Dan Bunten and M.U.L.E. - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2013/02/dan-bunten-and-m-u-l-e/

<comment><USER2> _"Dan Bunten was an idealist from an early age. At university he protested the Vietnam War, and also started a bicycle shop, not to make money but to help save the world. According to his friend Jim Simmons, Bunten's logic was simple: "If more people rode bikes, the world would be a better place." When he watched Westerns, Bunten was an "Indian sympathizer": "It just seems like such a neat, romantic culture, in tune with the earth." A staunch anti- materialist, he drove a dented and battered old Volkswagen for years after he could afford better. "I felt like I sold out when I bought a 25-inch color TV," he said. That 1960s idealism, almost quaint as it now can sound, became the defining side of Bunten the game designer. He campaigned relentlessly for videogames that brought people together rather than isolating them."_

It's quite fashionable to be condescending towards hippies and the 60's counterculture these days, but I find them incredibly inspiring.

I wonder how different today's gaming world would be were more game designers and studios more concerned with expressing their idealism through their games rather than squeezing out a few more FPS, making prettier graphics, or making games according to tired formulas.

<comment><USER3> Heh, I quite agree.

Maybe it's me projecting but I've always been more of a fan of Jeff Minter for what I perceieve of him as being a really cool down to earth dude rather than his games (despite me liking many of them).

<comment><USER4> Jeff Minters autobiography series is a fun read: <http://minotaurproject.co.uk/lshistory1.php>

Someone just needs to get him to keep writing - last post was 6-7 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MULE is one of my favorite video games of all time. It has been years since I last played (via emulation) but it's one of those games like Warcraft II and Starcraft where I find it's all to easy to say, "How about one more round?"

The music is burned into my mind.

I haven't done a search, but I assume there are some modern homages to MULE?

Edit: Only 30,000 copies were ever sold? Just goes to show how uncommon it was to own a computer back then. I think I still have my disk and cardboard flip- case somewhere... I should dig that up.

<comment><USER6> There was the free Planet M.U.L.E., from 2009, which had online features and updated graphics.

Here's some videos: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LiqbEvEnrg> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1W52wQUkKc>

Unfortunately, the website for that game seems to be gone.

<comment><USER7> Planet M.U.L.E. is still around--at least as of a week or two ago! I haven't played in a while, but I check the site everyone once in a while to see if there's any news and whether people are still playing. Here's a cached version of the site from January 29th: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130129005307/http://www.planetm...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130129005307/http://www.planetmule.com) . I'm guessing they're just having minor issues.

I highly recommend it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Old video games are particularly interesting as artifacts because they implicitly highlight the capabilities of hardware and the sort of peripherals that could be expected during that period.

One of these days I'm going to find the time to sit down and play Colossal Cave Adventure.

And then after that maybe I'll find somebody willing to play Spacewar! with me.

<comment><USER9> If you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, they have a PDP-1 running Space War.

The day I played it, the docent giving the demonstration was Steve Russell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I loved this game as a kid - I remember getting my whole family to play a few times, what a blast!

It's touched on briefly in the article, but another thing I remember from this time in gaming is a short-lived but fascinating push to make the makers of these games public figures. It wasn't a ton of games, but I think it was EA (ECA back then) that would include pictures of the game design team and a brief blurb inside each of their games.</comment>


Show HN: Developers Homepage - <AUTHOR> https://www.fullstackend.com/ <comment><USER2> For a home page, it loads really slowly - sorry. I'd want the home page to load in like <0.5sec otherwise it doesn't bring much value.

From Australia it's taking about 1 second upfront and then 5-10 seconds of spinning to load the feed.

Maybe you could cache the feed in local storage (which you load immediately) and only pull a diff? Serve a small dehydrated cache with the page load from your server?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank You for Your insight. Yes performance was one of the bottle necks, took me few days to rewrite critical API calls from PHP to GO. Still load is higher than 0.5 seconds, but now it takes around 1.5-2 seconds to fully load. Will try to increase performance further

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SSL warning appears in the browser that says the website has been improperly configured. Error code SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DONAIN

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I moved to firebase hosting, so it had BAD CERT for a few minutes</comment></comment>