the first five titles Electronic Arts launched with. Taking advantage of the fact that the Atari 400 and 800 had four joystick ports, up to four settlers can play at once: each one claims a plot on a newly founded planet, buys M.U.L.E.s — multi-purpose work machines — to extract resources, and then sells or buys them in a live auction where it pays to compete, and sometimes to help out whoever's falling behind. It sold poorly — around 30,000 copies — but it earned near-unanimous devotion from critics and, over the years, from game designers themselves, who point to it again and again as one of the smartest multiplayer designs ever made: an economic system that turns selfishness and solidarity into the very same mechanic. It's still studied today as the textbook case for how to balance competition and cooperation within a single game.
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