| 1 | 6 | My dad still has his HP-35 and it is double the weight of my TI-89 and does a tenth as much. It came in a leather carrying case and came with all wall-wart to plug into the wall. https://youtu.be/g6jQVqkpjc8 |
| 2 | 6 | It's important to note that Apple II's don't have... graphics. You could sort of fake them with special text characters, but home computers with sprites were a little way off. With the exception of the blocky splash screen, Wheeler-Dealers is a text-first game. People playing games on an Apple II were hobbiest that were attempting to get the machine to do something it didn't. |
| 3 | 6 | The controller was a broken Apple II controller that had its buttons split and rewired so that they could reach to each player. The buttons were glued to big craft beads that were painted red. |
| 4 | 7 | If you were foolish enough to go with the Atari 400, you were treated to: half the memory, a plastic membrane keyboard, only 2 controller ports, RF-output only (no S-video), and only 8 or 16kb of memory, depending on when you bought it. Like the model number suggests, it is half the price, though. https://archive.org/details/Atari4001920x1080 |
| 5 | 8 | EA has gone through so many layoffs in 2025 that as I write this in July there is some doubt that videogames will still exist as an industry that we can recognize. Battlefield 6 (6!) is slated to release soon, and they are banking on 100 million players. For context, Fortnite, one of the most played free-to-play games ever, has an estimated 400 million registered users. |
| 6 | 10 | I show a tracker music sheet because it looks cool but it is anachronistic: Roy Glover would have composed out his music on paper, probably graph paper, and then encoded it by typing in the notes. |
| 7 | 10 | Roy Glover came in late, and kind of as a contractor, so he was not credited on the initial run of Atari print covers. He is in the software credits. |
| 8 | 13 | The "meet the devs" section is wild. It feature a picture where three of the devs are reading a newspaper about MULE's, and Bill is eyeing up a woman. This is made awkward when you learn that the woman is Dan and Bill's sister (not mentioned anywhere, just a model of oppourtunity). The interview is with Dan talking about his favorite things: playing MULE and "Slick Willy's". |
| 9 | 14 | Lets be clear: bringing your setup to your friends house was not a realistic option. You would need a large suitcase packed carefully to move your Atari, the disk drive, the powerbrick, and the RF-adapter. And you did your best not to travel your disks too much, they are fragile. |
| 10 | 17 | The in-game symbols for these resources are absolutely mystifying. They didn't have the pixels to do much better, but you will have the resource page of instruction manual open for the first game or two. I've attempted to interpret them here but who knows if I'm even right. |
| 11 | 25 | The first few revisions of this page was actually five pages of "look how cool auctions are." Did you know there is a mathematically "correct" auction? Did you know they used to time auctions with special candles? Did you know that auctions are actually kind of new-ish (think: 1600-ish)? |
| 12 | 26 | This is only technically true, It's sort of a variable speed Dutch auction with but you can see other's bids grow. |
| 13 | 30 | Collusion mode only exists on the original run of games and the NES version. There is no networked version of MULE that has collusion mode, at least that I've managed to play. |
| 14 | 31 | No Really; From different reviews: "I learned more about the economics of the marketplace from M.U.L.E. than I ever did in college" - Scott Mace, Info World ... "Don't tell the kids, but playing M.U.L.E. is educational. I learned more about practical economics by playing this game than in all my college economic courses." - Leo Laporte |
| 15 | 31 | Jim attributes Alan to coming up with the idea of the colony failing if a minimum worth isn't achieved. Alan (correctly, in my opinion) identified that with the amount of economic tomfoolery going on, it would be easy to completely strangle any progress with the colony. This offers a slight counterbalance to going completely sicko-mode on everyone. |
| 16 | 33 | There are much easier ways to play MULE. Don't by an OG print, there is a good chance the disk has degraded beyond usability anyway. |
| 17 | 34 | A whole book could be written about Danni's approach to their transition, the human toll they paid, how Danni would refer to her past self as basically another person, the number of fucking times I saw her misgendered in big official publications, and so on. I am ill equipped to talk about the trans experience in general and this one specifically, but I'll leave you with something that sticks with me.... Danni had three kids, and the ones that speak publicly anyway refer to Danni as their father. That makes sense, at the end of the day that was their primary interaction with Ms. Berry and how they remember her. I even think that's how she would have wanted it, and a part of why she compartmentalizes Dan vs. Danni. However, when referring to her in an ambient/present tense, they will still use the pronoun he. I don't know how to feel about that. |
| 18 | 34 | Game historians get a little persnickety if you make an assertion like this since the defintions are gooey, but as a commercially available game, I believe this is true. |
| 19 | 35 | If this talk was recorded, I can't find it. Which is a little strange, the talk before was (John Romero speaks briefly in it). I don't think it was from anything nefarious, she gave a repeat of that talk the following year, which was recorded. However, it's a little hard to listen to, as you can hear something going on with her lungs, and she will pass away about five months later https://gdcvault.com/play/1013991/Do-Online-Games-Still-Suck |
| 20 | 36 | She says this a little tongue and cheek: action arcade games were tearing up the scene, and marketing was mostly targeted to teenage boys. A quirky economics game is not easy to market, and Danni wasn't about to modify MULE for the sake of marketability. |