In 1984, Electronic Arts released “Adventure Construction Set” (ACS), created by Stuart Smith. It is a game editor to create “adventure” games – though in modern terminology, you would say it is for creating “role-playing games” (RPGs). The games could have various themes, such as fantasy or science-fiction.
What does this have to do with M.U.L.E.? Well, the story goes that Stuart Smith went around contacting the various other EA-contracted developer studies to get graphics for the monster editor. It seems that he also got in contact with Ozark Softscape, because some of the M.U.L.E. aliens ended up in the “science fiction” theme of ACS. Although some of the graphics were changed a bit, you can still see the resemblance to the original M.U.L.E. graphics design.
In 2016, I sat down to try it out, trying to create a M.U.L.E.-themed adventure game. I used my own M.U.L.E. short story as inspirational background to creating my own M.U.L.E. adventure. The screenshot below shows how far I got… Not far! To be frank, the usability of ACS is abysmally slow and difficult. It would take ages to complete a game with it – time which I don’t have. Nevertheless, it is a nice idea to think that it would be possible to create a M.U.L.E.-themed role-playing game using ACS, if someone found the time and patience to do it.
Thank you Stuart for including the M.U.L.E. characters in ACS!