Drug Wars
John Dell
1984
PC/DOS, ripped off as Dope Wars

Animal Crossing players are likely familiar with the turnip stalk market. Each Sunday morning, a traveler named Sow Joan (or her also-punned granddaughter, Daisy Mae) comes to your little Animal Crossing town selling turnips. You’re expected to buy them in bulk for roughly 100 bells (the standard currency of Animal Crossing.) Over the course of the next week, your local shop will buy turnips for anywhere from 30 bells to 600. Should you fail to sell them over the course of the week, they will rot.

It’s a fairly basic market speculation simulator, and the way to “game” the system is to have enough friends playing the game that one of them can call everyone over to their market when their turnip prices are favorable. Successfully taking advantage of the market is what allows Animal Crossing players to go from struggling to maintain a balance of $60k to swimming in billions over the course of a year. Because you’re not paying rent or buying groceries, failed investments rarely ruin lives.

This basic concept – buy low and shop around till you can sell high – is the core of 1984’s Drug Wars, programmed by a solo developer named John E. Dell. You have 30 days to make as much money as possible – you start with $2000 and a debt of $5500 owed to loan sharks. You buy and sell cocaine, heroin, acid, weed, speed, and ludes. You can also buy guns for fighting off Officer Hardass and his fellow cops, or trenchcoats for holding more drugs. The interest on your debt to the loan sharks grows quickly and can end your game entirely, but taking out a bigger loan is the only way to get a decent score.

That arcade infrastructure of the “high score” is an interesting one for a PC game released during the video game crash of ‘83-’86. PC games held strong during this time, but arcades and consoles were on the way out, meaning it was not especially likely people would see that high score. But Drug Wars offers no other ways to celebrate your success – there’s no nominal “buy a nice car” or “buy a Scarface mansion” money goal you’re meant to reach. It’s all measured by that score. Shut out all conception of material reward, material harm, material wealth. You grind drugs and kill cops to be the best drug dealer you can be.

There are other multiplayer games that evolved around the buying and trading of materials to establish market values around this time – Taipan! and StarTrader were cited as direct inspirations for Dell. Like StarTrader, M.U.L.E. uses a similar space colonization theme and multiplayer competitive concept. The difference that leads to Dell’s choice in subject matter and eschewing multiplayer is that Dell was an edgy sophomore in high school. Drug Wars was an assignment for his computer lab. As the story goes, the game was later rewritten and rereleased so many times that even the shareware retitling “Dope Wars” has its own classic nostalgia.

The simplicity of Drug Wars is an accident shaped by its creator trying to get a decent grade. That simplicity is what makes it endure. Games go through cycles of simplicity and hypercomplexity. Right now, I think we’re on a wane, coming down from a peak of percentile modifiers to subsurface microstats and arcane board games and RPGs that seek to simulate the walking balance of a mech’s hydraulic limb system. There is a desire to just get back to skill being built around risk management, with any math being relatively basic.

In that sense, Drug Wars is important to me as a central reminder of how a small game you made in a couple weeks can endure forty full years. Of course, John E. Dell never made a dime off Drug Wars, and according to him, he rarely gets work off its reputation either. Ideas are just as easy to find cheap and sell high.  If you’re clever, mechanics can be reshaped from colonial exploration to sophomoric crime cartoons by a literal sophomore – and then back into cute animal cottagecore by the biggest game developer in the world.