Danielle Bunten Berry

United States · Born 1949 · Ozark Softscape · Game Designer

The designer of M.U.L.E. and The Seven Cities of Gold, who built nearly all of her games around players sharing a screen or a modem — a multiplayer pioneer decades early.

Danielle Bunten Berry was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 19 February 1949 and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. After an industrial engineering degree she built urban models for the National Science Foundation, and in 1978 she released her first game, Wheeler Dealers, a real-time auction game for the Apple II that sold about 50 copies. With her brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing and Alan Watson she founded Ozark Softscape in Little Rock, which made M.U.L.E. (1983), her first game for Electronic Arts. It sold only about 30,000 copies but gained a lasting cult following, and The Seven Cities of Gold (1984) sold more than 150,000. Ten of the twelve games she worked on were built around multiplayer play, including Modem Wars (1988) and, for MicroProse, Command HQ (1990) and Global Conquest (1992). She transitioned in 1992 and later co-founded the online games company Mpath. She died of lung cancer on 3 July 1998, two months after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Computer Game Developers Association, and was inducted posthumously into the AIAS Hall of Fame in 2007.