[5] Berry was born in St. Louis, Missouri and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas as a junior in high school.

She was quoted saying, “When I was a kid, the only times my family spent together that weren't totally dysfunctional were when we were playing games.

Consequently, I believe games are a wonderful way to socialize.”[2] While attending the University of Arkansas, she opened up her own bike shop called Highroller Cyclerie.

[2] 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.

[6] After producing three titles for Strategic Simulations, Berry, who by then had founded a software company called Ozark Softscape, caught the attention of Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins.

[6] Along with the success of M.U.L.E., Berry also had close ties with the games Robot Rascals, Heart of Africa, and Cartels & Cutthroat$.

By the time the continent data were stored in the computer's memory, there was little left for fancy graphics or complex gameplay - the game had only five resources.

Allegedly, Trip Hawkins, CEO of EA, did not feel that pushing production of games onto a cartridge based system was a good idea.

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 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.

[6] The game's primary premise consisted of players playing with and against one another to establish total control over a planet.

This can be done by changing races and giving respective colonies different advantages that will impact the way the game is played and determined later on down the line.

[14] Ozark Softscape was a computer game development team consisting initially of Berry, her brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, and Alan Watson.

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.

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.

She felt as though 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.

[4] Sid Meier, the mastermind behind the video game series Civilization, inducted her at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.