Danielle Bunten Berry

Danielle Bunten Berry (born Daniel Paul Bunten, February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998), was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E., one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold.

In 1998, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association. In 2007, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chose Berry as the 10th inductee into its Hall of Fame. In 2009, she was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

Early life

Berry was born Daniel Paul Bunten in St. Louis, Missouri and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas as a junior in high school. After creating a football game to play with friends at work, Berry submitted it Strategic Simulations, which the company ended up publishing in 1981 as Computer Quarterback.

After producing three titles for Strategic Simulations, Berry, who by then had founded a software company called Ozark Softscape, caught the attention of Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins. M.U.L.E. was Berry's first game for EA, originally published for the Atari 8-bit computers because the Atari 800 had four controller ports. Berry later ported it to the Commodore 64. While its sales of 30,000 units were not high, the game developed a cult following and was widely pirated. The game setting was inspired by the novel Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein. Modem Wars was ahead of its time, as few people in the late 1980s had modems in their homes.

Berry departed EA for MicroProse. Allegedly, Trip Hawkins, CEO of EA, did not feel that pushing production of games onto a cartridge based system was a good idea. The shift was important to Berry, as computer games had previously been distributed on floppy discs, and a changeover to a cartridge system would allow games to be played on Nintendo systems. This was a significant factor in her decision to leave. Around the same time, a port of M.U.L.E. to the Mega Drive/Genesis was cancelled after Berry refused to put guns and bombs in the game, feeling it would alter the game too much from its original concept. She then developed a computer version of the board game Axis and Allies, which became 1990's Command HQ, a modem/network grand strategy wargame. Berry's second and last game for MicroProse was 1992's Global Conquest, a 4-player network/modem war game. It was the first 4-player network game from a major publisher. Berry was a strong advocate of multi-player online games, observing that, "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'" Berry was one of the co-founders of the internet-oriented entity Mpath. Berry's Warsport, a remake of Modem Wars, debuted on Mpath's MPlayer.com service in 1997.

Less than a year after the release of Warsport, Berry was diagnosed with lung cancer, presumably related to years of heavy smoking. She died on July 3, 1998. At the time, she was working on the design of an Internet version of M.U.L.E. The name of the game stands for Multiple Use Labor Element. It was originally a single player format, focused heavily on having the players travel around the map and collect items to help them strengthen their colony. Once they felt as though they had a solid colony, the players could battle each other to see who could overtake whom. The company was based out of Little Rock, Arkansas and had profound success with a few of their early titles. Ozark Softscape had a publishing deal with Electronic Arts for several of its groundbreaking games. In the early 1990s, Ozark Softscape left its partnership with Electronic Arts over a dispute to port some games to cartridge format for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It began a partnership with MicroProse to produce two more titles: Command HQ and Global Conquest. A dispute occurred over creating a follow-up to M.U.L.E. with Sega in 1993, and the company dissolved. The employees of Ozark Softscape moved to different areas of the software industry.

Personal life

Berry was married three times. Berry had three children, one daughter and two sons. It caused difficulties in family relationships and led to her being shunned by the video game industry. She joked that the surgery was to improve the industry's male/female ratio and aesthetics, but advised others considering a sex change not to proceed unless there was no alternative and warned them of the cost, saying "Being my 'real self' could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn't know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I've stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice."

Games

{|class="wikitable sortable"

! Year !! Title !! Publisher

| 1978 || Wheeler Dealers || Speakeasy Software

| rowspan=2 | 1981 || Computer Quarterback || rowspan=3 | Strategic Simulations

| Cartels & Cutthroats

| 1982 || Cytron Masters

| 1983 || M.U.L.E. ||

| 1984 || The Seven Cities of Gold ||

| 1985 || Heart of Africa || rowspan=3 | Electronic Arts

| 1986 || Robot Rascals

| 1988 || Modem Wars

| 1990 || Command HQ || rowspan=2 | Microplay Software

| 1992 || Global Conquest

| 1997 || Warsport || Mpath Interactive

Recognition

Although many of Berry's titles were not commercially successful, they were widely recognized by the industry as being ahead of their time. On May 7, 1998, less than two months before her death, Berry was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association.

References

External links

Danielle Bunten Berry profile at MobyGames
A tribute to Berry by Greg Costikyan
A tribute to Berry from Gamasutra
Dani Bunten Berry named to the Academy of Interactive Arts
Article from The Arkansas Times about Bunten and M.U.L.E.
Ozark Softscape: Creators of M.U.L.E.