Danielle Bunten Berry
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Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 - July 3, 1998), also known as Dani Bunten (born Daniel Bunten), was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E. (one of the first successful multiplayer games), and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold. Bunten was a transsexual woman, having undergone sex reassignment surgery in November 1992.
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[edit] Biography
Raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Bunten acquired a degree in industrial engineering in 1974 and started programming text-based computer games as a hobby. In 1978, she sold a real-time auction game for the Apple II titled Wheeler Dealers to a Canadian software company, Speakeasy Software. This early multiplayer game required a custom controller, raising its price to US$35 in an era of $15 games sold in plastic bags. It sold only 50 copies.[1]
After three titles for SSI, Bunten, who by then had founded her own software company called Ozark Softscape, caught the attention of Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins. M.U.L.E. was Bunten's first game for EA, originally published for the Atari 8-bit family because the Atari 800 had four controller ports. Bunten later ported it to the Commodore 64. While its sales — 30,000 units — were not high, the game developed a cult following and was widely pirated. The title was inspired by Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein.
Bunten wanted to follow up M.U.L.E. with a game that would have been similar to the later game Civilization, but after her Ozark Softscape partners balked at the idea, she followed with The Seven Cities of Gold, which proved popular in spite of (or possibly because of) its simplicity. By the time the continent data were stored in memory, there was little memory left for fancy graphics or complex gameplay. The game only had five resources. It was a hit, selling more than 150,000 copies.
The follow-up game, Heart of Africa, appeared in 1985 and was followed by Robot Rascals, a combination computer/card game that had no single-player mode and sold only 9,000 copies, and 1988's Modem Wars, the first game played by two players over a dialup modem. Sales were poor because modems were not yet commonplace.
Bunten departed EA for Microprose, where she reportedly had a choice between doing a computer version of the Avalon Hill board game Civilization or a version of Axis and Allies. Bunten claimed Sid Meier talked her into doing Axis and Allies (which became 1990's Command HQ, a modem/network World War II game), while Meier did Civilization, which went on to become one of the best-selling computer games of all time. Bunten'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.
After her third marriage failed, Bunten, who had until then been living as male, transitioned to living as a woman. She underwent sex reassignment surgery in November 1992 and later kept a lower profile in the games industry. A port of M.U.L.E. to the Sega Genesis was cancelled after Bunten refused to put guns and bombs in the game. She felt it would alter the game too much from its original concept.
In 1997, Bunten shifted focus to multiplayer games over the Internet with Warsport, a remake of Modem Wars that debuted on the MPlayer.com MPlayer game network. Bunten, a chain smoker since her teens, was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1998.
She was working on an Internet version of M.U.L.E. when she died.[citation needed]
[edit] Effect on the game industry
Although many of Bunten'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.
In 2000, Will Wright dedicated his blockbuster hit The Sims to her memory.
[edit] Quotes
- "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'"
[edit] References
- ^ Interview with Berry from Halcyon Days
