A Review: Before Capitalism the Game was released by Game Freak, there was…
THE WALL STREET KID!!!
Year: 1990 // System: NES // Publisher & Developer: Soffel // Genre: ….errrrr, Stock Market???
>>>Man, I have to say, there’s no better way to push the processing power of the Nintendo Entertainment System to its full potential than with a high resolution game that deals with the most powerful, the most intimidating, the most UNPREDICTABLE force of reckoning out there in the world today…
…the stock market…
Hey sorry a member in your family died. NOW GO MAKE A MILLION BUCKS OR YOU FAIL!!!
NO kidding aside (because the stock market indeed controls the economy in my eyes…or rather, its shareholders), Wall Street Kid places you in the shoes of one of the unluckiest kids you’ll ever meet. His name is Wall Street Kid (wow, his name totally says nothing of the promise that his parents thought he held…), and he’s been struck with the most exhausting of burdens: 500,000 which he must turn into a million dollars in order to buy his first house and keep his family name. Oh, and he also has to pamper his girlfriend by buying her puppies and Ferraris. Man, 500,000 AND a girlfriend already? I really feel for the guy…
But the reality of the matter is that your boy is under a ton of pressure to succeed. I mean, this poor champ will become a chump if he can’t turn his 500K into a million within a month, and will therefore be disowned by his family. That’s honestly kind of cruel.
SHE ONLY LOVES YOU FOR YOUR POODLES!
And really, you can tell that his girlfriend only loves him because he buys her things and keeps himself in shape for her through swimming and hitting the gym. I almost didn’t see the whole point of exercising until the girlfriend popped up and said “Ewww, you look awful. EXERCISE you maggot!” Meanwhile you’re thinking to yourself, “God, her profile is the ugliest of the women in the game. How come there’s no option for me to hit on the pet shop chick and marry her instead? She’s all cute and homely, and it’s speak to the whole underlying theme of true love and…” oh wait, I’m getting off-track!
So your leisurely rich guy doesseven things with his life from 9 to 5: exercise, take his girlfriend on dates, buy and sell stocks via his boxy computer, read up on the stock market’s condition in the daily news, consult some dude named Stanley for 500 about the odds and ends of the stock market, hit on some consultant for 1000 who gives you information about which companies are expanding, and take out loans once you have collateral (a.k.a. you buy the house). At the end of each week you’ll be rewarded with shopping excursions…where you spend money on your girlfriend…uhm, okay…I’m rewarded by forcefully spending my money…thanks…
Screenshot here= the game. And yes, you just lost.
The truth of the matter is that this game is…extremely…dull… I mean, it doesn’t do the job in livening up that joy of making you money. It certainly simulates the rise and fall of certain stocks with an acceptable rate of unpredictability…but you pretty much do the same thing each day while hoping that you’ve invested enough in two or three companies to reap major awards. Unfortunately, no matter how well you do in working with tips and buying into soaring stocks, you will always have yourself a time in trying to reach each goal. All I can say is that the smaller stocks are better to invest in, as you buy more shares and therefore garner a LOT of extra money if the percentage shoots up by three of four. In fact, it’s almost never worth buying the big stocks as they don’t go up proportionately. For example, when the change for Boing, which starts at $145,000 (displayed as $145), is +2, you gain 2,000. But when you start out with 500,000, you can only buy 3 starting out to gain 6,000. However, if you buy as many shares of Carnivore as you possibly can, which witnesses a change of +2 at $34,000 per share (you can buy 14 max), then you will gain 28,000. That’s quite the difference!
Perhaps the developers were trying to teach us the game through basic experience that buying smaller shares was generally a smarter idea. Perhaps that was a lesson that the player needed to learn about the stock market. Well if this game is all about teaching the player about the stock market, then why didn’t they mention in a tutoring moment beforehand that $145 actually means $145,000 in economist’s terms, instead of making the player find out through noticing that all of his/her money was suddenly drained? I didn’t know what the small numbers meant, since I knew next to nothing about the stock market coming in. Therefore, it was easy for me to assume that your average shares ran for about 100 dollars, as opposed to 100,000. I’m just saying, that’d mean there were more people who could get in on owning a say in the company. Perhaps that was the point…bigger shares meant less stockholders running the business…
There was one major error in terms of realism. The gym, swimming pool, and hiking trail all closed before 2 in the afternoon. That…doesn’t make sense, especially since this was a North American game, and I’m pretty sure that most gyms in the United States stay open past 5 P.M. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to take frequent trips to your gym or swimming pool in the middle of a workday, but hey! This is a billionaire in training! He needs to constantly leave his office in order to be successful!
Every number on this screen is missing three zeroes behind it…yeah…
One particular glitch I found was in purchasing stocks in clusters. You could only hold five different types of stocks in your portfolio simultaneously. HOWEVER, if you bought two stocks from the same company on two separate days, then they would show up in different slots of your portfolio, meaning there was less space for you to use in buying other stock. I’m sure this is because the programming separated stocks of the same company based on the original pricing at which those stocks were bought…which makes sense, because, most likely, the price of one stock in particularly changed for the next day. But still, there should have been a way that they could have accounted for the separate days and still have grouped the two stocks into the same slot to allow you to buy from more companies. I’m just saying…this game was indeed in need of a little more polishing.
After playing Wall Street Kid, I don’t see it as a simulation of the stock market…but rather, the simulation of a day (or year) in the life of a rich guy. This game is pretty much saying that if you’re rich, then you base your life entirely around money. Want to stay in the family? Money. Want your wife to be happy? Money. Want to be happy in general? Time…and MONEY! But I gathered the impression that this game was also trying to uphold the age-old saying that time is money. Ultimately, this game tried to teach kids about capitalism, and it did a poor job because it just got old too quickly. Instead, kids would learn about the fundamental nature of their nation’s economy through a far more successful game franchise…
I wrote my first-ever Economics paper on this game…
CHIC Factor
Challenge: 5/10: The stock market was nicely unpredictable, but it seemed a little ridiculous for the creators to start you off with a nearly obscene goal of doubling your starting figures in less than one month of game time. That, and the internal game did a poor job of tracking your progress with your girl (or at least telling you about it) AND framing the importance of exercising (how was I supposed to know I had to go the gym to make my fiancee happy…that is, until I didn’t exercise for two weeks because I thought it worthless?)
Handling: 6/10: Extremely basic controls with a somewhat obnoxious rotation between selection boxes and choosing things with a mouse. Did the game really need a mouse? It made more sense to rotate through your office room options with a highlighter.
Innovation: 7/10: I will give Soffel props. Simulating the stock market with additional options through a NES game wasn’t a bad idea, and back in the 1990s, this would have been a nice game to use in promoting the implementation of NES “learning systems” in schools, so that children and teenagers could play these games as an alternate form of instruction. But just like computers, Nintendo Entertainment Systems were not cheap, and there was that unfortunate stigma that video games melted brains and detracted people from becoming valuable citizens.
Core Experience: 3/10: Routine of game grew out quickly, shares of the same stock bought on different days obnoxiously took up multiple spots in your portfolio whereas multiple shares bought on the same day only took up one space, and the music…wouldn’t…STOP! It was mainly that one screeching jingle that looped over and over until the weekends jumped out and said “here, enjoy this refreshing new BGM for 5 seconds…now GO BACK TO PAIN!!!” Also missing out on exercising later in the day didn’t make sense, and I hated that the game didn’t explicitly track your “love progress” or your improved physique.
OVERALL: 5.3/Iffy: It’s that one NES game about the stock market…and that’s about it. But it teaches a very valuable lesson that we must all remember for the rest of our lives: IT’S ALL ABOUT THEM BENJAMINS YO!
About the Author
Nichomaxwell Nichomaxwell is a reporter for the Northern Neck News in Warsaw, Virginia. When he's not writing newspaper articles, he's driving around in his unreliable SUV to see people or playing a new or old videogame. Although once the "review machine" on the site, NM has shifted his interests to feature stories, "did-you-know's" and editorials for TG.TV.
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