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I believe it was the Christmas when I was seven when me and my big brother Mats got a Commodore 64 from Santa Clause. Although I was a bit of a nerd even before this, it was this contraption which sealed my path into geekhood. At ten years old I was “programming” games in BASIC, and I have a lot of games like the Ultima-series to thank for at least some of my skills in the english language. One of my all-time favorite games though was always M.U.L.E.

In M.U.L.E. (Multiple Use Labor Element) you play settlers on the planet IRATA (Atari spelled backwards) settling land plots on which you either grow foods, gather solar energy, mine for smithore (the source material for the aforementioned M.U.L.E.s…) or the rare luxury mineral Crystite. Shortness of food will seriously handicap your abilities to perform functions, and if you don’t have enough energy your M.U.L.E.s won’t be able to perform, i.e. produce/harvest/mine goods. If the colony doesn’t receive smithore there will not be enough M.U.L.E.s to go around. Crystite? Well, that’s for making money.

Games are played in either six, nine or twelve months (rounds), each month identical. It starts with a land grant, where all players (always four of them, either human or A.I.) have the opportunity to claim one land plot for free. Additional land plots may be auctioned off at this point as well. After this players (in order of rank) take turns doing their actions. This may include buying M.U.L.E.s, outfitting them for work either harvesting food, gathering energy, mining smithore or crystite, and then taking them out to their land plots. M.U.L.E.s can be moved around or refitted for other duties as well. You can mark your land plots for sale in the following land auction or buy an assessment of how much crystite is found in any plot. You can carry out as many of these actions as you can in the amount of time given. The amount of time depends on how much food you have. If you have time over you can always end your turn by gambling in the pub. The final phase of the round is the auctions phase. Now goods of surplus food or energy, as well as smithore and crystite can be bought and sold to either other players or to the colony itself.

After the selected six, nine or twelve rounds the colonist ship returns whoever has the most points (money, land and goods) wins the game. Simple as pie! Well, not really. There’s a lot to keep in mind. If you’re producing food (more than the others) you want the colony to run out of foods, so that you can control the price, as everybody has to buy from you. If the colony doesn’t get smithore it can’t produce M.U.L.E.s. The less they have, the more they cost, naturally.

A few days ago, a Twitter-contact let me know about a new development in the world of M.U.L.E., namely Planet M.U.L.E.. This is the answer to several of my long-lived prayers, and I’m not a praying man… I’ll get it out of the way immediately, it’s free, it’s cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it’s online. In a sense I think M.U.L.E. was always meant to be played online, it was just twenty-or-so years ahead of it’s time…

So far I’ve registered (username: Mosse) and played only one training game (against bots) but it seems very truthful to the original, with the exception of revamped graphics. The game has only been live since the 6th of December (Finland’s independence day, by the way…) so there aren’t that many active players yet. I don’t know, and honestly actually doubt, if it will ever grow huge, as this M.U.L.E. fandom is a bit on the über-geeky side, but I’m a happy camper! I’ve waited for this for a long time, as M.U.L.E. is one of the games I always make sure to play every time I dust off ye olde C64 and start it up, which I do about once a year.