Mother of Multiplayer | Danielle Bunten Berry (1949- 1998): Not Just Cistory
I am often momentarily convinced by the narrative continually being forced upon us by angry gamer bros, that gaming has always been an entirely male industry, only recently opening its gates to women, but, despite what the trolls and misogynists say in the comments section, that simply isn’t true. In 1964, the first narrative video game was written by a woman; Mabel Addis, a teacher who wanted her students to be more engaged in her lessons on ancient Sumeria (Wilaret, 2019).
From there, women’s involvement in gaming only grew. It is estimated that, in 1989, a mere 3% of video game developers were women, and in 2013 it was 12% (Gracer, 2013). Flash-forward to the year 2021 and Statistica says that 30% of game developers are women (and 8% are nonbinary, gender fluid/genderqueer, two-spirited, or transgender) (Clement, 2023). Suffice it to say that women have always been a part of creating video games, even if at a minuscule percentage.
In 1989 Danielle Bunten Berry’s game M.U.L.E had already been published for six years, she was three years away from coming out publicly as a woman and beginning her transition, and eighteen years away from (post-humously) being added to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame (Costikyan, 2023).
Berry is far from being the only transgender woman to help shape video games into what they are. She is in the company of other talented individuals such as Veda Hlubinka-Cook, Cathryn Mataga, Rebecca Heineman, and Jamie Fenton (Johnson, 2021), but she is the subject of our focus for this entry into the Not Just Cistory series
Early Life
Danielle Bunten Berry was born “February 19, 1949, in St. Louis, Missouri… [the first] of six children” (Costikyan, 2023). Danielle and her family moved to “Little Rock [Arkansas] in 1965, and Bunten lived in and around Little Rock until the last years of her life, when she moved to Palo Alto, California” (Costikyan, 2023).
Even during her childhood, games were an important part of Danielle’s life. In an interview, she states “When I was a kid the only times my family spent together that weren't totally dysfunctional were when we were playing games” (Hague, 1997). She goes on to explain how this influenced her philosophy when creating games, saying “Consequently I believe games are a wonderful way to socialize” (Hague, 1997). This philosophy is evident in across her career and has left an indelible mark on gaming as a whole.
As a teen and young adult “Bunten worked at a drugstore and as an assistant scoutmaster for a Boy Scout troop to provide extra money [to support her family]. Bunten graduated from Catholic High School for Boys” in Little Rock (Costikyan, 2023).
A potent combination of intelligent and enterprising, “In 1971, Bunten opened a bicycle shop, the Highroller Cyclerie, near the University of Arkansas… and received a degree in industrial engineering from UA in 1974. Bunten’s first job involved doing mathematical modeling of urban systems for the National Science Foundation” (Costikyan, 2023).
Entering the Game Designing World
Right from the start of her game developer career, Bunten was an innovator, her “first game, 1978’s ‘Wheeler Dealers,’ [sic] was the first personal computer game that was packaged in a printed box, and one of the first — if not the first — computer games that allowed for more than two players” (Koon, 2012).
Her innovative spirit and philosophy of communal gaming were evident, as “the game shipped with four custom-built controllers made from red wooden macrame beads with a single button glued into one end, which players used to make stock-market-like trades while competing against one another” (Koon, 2012).
She continued on her entrepreneurial path, when “in 1979, Bunten partnered with her brother and a few friends to found the game company Ozark Software [sic]. The group ran the organization from Bunton’s [sic] basement…” (AtariWomen).
A Cult Classic and Rockstar Status
The company began to take off when “[i]n 1982, Bunten was selected by Electronic Arts (EA), a recently founded company, as one of a handful of ‘electronic artists’ it published, and Ozark developed five games for EA over the next few years” (Costikyan, 2023).
One of the games that Bunten Berry was tasked to write for EA was M.U.L.E, which would become the cult classic she is most known for (Hague, 1997). Released in:
[1983, it is], a turn-based strategy game that could accommodate up to four players at the same console. An exercise in supply and demand economics, the game forces the players, who represent settlers on the planet of Irata, to compete over food, energy, and mineral resources (Costikyan, 2023).
M.U.L.E is sometimes considered to be a monetary failure, but in a 1997 interview Bunten Berry disagreed, saying:
given some caveats, it didn't do all that badly. It sold 30,000 copies, and for a game whose home platform–the Atari 800–went out of production just months after its release, that ain't bad. Also, although we ported it to the C64 it had a very poor solo capability but still sold good numbers there too (Hague, 1997)
Proving that she and her design company were not just one-hit-wonders, Ozark Softscape’s next game Seven Cities of Gold did even better, selling five times as many copies (Koon, 2012). Ozark Softscape and Danielle Bunten Berry had made their mark on the gaming industry, even if it wasn’t initially evident.
EA, however, seemed to sense this (or maybe they just wanted to broaden their market, by making gaming look cool), treating Danielle Bunten Berry and her colleagues almost like rockstars:
a famous publicity shot of the Ozark Softscape team created for EA shows programmers Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, Alan Watson and Dan[i] Bunten lounging picturesquely on a bench with a dog while a hot blonde sips a drink nearby, the four looking decidedly more like Lynyrd Skynyrd than a bunch of game geeks (Koon 2012).
Leaving EA
However, this honeymoon phase/world tour couldn’t continue forever. After creating several games for the company “Ozark and EA fell out over a new version of M.U.L.E. and EA’s insistence that it include combat, which Bunten felt was a betrayal of the game’s intent and aesthetic” (Costikyan, 2023).
Ozark Softscape did go on to create two more game titles, now working with Micropose, but they never did recreate the monetary success of their earlier titles, particularly Seven Cities of Gold (Koon, 2012). Melanie Bunten Stark, Danielle’s eldest, says that money was never the goal for her, she was in it for the love of the game (Koon, 2012). (Okay that was a dumb joke, but I just watched the first episode of Fallout, bear with me.)
Becoming Ms. Danielle Berry
In 1992, after the end of her third marriage, Danielle announced to people in both her personal and professional life, that she was a woman, and was beginning her transition (Costikyan, 2023). Danielle described Transition as “the name given to the time when your old pronoun doesn't fit anymore but neither does the new one” (Hague, 1997). In November of that year, she underwent gender-affirming surgery, which was, at the time called sex-reassignment surgery (Costikyan, 2023).
Another thing that was changed by her transition, was Bunten Berry’s involvement in the video game industry. In 1997 she described her new life and new priorities:
I'm a little more than three years into my new life role as Ms. Danielle Berry, and her career looks to be somewhat different from old Mr. Dan Bunten's. For one thing I'm not as good a programmer as he was. I'm also not as willing to sit for hours in front of a computer to make something that other people can use to socialize. I tend to need to socialize far more often than he did. Thus, I do design and consulting rather than programming and development. However, with my background I seem uniquely suited to this business so I think I'll stay around in one form or another for as long as they'll have me (Hague).
End of Life
Around the time of the publication of what would end up being her final game, Warsport, for MPath, an online gaming publisher, Bunten Berry was diagnosed with lung cancer, which would eventually kill her (Koon, 2012).
In May of the following year, she was honored with an award for lifetime achievement from the Computer Game Developers Association. Two months later Danielle Bunten Berry passed away at the age of 49 on July 3, 1998(Koon, 2012).
This award, given mere weeks before her death was not the last she would receive; indeed in 2007, she was added to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame (Costikyan, 2023).
Conclusion
However, her impact, in my opinion, is more deeply felt in the world of gaming today, than in any (well-deserved) award she received before or after her death. She has inspired developers like Will Wright, original designer of the Sims franchise, as well as Sid Meier, designer of the Civilization games (Costikyan, 2023), as well as multiplayer games at large.
She really was the mother of multiplayer. Not that someone else couldn’t have come up with what she did, but she did. It was her boundless creativity and ingenuity that started the evolution of what would become a core part of video games today.
Her belief that video games could be just as social as the board games she treasured with her family changed the trajectory of the industry in ways any other developer might not have, had they pioneered the radical idea of multiplayer instead.
Trans women and cis women have always been a part of gaming, even if their identities have been unknown to the public, and it is foolish to assume otherwise. Games have always been for whoever wants to play, and their creation is the same.
Bibliography
Atari. (2019, March 6). Danielle Bunten Berry. atariwomen. https://www.atariwomen.org/stories/danielle-bunten-berry/
Clement, J. (2023, December 12). Global Game Developer Gender 2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/453634/game-developer-gender-distribution-worldwide/
Costikyan, G. (2023, September 7). Danielle Bunten Berry (1949–1998). Encyclopedia of Arkansas. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/danielle-bunten-berry-4524/
Graser, M. (2013, October 1). Videogame biz: Women still very much in the minority. Variety. https://variety.com/2013/digital/features/womengamers1200683299-1200683299/
Hague, J. (n.d.). Danielle Berry. In Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. interview, Dadgum Games. Retrieved from https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/BERRY.HTM.
Johnson, S. (2021, May 30). Seven trailblazing LGBT+ pioneers who helped to shape video gaming as we know it. PinkNews. https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/05/30/lgbt-video-game-pioneers-david-gaider-danielle-bunten-berry-gaming/
Koon, D. (2019, April 26). Dani Bunten changed video games forever. Arkansas Times. https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2012/02/08/dani-bunten-changed-video-games-forever?oid=2059426
Willaert, “Critical Kate.” (2022, November 25). The Sumerian game: The most important video game you’ve never heard of. A Critical Hit! https://www.acriticalhit.com/sumerian-game-most-important-video-game-youve-never-heard/
