Undaunted, addicts around the world populate the Dealers Den.
#Dopewars onine windows#
With the Windows facelift, the game took off, even getting the ultimate props: a denouncement by a politician (in this case, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback who dissed the game in December). “Fortunately, he was a fan of the original game,” Wall says, “so he was quite receptive.” Wall also made a site for the game last March (and was lucky enough to find a sympathetic geek at - a popular, through generally conservative shareware site - who agreed to carry Dope Wars. To pump up the competition, he added a makeshift multiplayer application, which allows dealers from around the world to post their scores in a table online. Wall, a computer programmer and juggler who moved to New York from England, was so smitten by the game that he decided to take it to the masses who use Windows. The quick pace and dark humor of the original Dope Wars made Wall an instant fan after a friend emailed him the DOS version a couple years ago. Every hood has its own market prices, which fluctuate according to police busts and plain old serendipity (“Colombian freighter dusted the Coast Guard!”, reads one bulletin, “Weed prices have bottomed out!”). To do this, they click on buttons which represent subway rides to neighborhoods including the Bronx, Coney Island, and Central Park. Players start out with $2,000 and 31 days to make as much money buying and selling drugs as they can. You might say it’s a bit of aesthetic genius: all the action takes place via a nifty little text panel that’s about as complicated as your desktop calculator. ” On speed.īecause there are no fat graphics to weigh down Dope Wars, the game is indeed fast, fast, fast. “I had no idea so many people were addicted to the game,” the 31 year old says, “I guess it’s kind of like Tetris. Now Wall, who resurrected the low tech, high satire game on a lark for Windows last year, is trying to keep up with subsequent demand, putting the finishing touches on a souped-up Version 2.0, expected to hit the wires this month. Since it was first developed for DOS systems in the mid 1980’s, Dope Wars has become the underground’s answer to Solitaire – quick to install, easy to play, and, thus, tailor made for incessant work day lulls. Fortunately for Wall, the illicitness is taking place online, where nearly a half million gamers have downloaded his hometown drug dealing simulation, Dope Wars, making it one the top ten most popular shareware titles along with Pac-Man and Quake. He’s so dope, he’s the dope king, ensconced in his Queens apartment, cooking up new ways for international cartels to unload Ecstasy, smack, and shrooms. Dope Wars was huge in the early online underground.
I wrote this story, “The Dope King,” for the Village Voice, March 2000.
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