discoursedrome:

On the subject of the stock market, I’ve been meaning to talk a bit about Wall Street Kid, an old NES game about investing in the stock market. This game is fascinating to me because there’s almost nothing else like it, and it’s so intensely a product of its era, but it’s also interesting as a sort of inadvertent cultural commentary, because it’s like the Papers, Please of being a New England trust fund kid.

The premise of Wall Street Kid is that you’re a preppy-looking dude from a wealthy family, and your dead uncle has left you a hojillion dollars, but to inherit it you have to prove your worth by taking a small loan of half a million dollars and parlay it into a successively greater fortune, accumulating status markers of upper-class adulthood along the way. (This is easier than it sounds because you live in a world where everyone is very stupid and so you can often beat the market just by reading the paper and noticing cyclical trends. Unfortunately you can only borrow money at extortionate rates, so you can’t speedrun the game with leverage.)

Anyhow, what’s interesting about wall Street Kid is that it’s appealing to that sort of caricatured fantasy of the high-flying rich trader from the boom period, but it also goes out of its way to make it feel like a banal rat race. That, more than the weird premise, is what makes it interesting to me.

Everything is structured around the notion that you’re obligated to get all these victory conditions for the sake of your family, in order to make yourself worthy of having their name and inheriting their stuff. It’s rare to see the experience of “being born into burdensome familial obligations that dominate your entire life”  gamified in this way, and while the inheritance gimmick makes it less direct, it’s not really subtextual either. Compare this to the Animal Crossing Tom Nook thing, which has the same sort of “gamified debt bondage required to enter adult life” motif but presents it as more impersonal and less a matter of fulfilling familial obligations.

There are two other constraints limiting your performance in the game. The first is that you have to take care of your health or you will literally die, so you have to work an exercise regimen into your schedule and practice “self-care”. The second is that you have a fiancee who demands a big wedding and then a constantly-escalating series of status markers, sometimes with little warning, and if she leaves you you lose the game.

The game is divided into chapters – at first you have to buy a house, and then you need to get married, and then you need to buy a yacht, and so on. But it’s fascinating to me because these needs are all, within the game narrative, explicitly imposed upon you by other people. Textually you’re a wealthy aristocratic superman but it never feels at all like you’re playing Richie Rich, it feels like you’re getting dragged around and worn thin by the rat race and a web of social obligations you had no control over. It’s great, I love it.

adjacent points:

this was originally a Japanese game, the “you have to work out and keep your girlfriend” stuff came from the same genre mechanics that later became Newgrounds flash games about fucking Eva girls

The same company also made a “Casino Kid” that year that was about gambling not casino ownership, but in 1989 the American localized branding for both were riffing off famous American rich boy casino owner Donald Trump