Danielle Bunten Berry

In 2012, Arkansas Times wrote that Berry "is still considered something of a rock star among game designers and those interested in the history of games", crediting her emphasis on social interaction in gaming.

In 2000, Will Wright dedicated his blockbuster hit The Sims to Berry's memory. In 2007, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chose Berry to be inducted into its Hall of Fame. Sid Meier, the mastermind behind the video game series Civilization, inducted her at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.

In 1998, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association. In 2007, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences chose Berry as the 10th inductee into its Hall of Fame.

Less than a year after the release of Warsport, Berry was diagnosed with lung cancer presumably related to years of heavy smoking. She died on July 3, 1998. At the time, she was working on the design of an Internet version of M.U.L.E..

Although many of Berry's titles were not commercially successful, they were widely recognized by the industry as being ahead of their time. On May 7, 1998, less than two months before her death, Berry was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association.

A port of M.U.L.E. to the Mega Drive/Genesis was cancelled after Berry refused to put guns and bombs in the game, feeling it would alter the game too much from its original concept. In 1997, Berry shifted focus to multiplayer games over the Internet with Warsport, a remake of Modem Wars that debuted on the MPlayer.com game network.

After a third divorce, Berry, who had until then been living as male, transitioned to living as a woman. Berry underwent sex reassignment surgery in November 1992 and afterward kept a lower profile in the games industry. Berry later regretted having surgery, finding that for her, the drawbacks of surgical transition outweighed the benefits, and wishing she had considered alternative approaches. It caused difficulties in family relationships, and led to her being shunned by the video game industry. She joked that the surgery was to improve the industry's male/female ratio and aesthetics, but advised others considering a sex change not to proceed unless there was no alternative and warned them of the cost, saying "Being my 'real self' could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn't know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I've stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice."

After her transition in fall 1992, Berry stayed out of the video game spotlight, mostly keeping to herself. She felt as though that after transitioning she was not as good at video game development as she had previously been, stating "So, I'm a little more than three years into my new life role as Ms. Danielle Berry, and her career looks to be somewhat different from old Mr. Dan Bunten's. For one thing, I'm not as good a programmer as he was."

Berry departed EA for MicroProse. Allegedly, Trip Hawkins, CEO of EA, did not feel that pushing production of games onto a cartridge based system was a good idea. The shift was important to Berry, as computer games had previously been distributed on floppy discs, and a changeover to a cartridge system would allow games to be played on Nintendo systems. This was a significant factor in her decision to leave. She then developed a computer version of the board game Axis and Allies, which became 1990's Command HQ, a modem/network grand strategy wargame. Berry's second and last game for MicroProse was 1992's Global Conquest, a 4-player network/modem war game. It was the first 4-player network game from a major publisher. Berry was a strong advocate of multi-player online games, observing that, "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'"

Ozark Softscape was a computer game development team consisting initially of Berry, her brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, and Alan Watson. Ozark was run out of Berry's basement. The company was based out of Little Rock, Arkansas and had profound success with a few of their early titles. Ozark Softscape had a publishing deal with Electronic Arts for several of its groundbreaking games. In the early 1990s, Ozark Softscape left its partnership with Electronic Arts over a dispute to port some games to cartridge format for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It began a partnership with MicroProse to produce two more titles: Command HQ and Global Conquest. A dispute occurred over creating a follow-up to M.U.L.E. with Sega in 1993, and the company dissolved. The employees of Ozark Softscape moved to different areas of the software industry.

The follow-up game, Heart of Africa, appeared in 1985 and was followed by Robot Rascals, a combination computer/card game that had no single-player mode and sold only 9,000 copies, and 1988's Modem Wars, one of the early games played by two players over a dial-up modem. Modem Wars was ahead of its time, as few people in the late 1980s had modems in their homes.

In 1978, Berry sold a real-time auction game for the Apple II titled Wheeler Dealers to a Canadian software company, Speakeasy Software. This early multiplayer game required a custom controller, raising its price to USD$35 in an era of $15 games sold in plastic bags. It sold only 50 copies.

While attending the University of Arkansas, she opened up her own bike shop called Highroller Cyclerie. Berry acquired a degree in industrial engineering in 1974 and started programming text-based video games as a hobby. After she graduated from college, she was employed by the National Science Foundation, where she created urban models before starting a job at a video game company.

Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998), formerly known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E., one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's The Seven Cities of Gold.