Release Date: 1999-12-31
Developer/Publisher: Monte Cristo/: Interplay
Genres: Strategy,Retro
Platforms: PC Games,PS2
Perhaps the best compliment one could pay the designers of Wall Street Trader 2000 is to say that they deftly avoided all of the obvious opportunities to screw it up. That's no small feat, since a financial-markets simulation such as Wall Street Trader 2000 always runs the risk of being an atrocious game. The first temptation is to convert the experience of researching companies, buying low, and selling high into a massive spreadsheet that has all of the drama and suspense of balancing a checkbook. A straightforward trading sim also would suffer from a fairly pat victory condition - amassing mo' money, mo' money, mo' money. Beyond that, any accurate and deep model of what affects market behavior could swamp you in an unwieldy interface that forces you to drill into and track countless layers of variables. In other words, Wall Street Trader 2000 could have been entirely unexciting.
Instead, the developers made a very impressive attempt to skirt all of the natural pitfalls and actually make a financial simulator that's worthy of being called a game. Rather than dropping you into the middle of a spreadsheet, the game instead thrusts you into a contemporary economic drama. You play a bright young financial wunderkind hired by the enigmatic and cheeky financier, Lord Fleming. After buying up a failing Asian bank, Fleming expects you to save the company. Things go awry in short order. Other traders at the bank, against whom you competed to win the Lord's favor, take off for the US with embezzled funds. To avoid publicity, Fleming puts you on their trail to wreak revenge the old-fashioned way - by ruining them. You must win back their ill-gotten gains via hostile takeovers and perhaps earn control over the entire Fleming empire in the process.
Perhaps the best compliment one could pay the designers of Wall Street Trader 2000 is to say that they deftly avoided all of the obvious opportunities to screw it up. That's no small feat, since a financial-markets simulation such as Wall Street Trader 2000 always runs the risk of being an atrocious game. The first temptation is to convert the experience of researching companies, buying low, and selling high into a massive spreadsheet that has all of the drama and suspense of balancing a checkbook. A straightforward trading sim also would suffer from a fairly pat victory condition - amassing mo' money, mo' money, mo' money. Beyond that, any accurate and deep model of what affects market behavior could swamp you in an unwieldy interface that forces you to drill into and track countless layers of variables. In other words, Wall Street Trader 2000 could have been entirely unexciting.
Instead, the developers made a very impressive attempt to skirt all of the natural pitfalls and actually make a financial simulator that's worthy of being called a game. Rather than dropping you into the middle of a spreadsheet, the game instead thrusts you into a contemporary economic drama. You play a bright young financial wunderkind hired by the enigmatic and cheeky financier, Lord Fleming. After buying up a failing Asian bank, Fleming expects you to save the company. Things go awry in short order. Other traders at the bank, against whom you competed to win the Lord's favor, take off for the US with embezzled funds. To avoid publicity, Fleming puts you on their trail to wreak revenge the old-fashioned way - by ruining them. You must win back their ill-gotten gains via hostile takeovers and perhaps earn control over the entire Fleming empire in the process.
