It often comes from random inquiries from curious fans, such as when, a few years ago, a software company from Santa Barbara contacted him through LinkedIn to interview him.ĭell said that the recruiters had been planning to hire a new programmer, and one of them, in jest, suggested finding the guy who wrote Drug Wars. He said that at this point, he is rarely ever reminded of the crime game he masterminded-only about once every few years. These days Dell helps operate Mutations Ltd., a business productivity software programming and consultancy company he cofounded in 2016. A simple search on Twitter or Reddit for "drug wars" and "TI-82" will produce ample evidence that the game still has a cult following. There are also several variations of the game available in the Apple App Store. Dope Wars Classic, a rendition of Drug Wars with a larger variety of drugs to sell, has 17,484 reviews at the Google Store. “I couldn’t believe that people would still be doing that,” said Dell.Įven today, if they are not still playing the game, there are a lot of people that at least fondly remember it. It was around this time, the mid-1990s, when Dell said his younger brother showed him people were still rewriting and sharing Drug Wars online. But from there it spread to schools around the country,” said Maier. “I was a little upset that he did all that without my permission. Maier was a mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech when he learned that one of his former high school classmates had tweaked his original program, added his own name to it, and uploaded it to one of the primitive file-sharing sites that existed in the late 1990s. “I ported a few other things and even made a few games of my own, but none became viral sensations.” “All credit should go to the original programmer for conceiving the original brilliant game design in the DOS version,” said Maier, referencing Dell. “I knew it was a hit when I walked by the math classroom and saw the teacher playing it alone on the contraption that displayed the calculator screen up on the overhead projector,” said Maier, in an email. From there it spread among his friends, and then throughout the whole school. Maier, then a high school sophomore, shared the game with his friends using a homemade cable that allowed him to connect his graphing calculator to his computer. Jonathan Maier rewrote Drug Wars on his graphing calculator in 1993. It was also adapted to early Windows editions, but this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when computers were often reserved for the wealthy and/or nerdy.ĭrug Wars truly went viral (at a time before that word was used to describe anything but pathogens) when it appeared on a TI-82 graphing calculator-the same device that could be found in any high school advanced math class throughout the 1990s and 2000s. We're letting you know of this so that you can make your own mind up - if you can wait until November 2000 to see if you can get the full version for free, we recommend you do so.Dell would later rewrite the game in DOS and upload it to a bulletin board system (BBS), which was how computer users in the 1980s communicated, shared files, or played games online.Īfter high school, Dell forgot about the game and enrolled in the US Naval Academy, studying computer science as he began a military career.ĭrug Wars continued to evolve as it was reprogrammed into an actual BBS game. If the advertising reveune is sufficient, we will probably change the software such that it is fully featured and free, supported by advertising only. We will review this again in November, 2000. As we aren't sure yet if this is the case, we have released Dope Wars 2.0 as both shareware and adware. The ultimate hope and goal of Beermat Software is that the advertising revenue is sufficient to support the costs of Beermat Software so that we don't have to charge our customers a fee. *Please note before you register: We have included adverts in the shareware version of the game. Read more about registering Dope Wars 2.0 here: To gain a few extra features, remove the advertising and help support Beermat Software, you can register Dope Wars 2.0 for just $6.95. Graphically challenged, it is nevertheless easy to use and highly playable! Buying and selling drugs, travelling within a city, flying between cities, monitoring price fluctuations, managing your finances, buying weapons, viewing news headlines, visiting the hospital - all are a click away This newer, snazzier version adds just the right amount of new goo. It's a desktop economic-sim crime-puzzle designed to satisfy all of your drug dealing needs, legally. And the cool part is: It's a great game and it's free*. Dope Wars has become quite popular on the net. It's interface was once described as "a piece of asthetic genius".
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