Will Wright dedicated the Sims, the bestselling computer game of all time, to a Little Rock, Ark., programmer named Dani Bunten.

Bunten was a computer-game maker of the old school: Her games were designed to fit onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, where a puny 170,000 bytes or less hung suspended on brown magnetic film. She was also prescient: Even as the gaming industry increasingly focused on games designed for one player only, and her own career faltered, she insisted, again and again, that the future of games would be based on social relationships.

She was a pioneer several times over. Her most famous game, M.U.L.E., has been cited as an inspiration for generations of game developers. As the frontman of Ozark Softscape, a quartet of game designers from Little Rock, she and her co-workers were the stars of the first publicity campaign to promote programmers as if they were rock stars. The former Dan Bunten also pushed gender boundaries, changing her name, and her sex, in the early ’90s. But in 1998 Dani Bunten died of cancer at age 49, shut out from the mass market she envisioned when computer games were only an oddball hobby.

Her career arc is instructive: In the 1980s the computer game business was as free-form as college radio, as willing to back risky creative projects as ’70s Hollywood was. Back then, an upstart company called Electronic Arts could unleash the impulses of a creator like Bunten, whose games were known as much for impish humor as for revolutionary design.

“Ask most game designers what their favorite computer game of all time is,” says Wright, “and you’ll get M.U.L.E. as an answer more often than any other title.”

But outside the relatively small world of game designers, Bunten and her 1983 game of robot prospectors have been mostly forgotten. Unlike old movies and music, landmark computer games are not, as a usual practice, reissued commercially. At CompUSA, any search for the past stops at the bargain rack of mid-1990s titles: $9.99 shrink-wrapped reissues of Deer Hunter and Braveheart. Except for the fingerprints that her philosophy of graceful simplicity left on modern game designs from the Sims to Civilization, it’s almost as if Dani Bunten’s games never existed.

And yet, today, the gaming industry is finally investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the market niche of multiplayer home computer games, a genre Dani Bunten specialized in back in 1978.

In her speeches and writings, Bunten told us this day would arrive, a day when not just Computer Gaming World but the New York Times would write seriously about games as windows into human behavior. But her predictions and passionate beliefs have been lost in the glitz, megahertz and adrenaline of modern gaming.

The name Dani Bunten is absent from current accounts detailing the rise of multiplayer games. Newsweek’s timeline of multiplayer online game history, accompanying a cover story on the Sims Online, never mentions her social interaction games for Electronic Arts and completely ignores multiplayer gaming’s offline, home-computer origins.

Thumbing through a recent Business 2.0 recap of Electronic Arts history (“Could This Be the New Disney?”), it seems the entire early history of the company under founder Trip Hawkins (now at 3DO) has been deleted. Describing current CEO Larry Probst’s arrival in 1984, at the delirious height of gaming’s early golden age, the article bubbles: “Back then Pac-Man was the most popular video game, and Electronic Arts’ portfolio was limited to a handful of products for the Apple II and Atari computers.”

And also the most popular home computer of the time, the Commodore 64, but who’s counting?

Today Electronic Arts is best known as a distribution Goliath. But in the heady atmosphere of the early 1980s, E.A. was famous for a contribution to computer game culture arguably as culturally significant as Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial: the “We See Farther” ads, which for the first time promoted game creators as artists with distinctive styles.

One ad shows Ozark — Dani (then known as Dan) Bunten, his brother Bill, Alan Watson and Jim Rushing — seated on a bench in front of a rustic market. Shot in sepia tones, the four disheveled men are hunched intensely over the Arkansas Gazette. The photograph conveys the ambiguous drama of an L.P. cover.

Despite Bunten’s status as computer gaming’s first star designer, she “didn’t have a scrap of pretension,” says game designer Chris Crawford, another iconoclast of the floppy disk era. “He was one of the few really good people in the industry.”

Even as she stood up for the rights of programmers as employees — to the point that some in management feared a union was in the offing — Bunten once politely walked out of a conference to protest what she saw as programmer egotism, Crawford says. Some designers wanted to receive an award that had previously gone to software publishers, and Bunten didn’t like the idea. Unlike others, Bunten was purely dedicated to game design — not money, fame or hacking repute, Crawford says.

As a child, Bunten had found classic board games to be a peaceful escape from family pressures, which included the burden of taking care of his four younger brothers when the Buntens hit hard times, according to younger brother Steve, who noted that Dan worked at a drugstore and as an assistant scoutmaster for the local Boy Scout troop to help pay the bills. As a computer game designer, Bunten wanted her creations to be as breezy to learn, and social, as her favorite board games, but to also benefit from the complex intelligence of a computer at work beneath the friendly surface.

“That was his inspiration,” says Civilization designer Sid Meier: “the vision of the family gathered around the computer.”

While an engineering student, Bunten started a bike shop called the Highroller Cyclery. Hometown friend Jim Simmons recalls, on the Dani Bunten Memorial Web site, that while Bunten’s partner saw the bike shops as a way of making some extra cash, Bunten saw it as part of a quest to improve the world. “If more people rode bikes, the world would be a better place. Typical Dani.”

Later, while working a day job in Little Rock, she spent some nights teaching others in the Little Rock Apple Addicts club the secrets of 6502 assembly language, and recruiting testers for her games. Friend Ted Cashion posted on the memorial site that at a bar on Markham Street, “several of us would usually down several pitchers, and as the night wore on, get carried away/excited/buzzed at what the future held for computers and gaming.”

Bunten’s games caught the interest of Russell Sipe, a soft-spoken former pastor who founded Computer Gaming World in 1981. According to Sipe, Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, dropped by the magazine’s tiny offices early on to ask for his opinion on whom to hire.

“Dan was one of the five that I listed,” Sipe says. He and Hawkins shared an admiration for Bunten’s easy-to-play multiplayer games. In 1978, Bunten had self-published Wheeler Dealers, a stock-market game that came with a special push-button controller so four people could play. Cartels and Cutthroats, published in 1981, had also contributed to Bunten’s growing reputation.

In the early years of E.A., Hawkins — who remembers Bunten as a kindly soul who would give him free chiropractic help — allowed Bunten the freedom to choose ambitious topics. Robot Rascals was envisioned as a family board game. A whimsical scavenger hunt for items like the “Digital Donut,” it came with real-life playing cards — and no single-player mode. It didn’t sell well — nor did 1988’s Modem Wars, a real-time strategy game released before enough people had modems. But Bunten’s 1987 Spanish explorer game, Seven Cities of Gold — one of her only single-player games — sold 150,000 copies. That was a lot back then.

Its scope was awesome for the time. “Your Computer Is Creating the New World,” your 64K Commodore would tell you in its blocky yellow approximation of calligraphy, as it spent 20 minutes drawing the coastlines of a random new Western Hemisphere. (Separate blank disk on which to store the New World not included.)

On the Bunten memorial board, former E.A. producer Joe Ybarra recalls that a buggy beta version was unable to generate an image of North and South America that didn’t look like an enormous peanut. There was an outburst of celebration in the E.A. offices the first time Bunten, at an agonizingly slow 2,400 baud, successfully transmitted a believable Western Hemisphere from Little Rock to the Bay Area.

“The energy and excitement was terrific,” recalls Ybarra. “Dan was both elated and burnt out, but you could hear him grinning on the other side of the phone.”

Bunten’s philosophy was that complex games could be based on surprisingly few rules. In Seven Cities you only kept track of Food, Men, Ships and Gold. But Meier was “blown away” by the final product, he says, not only because of its friendly interface design — “Amaze the Natives,” “Drop Stuff Off” — but also because it made him realize the vast historical scope possible for a simple game.

“Dan’s genius in M.U.L.E. and in Seven Cities of Gold was in taking big ideas and making them fun and accessible,” Meier says. “And that paved the way for a game like Civilization.” Indeed, Civilization pulls off the Buntenesque feat of turning 6,000 years of world history into a playable game.

Bunten’s greatest game, and the one with the most relevance to today’s multiplayer world, was M.U.L.E. Named for the stubborn electronic beasts (“Multiple Use Labor Elements”) that players haul out to plots of land on the planet Irata (“Atari” spelled backward), it took advantage of the Atari home computer’s four-joystick setup to let players cooperate and compete in an artificial economy. Designers still admire its flawless balancing of ruthlessness and interdependence. A player can make a tidy sum using such tricks as monopolizing the planet’s energy supply, but a robot Ken Lay who takes it too far will bring the economy crashing down for all four players, dooming the colony.

As anyone who has played it knows, bloodshed is unnecessary in the good-naturedly cut-throat competition of M.U.L.E. Today, journalists writing about the massively multiplayer Everquest find it remarkable that a game can teach us about free markets. But on a much smaller scale, M.U.L.E. staked out this territory on an Atari computer with four players gripping leathery joysticks.