Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
Dani Bunten's pioneering computer game inspired some of the greatest designers in the business. But her life story is a testament to how the industry lost its way.
Mar 18, 2003 | 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.
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