User Summary
Wall $treet Raider is a long-running, stock market trading game.
At the start of the game the player(s) decide how long the game will run by setting the difficulty level and the number of game-years to be played. Each year has four trading quarters each of which represents one turn per player. Players start with a small inherited fortune and when it is their turn to play they can do virtually anything a trader can do, and more.
Stock in any company can be traded, loans can be arranged, companies can be researched, the holdings of other players can be investigated as can their relative net worth. The player can arrange buy-outs, mergers, issue junk bonds, make public offerings, liquidate companies, sue competitors and much, much more. The game even allows the player to become CEO of companies which they can then asset strip, liquidate or nurture.
The game was initially developed as a board game in 1967 while the author, Michael D. Jenkins, was at Harvard. Over several years of playing and refinement the board game, then called "Robber Baron", grew and became very complex taking many hours, even days to complete.
A computer version was released commercially in 1986 and despite good reviews it did not sell well. Michael Jenkins reacquired the rights to the software in 1988 and released the game as shareware, it has been in continuous development and improvement ever since, initially running under DOS and under Windows since 2001.