Subtrade: Return to Irata is a multiplayer video game developed in 1993 by the German developer Century Interactive. It is a clone of the popular video game M.U.L.E. Subtrade was originally written for the Amiga, and later ported to MS-DOS.

General information

Like M.U.L.E., the game is about 4 colonists (players) building up an economy on the planet Irata (Atari backwards). The objective of the players is to become the richest colonist within 12 game turns. The gameplay of Subtrade is largely similar to M.U.L.E.. The most notable change is the transfer of the setting to a sub-oceanic world.

Subtrade was developed in 1993 because the platforms that could run the original M.U.L.E. (mainly the Atari 400/800 and the Commodore 64) were slowly disappearing. Unlike today, there were no convenient emulators available to run old software on current machines. Due to the rising demand of players for a port of M.U.L.E. to newer systems and Electronic Art's refusal to develop it, several companies decided to develop unlicensed M.U.L.E. clones on their own. Besides Traders, Subtrade is the only M.U.L.E.-clone that has been commercially released for 16-bit home-computers.

External links

• Subtrade at "Home of the Underdogs"
• A comparison of M.U.L.E. with Subtrade
• Subtrade at "The Legacy Museum"