TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 9,187
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Though I'm not Karl Marx, just in case you're confused.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.
And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.
In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.
I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.
Capitalism—the game—does not work how you expect it to. For one thing, it is not on Earth. It happens on a procedurally generated pseudo-region of an Earth-like planet that you can spin up with every new game. Want to build the free market on a vast archipelago? By all means. A single, contiguous mega-landmass? Absolutely. The only guarantee is that, wherever you end, it will look nothing like anywhere that exists on our actual planet. Also, cities like Lisbon and Chicago will end up a short walk from each other, much like they are in real life.
I admit it, my first forays into the world of business were jazz capitalism. I was hitting buttons and trying things out without much regard for structure or logic. I built a department store in central Jakarta (next to Tehran) and filled it literally, exclusively with laundry detergent.
This was not just an idle whim. Capitalism is big on the supply chain, strangely, which means all the goods you sell have to come from somewhere. The wares I flogged in my department store were sourced from Jakarta's nearest seaport, and the things Jakarta's nearest seaport had to offer were: cookies, leather shoes, and detergent.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Were the people of Jakarta buying my suds? Absolutely the hell not. They could not have been less interested, even as the industrious worker-bees in the department store's purchasing unit accumulated more and more boxes of the stuff, gradually entombing my sales team like soapy pharaohs. Supply outstripped demand by a gazillion to one. I was making negative $80,000 a year.
I asked myself what Warren Buffett would do and decided the answer was probably 'keep digging'. I added the cookies and leather shoes to my department store's roster of goods, turning it into one of those malls—you know the ones—that occupies an entire city block and sells unrelated three products. If this didn't work, the game was broken.
There was, happily, more demand for shoes and cookies than laundry detergent, which is to say I was selling literally any of the former at all. Nevertheless, my expansion into the footwear and baked goods sectors had taken its toll. In spite of the new products' relative success, I was now making negative $300,000 a year. I added an advertising unit to my department store and partnered with a TV station.
This either helped or, more likely, coincided with an entirely unrelated change in my fortunes, because my annual profit suddenly skyrocketed to an incredible negative $3,000 a year. I went mad. I built an R&D Centre, a silica mine, and a new department store—this one selling CPUs, silica...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.
And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.
In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.
I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.
Capitalism—the game—does not work how you expect it to. For one thing, it is not on Earth. It happens on a procedurally generated pseudo-region of an Earth-like planet that you can spin up with every new game. Want to build the free market on a vast archipelago? By all means. A single, contiguous mega-landmass? Absolutely. The only guarantee is that, wherever you end, it will look nothing like anywhere that exists on our actual planet. Also, cities like Lisbon and Chicago will end up a short walk from each other, much like they are in real life.
I admit it, my first forays into the world of business were jazz capitalism. I was hitting buttons and trying things out without much regard for structure or logic. I built a department store in central Jakarta (next to Tehran) and filled it literally, exclusively with laundry detergent.
This was not just an idle whim. Capitalism is big on the supply chain, strangely, which means all the goods you sell have to come from somewhere. The wares I flogged in my department store were sourced from Jakarta's nearest seaport, and the things Jakarta's nearest seaport had to offer were: cookies, leather shoes, and detergent.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Were the people of Jakarta buying my suds? Absolutely the hell not. They could not have been less interested, even as the industrious worker-bees in the department store's purchasing unit accumulated more and more boxes of the stuff, gradually entombing my sales team like soapy pharaohs. Supply outstripped demand by a gazillion to one. I was making negative $80,000 a year.
I asked myself what Warren Buffett would do and decided the answer was probably 'keep digging'. I added the cookies and leather shoes to my department store's roster of goods, turning it into one of those malls—you know the ones—that occupies an entire city block and sells unrelated three products. If this didn't work, the game was broken.
There was, happily, more demand for shoes and cookies than laundry detergent, which is to say I was selling literally any of the former at all. Nevertheless, my expansion into the footwear and baked goods sectors had taken its toll. In spite of the new products' relative success, I was now making negative $300,000 a year. I added an advertising unit to my department store and partnered with a TV station.
This either helped or, more likely, coincided with an entirely unrelated change in my fortunes, because my annual profit suddenly skyrocketed to an incredible negative $3,000 a year. I went mad. I built an R&D Centre, a silica mine, and a new department store—this one selling CPUs, silica...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?