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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.
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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.
Business 101
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.
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 (a lot of silica about) and raw tobacco. Had I maybe started trying to sell directly to consumers raw materials I was meant to use in my own factories? Perhaps! Was I nevertheless now making an utterly inexplicable $400,000 a year? Yes!
I could only ride the high for so long. Eventually, my objectively boneheaded business decisions ricocheted back on me. The people of Bombay (where my second store was) were not interested in bulk-purchasing silica or computer chips, the fools, and even adding another advertising department didn’t help. Though I did partner that advertising department with a newspaper rather than a TV station, and we all know traditional media is dead.
It wasn’t long before the game told me I was out of cash in a Nickelodeon font.
Visions of the past
Here is the serious part of the article: Capitalism is genuinely rather fascinating. It is the crystallised end of history—that moment of triumphalism that marked the end of the Cold War and the seemingly final victory of liberal capitalism over all its foes. Its pregenerated scenarios, which you can play if you don’t want to generate a random world for yourself, have names like The Fall Of The Berlin Wall and The Emerging Dragon (yes, it’s about China).
It presents a vision of the world where consciously-held ideology is dead. In its place, ranks of men with big phones and suits chasing ever-greater numbers on ever-bigger spreadsheets—the “dog-eat-dog” world of capitalism. Was it good? No. Was it bad? No.
Capitalism, the game, does not sing the praises of capitalism the concept, nor does it criticise it. In this way, it reflects its era: good and bad were outdated—relics of a past where people deluded themselves by believing in things rather than chasing stuff that is concrete and consumable. Humanity had outgrown the distractions of faith and ideology. Now it could focus on reality, and the accumulation of CPUs and silica.
And air conditioners.
The aircon king of Guangzhou
My attempts to grow fat from detergent sales had run aground, but I did learn some things in that first run. Mostly, what I learnt—right there at the end—was ‘hey, there’s a button here to change the price of the things I sell’.
So I tried again, and a little bit slower this time. In Guangzhou (near Adelaide), I erected a department store, sourcing a thick gush of shampoo from the nearby port and selling it to anyone with hair. Crucially, this time I paid attention to things like ‘product quality’ and ‘price’. The shampoo I was sourcing was a fair bit better than what Guangzhou already had access to, and by fidgeting with the price-per-bottle I could establish a neat equilibrium between supply and demand. Before long, I was making a stable $500,000 in annual profit.
What else did the port have to offer? Air conditioners and jumpers (‘sweaters,’ to our American readers). Guangzhou was hot; I suspected aircon demand would be high. I funnelled them into my department store.
It turned out I could charge essentially whatever the hell I wanted and get away with it. Demand was too strong to deter. I was charging people double what I was paying for them and raking it in. Before long, I got the jumpers on the shelves too, which inscrutably sold like hot cakes at the same time as the aircon units did—though, in credit to Capitalism’s simulation, I am fairly sure the aircons sold better in summer, and vice versa for jumpers.
I was making $5,000,000 a year. I built factories, invented the video camera, purchased my competitors’ jeans and sold them at a mark-up. I even started mining silica again, just for old times’ sake. Pretty quickly, I hit $12 million a year. Which is kind of where I left it, since it rapidly became apparent I was simply too good at Capitalism for anything funny to happen ever again.
I’ll say this, though: I like Capitalism (the game) a lot. The depth of its simulation is impressive, and not even ‘for a game from 1995’. It just is. Here is a toy free market that consistently surprised me with the things it took into account and the things it asked me to take into account, from climate and environment to the nitty-gritty of the supply chain to the precise number and arrangement of business units in each of my outlets. It’s a good time, if you are also the kind of person who gets excited by a nice spreadsheet.
Total conversion
Am I converted? Well, apparently I could be making $12 million a year in shampoo sales, which is only slightly less than I make writing about videogames, so maybe. I’m certainly into the game itself, which is probably the most I can reasonably ask of an entertainment product from three decades ago.
Does Capitalism, with its sepia snapshot of a period of post-Cold War triumphalism, represent a way forward for our current period of deep societal stagnation? Well, not quite. Capitalism captures not so much actual things that happened so much as it captures a vibe that existed in a select few places during a vanishingly small period of time.
You couldn’t return to it if you wanted to—it was a product of a historical juncture, and no amount of nostalgia for an era when things felt better (whether they actually were is perhaps debatable) will change that.
Unless, of course, you start selling air conditioners.
