Cartels and Cutthroats

If not for Cartels and Cutthroats, there may never have been M.U.L.E. When Electronic Arts was starting out, they tried to buy the rights for Dani Bunten-Berry’s seminal business game from SSI. SSI turned them down, so they went to Bunten-Berry. The result, M.U.L.E. was a revolutionary, visionary game. It was also something like a low-rated cult-TV series of the day. Everyone claimed to love it, but few people actually bought it. Still, it really was an amazing game that took fantastic advantage of the musical and graphics capabilities of the Atari and C-64.

But Cartels and Cutthroats was something special. In part, this specialness was due to its intelligence. M.U.L.E. would do a fine job of simulating an economy behind the scenes. But Cartels and Cutthroats was really all about economics and nothing was hidden. The game is played in quarters, each of which begins with a detailed review of major economic indicators of the previous quarter. Their impact on you, in part, would depend on the type of good you were producing—a luxury, a necessity, or a little of each. Your decisions were simple, but like in the best Sid Meier games, they were both meaningful and interesting. Not only would you decide on production and pricing, but on advertising and R&D. R&D investment pays special dividends in saving money and improving your product.

There are no graphics to speak of. It ran painfully slow on my Commodore 64 as a kid, but running it under emulation today makes it much quicker and much more enjoyable. Game bugs are nothing new, sadly. The game crashed when I was a kid, and it still does. Despite the stability issue, it remains a really fun, engaging game if you like spreadsheet games (as I do).

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