When you think back to being in high school, staying up all night with your friends playing video games, what games do you play? Is it Mass effect? Maybe some iteration of Smash or Mario Kart? The big one when I was that age was Street Fighter II in all its iterations. But there’s another game that brings back the most vivid memories, and it’s incredibly stupid: Wall Street Kid for the NES.
I friend Russ and I loved JRPGs, and Wall Street Kid fit the bill, I guess. After finishing another playthrough of Final Fantasy II (now known as FFIV) on our brand new SNES, we’d switch over to an older Nintendo system to engage in raw casino capitalism. To be honest, this game was a lot more challenging than leveling Cecil, Rose and Kain, and I vividly remember throwing my rectangular controller when I failed to earn a million dollars to buy a starter home, accidentally knocking over a two liter Pepsi bottle. It was three in the morning.
Wall Street Kid is a very strange game, and I’m always confused when I remember that it exists. Released in Japan in 1989 as Money Game II: Kabutochou no Kiseki and in North America next year, this title celebrates wealth and its accumulation, while offering enough snarky commentary to let you know we’re all in on the joke. Could be.
But the world has changed a lot in the last 30+ years. The image of the investment tycoon is not so uncritically revered, especially post-The Wolf of Wall Street, after the housing crisis, postal bank bankruptcies and, well, everything else. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of people who want to be Wall Street kids or something in the venture capital or cryptocurrency game. So I was curious: How would it feel to play the Wall Street Kid today, in the year of the Lord 2023?
Strange. It was felt strange.
At the start of the game, you’re told that your rich uncle has just died and left you his $600 billion estate – but only if you can prove your money management skills in the stock market. You are given $500,000 to invest and one month to earn enough to buy a “decent million dollar house”. You know, your standard starter home. If this isn’t outrageous enough, I might just throw out that $1 million in 1990 would be $2,321,063.50 today.
But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve got your top and made a few other big purchases, the bottom line is buying out the family castle. Of course why not.
Alright, let’s dive in! Each in-game day in Wall Street Kid starts with a stock news report, letting you know what types of stocks are doing well and a few popular investments. Through a point-and-click interface, you then spend cash to buy stocks with names like YBM and Boing, mirroring actual companies popular at the time, or sell what you have and reinvest. There are a few other activities (more on that in a bit) and then you can hit the clock to end the day and see how your portfolio did.
As you play an investor who buys and sells stocks based on daily trends rather than anything intrinsic to the companies they represent, you can’t escape the feeling that our entire economy revolves around guys trying to double their money in 30 days to buy a fancy house. It’s not a good feeling.
In the midst of buying and selling stocks to make his first million, your character must also take care of his physical health and his fiancée, Priscilla. (Yes, it’s spelled that way.) Neglecting any of these will result in game over conditions.
Compulsion adds a few extra gross dimensions to the game. First, presenting your relationship as a task to be completed is… not great. The completely transactional nature of your dates is emphasized by the very specificity of dialogue like “I’m really going to enjoy these four hours.” But there is also a deeply problematic dynamic of the relationship itself. Prisilla will often ask our hero to buy her things — a dog, a car, an engagement ring — and missing those opportunities risks losing the game. We don’t see our main character and Priscilla together, we don’t get a peek into their lives; she literally exists only as a waste of time and resources, presented in that old-fashioned misogynist style of men who hate their wives.
After you’ve bought your million-dollar house, the first thing you should do—unless you’ve been extremely good at the game by this point—is put it up as collateral for an $800,000 loan so you can keep buying and selling, right back to the hamster wheel to your next big purchase. A yacht, in case you were wondering, for your wedding. Once again, this game strips the value of everything down to his ability to create more value. Which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate depiction of late-stage capitalism. What is a home if not “property?” We literally use “possession” as a synonym for sleeping place.
No, none of this occurred to me in the early nineties.
Actually, I understand why I loved Wall Street Kid as a teenager. It’s like a caricature of the American dream, where pointing and clicking in the right sequence unlocks riches you can’t imagine. The mechanics of selecting your investments and then ticking the clock to end the day provide both the satisfaction of choice and the rush of surrendering to the whims of fate. In an era when fewer adults played video games, it seemed like a window into what someone older might play. The Wall Street Kid somehow felt cool.
The Wall Street Kid is supposed to be ambitious. It’s just a game, yes, and one that seems very aware of its cartoonishness. But it’s a game that’s at least nominally based in the real world, and it’s a game that wants to want
Still, when I revisit Wall Street Kid as an adult, I’m mostly kind of saddened that so many people still see the world this way—stocks as a bet rather than an investment, family life as a liability to be checked off—and disturbed by the degree to which is our real world economy gamified.
But I’m also encouraged by how far we’ve come. “This couldn’t be done today” is a common complaint, and in any case it’s completely wrong – a lot of awful things still see the light of day. But Wall Street Kid almost certainly I do not want to do today, at least not in the same way. For one thing, modern systems allow for a lot more complexity — I can imagine having a bit of fun with a GameStonks-esque quest, and instead of a one-dimensional fiancee, there could be Persona-like romance songs — but more than that, I think the material would be treated differently.