Rags to Riches

Rags to Riches came out in 1985 for the Commodore 64, and it is not the kind of game anyone would expect from that year: you start as a homeless man with no money and nothing to eat, and your job is to work your way up. No monsters, no jumping — just a city split into districts, a subway to move between them, a day and night cycle, and a relentless tally of hunger and fatigue.

There are several ways to make money and the game pushes you towards none of them. You can collect bottles, you can find a job, you can steal. Save enough and you can rent a room instead of sleeping rough; save more and you can pay for schooling that unlocks better-paid work, and eventually you can invest what you have. Working against you are thieves, the police and tax men, any of whom can take what you just earned. That open structure is remarkable for 1985 — it is essentially a life simulation fifteen years before the genre had a name.

The weaker part is the playing. The rhythm is slow and repetitive: travel, earn, eat, sleep, repeat. Feedback is terse, a lot of the rules are learned by losing everything, and once you work out which activity pays best, the rest of the menu stops mattering.

What it misses most is an ending. There is no victory screen and no finishing line — once you are rich, it simply carries on. That takes the drive out of it, and today Rags to Riches is more an interesting experiment than a game you will stay with for hours. It is still worth trying: very few developers of the time dared to think about a city and about money this way.

On oldgame.cz you can start it directly in your browser, with no installation and no emulator on your machine.