Black Monday

October 1987. The New York Stock Exchange plummets more than twenty percent in a single day, and the world learns a new word — Black Monday. Someone was sitting there with cold sweat on their forehead, while someone else was peacefully clicking away on DOS, playing a simulator that bore exactly this name. The publisher couldn't have timed the release any better.

Black Monday from Starsoft Development Laboratories is a stock market simulator from 1987 for MS-DOS. You get a starting capital of fifty thousand dollars and the task is simple: buy low, sell high, walk away rich. You have a selection of shares in real American companies of the time — Coca-Cola, US Steel, American Airlines, RCA, and others. No fantasy setting, no story. Pure numbers gaming.

Gameplay is straightforward to the point of spartan minimalism, which was hardly unusual in 1987. You track price movements, decide when to buy and when to sell, and pray the market cooperates. Price dynamics depend on simulated market activity — prices fluctuate, opportunities come and go. The interface is text-based, keyboard controls, nothing that would surprise a modern player in a good way. The simulator was never as deep as later stock market competitors on PC, but for its time it managed to convey the basic logic of speculative trading.

What's worth taking away from it today? Mainly the historical context. In 1987, interest in the stock market and personal investment was on the rise in the American middle class, and the film Wall Street premiered that very same year. Black Monday was riding that exact wave — and then the real crash renamed it. The game itself isn't a milestone in the genre, didn't make it into any hall of fame. It's more of a time capsule: a look at what people cared about back then and what they thought belonged in a computer game. The depth of the stock market simulation stays on the surface, share prices don't feel like the result of a complex model, and after an hour of play you feel like you've explored everything the game has to offer.

Today, mainly those who want to experience what software from the second half of the eighties looked like will play it — stripped down, no music, no explanations. Or those who want to verify that investment decisions are frustrating even in a simulation where real money isn't on the line. On oldgame.cz you can run it in your browser without installation, without DOSBox, without sound configuration that wouldn't have anything to play anyway. Half an hour of nostalgia at the price of zero effort — that's the whole offer and the whole truth about Black Monday.