I fell down a Wiki rabbit hole recently after a Slack conversation about Arkansas software development. I didn't know that at one time, one of the best video game companies in the world was right here in Little Rock.

David Koon did a great cover story about their star developer a few years back. It does the whole historical-gendering, he-then-she thing, but otherwise it's a damn fine tribute to an unsung hero of software.

I'm one degree removed from her, turns out. A friend of mine started chatting with her in a bar in Hillcrest in the early '90s, somehow they got on the subject of games, and he declared to her that the greatest game of all time was M.U.L.E.

"I wrote that," she said, and it took a bit for her to convince him. From then on they were friends until her death.

"I still pull out my old Commodore and play it," he told me. "I've probably played M.U.L.E. 2000 times since the 1980s. And I've literally never seen a game go the same way twice."

Hell of a thing.