Like many other American pioneers, Bunten found she couldn't fit into the new order she helped build. Her friend Crawford says: "It is with much shame that the industry rejected her towards the end, treated her as a washed-up loser, out of touch with reality."

Fellow designers still welcomed Bunten as a visionary. In 1997, on the threshold of the multiplayer age, she gave a speech at the Computer Game Developers conference. "Solo sells, or at least it has until now," she said in her speech, predicting things would change. She also ticked off the elements in her philosophy of multiplayer games -- ideas that can be seen in games from Civilization to the Sims. You should be able to personalize your game; there should be what she called the "Norm Effect," after the Cheers character everyone greeted as he walked in the bar. Chance events should balance out the competition. And "keep the features down," she said. Then players, anticipating their opponents' next moves, could concentrate on human psychology, not game detail.

("The whole world was focused on solo play," Crawford says. "Bunten was passionate about that point, that no amount of A.I. would ever, ever match the richness of play you could get from multiplayer.")

Then she told a story that some say is myth and others swear by. The story was that for years she and Sid Meier had been eyeing a board game, called Civilization, as a likely possibility for adaptation. In one version of the story, related by Infocom's Brian Moriarty, the suits at E.A. talk her out of doing it. But in the version Bunten related at the speech, Meier was the one doing the dissuasion. Bunten ended up writing Command HQ, a Risk-like and un-Buntenish game that sold modestly. Meier's 1991 Civilization game sold 850,000 copies.

"Not that I would have done the amazing job that Sid did with that game," said Bunten, "but it does give one pause to consider the ways fate works out." (Meier says he was unaware of this story.)

By 1997 Dani Bunten was fighting the effects of a lifetime of heavy smoking. She searched the Internet one day looking for Web sites about herself and came across the fanatically detailed "World of M.U.L.E.," run by Christian Schiller. Schiller says he receives about five e-mails a week from people "who say they play M.U.L.E. on a regular basis." Instead of waiting for the industry to create a new version of the game, he and others are programming their own. His is called "Son of M.U.L.E."

In an e-mail to Schiller, Bunten described her frustrations: "The unfortunate situation is that virtually all the folks in authority got here after MULE was already out of print. The world is so oriented towards 'sizzle' these days that showing someone the original product doesn't go very far either..."

"Anyway, on a personal note I'm currently finishing treatment for a fairly advanced case of lung cancer. The prognosis is good and my spirits are very high. I view the future one day at a time. However, if there is one thing I want to do before I die it is to re-do MULE for a modern audience."

But as Bunten met with potential publishers in the '90s, they watched the blocky robo-donkeys march to tinny, mock-stately title music; they observed the primitive 8-bit doodles of the Auction; and time after time, they saw nothing more than an ancient, dusty, stupid Atari video game.

When her obituary appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette -- the consolidated version of the newspaper she was reading in that old Electronic Arts ad -- a woman who met Dani Bunten at an Arkansas hospital was quoted as saying that a conversation with her was like "having your head opened and the universe poured in." Late in life, Bunten seemed to become fanatical about studying other people; she was devouring New Age books, anthropology and Jung. At a time when modems were seen by most users as optional peripherals, like printers or koala pads, Bunten's genius was in seeing the interconnectedness of people as the key to a new era in gaming. She had "a vision that, in hindsight, turned out to be correct," Meier says. "It's not easy to be ahead of your time."

Insisting that a mass market of people could be reached if designers would only get out more, Bunten uttered her most quoted maxim: "Nobody on their deathbed said, 'I wish I'd spent more time with my computer.'"

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