Drug Wars TI-83
The game that got passed around on graphing calculators, link cable to link cable.
DRUGWAR was written in 1984 by John E. Dell for the earliest home computers, and spent the next twenty years being ported to everything with a screen. The version most people met was the TI-83 one, traded between calculators in classrooms where the calculator was the only computer allowed on the desk. This is that version, with its original numbers.
Underneath the theme it is a commodity arbitrage puzzle. Prices are redrawn every day in every borough, you can only carry a hundred units, and the loan shark compounds at ten per cent a day while the bank pays six. The whole game is deciding when a price is far enough from its average to be worth the day it costs to get there — and remembering that the debt grows whether or not the trip made you anything.
Thirty days. Start with $2,000 in cash and $5,000 owed.
Thirty days, six boroughs, and a loan shark charging ten per cent a day.
How it is actually won
The instinct is to clear the debt first, which feels responsible and is wrong. Ten per cent a day is brutal, but so is compounding in the other direction: every dollar you hand back to the shark is a dollar not doubling in the cocaine market. The players who finish with millions borrow the maximum on day one.
The real constraint is the coat. The hundred units are shared across all six drugs rather than being a hundred of each, which is the rule people miss, and a hundred is nothing once you can afford cocaine. So the run stops being about money and starts being about space.
That is why the trenchcoat matters. Somebody offers you one on the road every so often, and it is ten more units for two hundred dollars, with no limit on how many you buy over the month. Ten units of cocaine is thirteen thousand dollars of spread at the usual prices and far more during a shortage, so two hundred dollars is the best deal in the game — and almost everyone declines it early because they are saving up.