That is to say, the game stopped being distributed to retail outlets. Illegal copies spread rapidly and by the mid 90s received knowledge among nerds held that M.U.L.E. was the most pirated game in history.

Yet you’ve probably never heard of it, much less played it.

Attend any gathering of serious computer gamers and you will over the course of an evening hear M.U.L.E. mentioned more than once. Attend a convention of computer game makers and you will hear M.U.L.E. spoken of in reverential tones which earlier, less secular ages reserved for references to the Deity.

On its face, M.U.L.E. seems to have little to recommend it. It’s a four-player supply-demand game with a simple scenario: You and three other players (which can be people or the computer) land on Irata ("Atari" spelled backward), an undeveloped planet, and you have 12 turns ("years") to develop its very limited resources (two minerals, "smithore" and "crystite") by using the planet’s limited farming and energy-generating capabilities. To do this, you have to use "mules", which are comically animated "Multiple Use Labor Elements." (That's a M.U.L.E. creeping along under the title in the illustration above.)

That’s it.

Of course, you can also say that a Shakespeare sonnet is just 14 ten-syllable lines about love.

What sets M.U.L.E. apart from the hundreds, the thousands of computer games filling the already overflowing dustbins of cyber-history?

For one thing, M.U.L.E. is, in its own self-defined context, perfect. There is no point in the game where you think, "Uh-oh. This could’ve been done a lot better." There’s no place for improvement, at least if you have to stay within that extraordinary 36K coding limitation.

The music may be midi-esque but—again given the limitations—it is clever and fits the game perfectly.

The graphics and animations may be primitive but they are—within the limitations—carried off with both minimalist elegance and, amazingly, gentle humor.

As every gamer knows, and as more than one venture capitalist has learned the hard way, the game’s the thing.

If the concept is good, players will overlook, indeed ignore, many other deficiencies. Myst, one of the all-time best-sellers, was nothing more than a series of still images strung together on a highly seductive story-line studded with clever, challenging puzzles. Quake promised bloody mayhem and delivered precisely and abundantly on that one promise.

For that matter, consider chess: 32 pieces on an 8-by-8 grid? What’s to like? But once you play the game, the limitations—the small number of pieces and the simple board—disappear because the concept is so stimulatingly and bafflingly rich.

M.U.L.E. is certainly not chess. What it is is a perfectly realized diverting, entertaining, non-repetitive 36K computer game that offers the player an hour or so of pleasurable involvement.

But wait. There’s more.

M.U.L.E. lives in the computer-gaming hall of fame also because it was the first mass-marketed multi-player game. You can play it as you vs. the computer. You can also play it as a computerized parlor game, with you and three friends gathered around the computer. In 1983, pre-Internet and not that far-removed from the glorious, mind-numbing inanity of Pong, this was a new and radical concept.

A shared computer-game experience? Now, we think nothing of having nightly bridge partners in Singapore, or in destroying Quake shooters in Brazil.

All this cyber-game communality started with M.U.L.E.

I was one of the 30,000 buyers of the original release, and I played M.U.L.E. countless times until finally the old Commodore 64 gave way to the bloatware wonders of the PC. There followed some years without M.U.L.E., and then one night on the Internet…