WallStreet

When a graph starts blinking on your screen and buttons labeled "BUY" and "SELL" stare back at you, you know this isn't a flight simulator — it's something far less cosmic: speculation. WallStreet from 1989 plants you in front of a trading terminal and says: money, stocks, time. The rest is up to you.

This is a stock market simulation running on DOS, where you attempt to get rich by buying and selling shares on a fictional market. There's no story, no enemies, no levels — just tables, numbers, and time pressure. You start with a certain amount of cash and try to multiply it. Stock prices shift according to algorithms that simulate some kind of market behavior, and your job is to guess where the market will move.

Playing is straightforward — you pick a stock, enter the quantity, click BUY or SELL. The screen shows your portfolio value and the day's market movements in real time. The pace is surprisingly tense because you have to calculate, take risks, and make decisions under pressure. The controls are the most boring thing imaginable — purely text-based interface, no graphics or atmosphere — but that distraction would only get in the way anyway. In fact: the uglier the graphics, the more you focus on the numbers.

This game is essentially pure mechanics with no frills. It wasn't meant to entertain, but to educate — teaching you to think like a trader, understand how markets behave, test your intuition without real money on the line. In the nineties, when the internet wasn't everywhere and trading happened in person at the stock exchange, something like this made sense. Today its educational value is zero, because real market simulators are free online.

WallStreet is simply outdated as a paper map. If you're curious about how people played on computers when trading was the domain of elites and numbers were crunched by hand, it's worth a go. It's a window into a time when computer simulation was a novelty. For today's player who wants the thrill of trading without learning the script, there are better options. But if you love minimalism and can piece together the meaning of a graph from prescribed rows of text, there's at least an authentic old-terminal atmosphere and a modest sense of victory when a trade pays off.