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Saw this on Hacker News today: Someone reverse engineered a game from 1983 called 📈 Wall Street Raiders, it was 115,000 lines of BASIC so indecipherable that even Disney couldn't figure out how to It's essentially a very deep granular trading simulator where you're a corporate raider, buying and... show more
453,736 views • 7 months ago •via X (Twitter)
38 Comments
You can still buy this game from the original dev! And it's being remastered for a release on Steam
This IS the remaster that's talked here no?
This is what I get for dashing off a reply without reading the article
h/t by @AndreyAzimov
you should make the mouse draggable
It moves if you move the mouse on the screen :D
Thats how you need to write prompts! Thank you Pieter! Love your pc
Back in the 90s, I worked a 3rd shift job sitting at a security desk at a Siemen's medical company. WSR was one of the only games I could play on my crappy little 286 laptop, and I must have played that game 30+ hours a week for two semesters straight. And still want to.
hope that indecipherable is just hyperbole because things are decipherable even if you don't have a source code these days.
how long has this existed on i didn't expect my childhood to hit me quite so hard just now
It’s crazy but people didn’t really have access to simulations back then. So been small scale trade sim like this actually gave people novel ideas.
Oh man, this is awesome. I’ve been obsessed with trying this game. The guy who made it was a Harvard-educated M&A lawyer. A dev picked by the lawyer is currently working on a remake:
Interesting history
Hello Pieter. Thank you so much for sharing my project! I love your web VM! If you're interested, I just open sourced my PowerBasic compiler written in Rust. Cinven killed the compiler and the support forums so I made my own.
so the real financial education was the BASIC games we decompiled along the way.
I love when old software hides serious depth Sometimes the best learning tools look outdated on the surface
Reverse engineering indecipherable legacy code is the ultimate stress test for modern AI agents, it proves that "unmaintainable" is just a lack of context. The fact that a game from 1983 still holds strategies used by modern CEOs proves that the underlying logic of systems doesn't change, only the tools we use to navigate them.
Disney: "This code is impossible to understand" Random dev: "Hold my beer" 115K lines of BASIC reverse engineered. Legends.
What makes this story interesting beyond the nostalgia: the 115K lines worked. The strategies were real enough that CEOs and fund managers applied them. The code was correct in every way that mattered, and completely opaque in every way that matters for anyone who comes after. That's a specific kind of failure mode. Not a broken system. A working system nobody can modify, extend, or trust without running it and hoping. We're producing that pattern at scale now, except without the single author who at least understood it once. When teams ship AI-generated code at speed, the gap between "it works" and "I understand why it works" grows fast. The Wall Street Raiders dev knew every line. That knowledge just lived only in one head and died there. With AI-generated code, the knowledge never lives anywhere. The interesting question for engineering teams is not how fast they can ship but how they maintain the ability to change what they built. A system you can't safely modify is an asset that degrades over time, not a foundation you build on.
Respect to anyone patient enough to untangle that.
man wrote 115K lines of BASIC with no stack overflow, no copilot, no linter. just vibes and a CRT monitor. we'd all quit by line 200
Maybe Disney *could* figure it out but realized 1983 trading mechanics aren't worth the trademark renewal fees.
now do Zork pls
Those 1983 systems were deep, but modern environments add the volatility and leverage that define current markets. Momentum lets you practice with up to 200x leverage on a 10Hz feed to see if your risk management holds up before hitting the real Base L2 markets.
? Prolly. Link for anyone else who wanted to read that thread
@DXRGai @poof_eth
@grok which states have decriminalized polygamy from 1 to 10
Carl Icahn simulator holy crap
How funny, I reached out to Michael, the creator over a year ago about doing just this, found that AI coding was not yet up to the task to refactor the application. Loved this game as a kid, glad to see it has come back to life!
The granularity of those 1983 systems is genuinely impressive. Modern simulators have caught up in data fidelity but added real-time multiplayer and cross-asset replay. Momentum is probably the closest thing to that depth with a competitive layer built on top.
Devs back then were absolute superheroes.
115,000 lines of BASIC that no human could understand and AI just casually reverse engineers it. this is why I stopped worrying about code quality and started worrying about whether my code even needs to exist in 5 years 😂
i played so much the v8/v9. so good. hours and hours buying companies and doing turn around xd
Yea!!!! I have this on an MS-DOS emulator, and it’s SO much fun. I’m glad to see more people getting into it.
The digital equivalent of digging up a fossil and putting in a museum
@Basic10L 🙀
The procedural galaxy generation in Elite ran on 22k of RAM. Wild how constrained systems forced elegant solutions that modern dev has kind of forgotten.
Is it extensible in asset class now? Eg can you do oil barrels and futures? When i was young i was selected for the chevron oil trading program and the interview was a similar dos based interface to mock buying selling oil
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