Wall Street Raider, the Legendary Tycoon Game, Is Back: Ben Ward Talks the Epic 2025 Remaster in Exclusive Interview

Video Interview: Ben Ward of Wall Street Raider 2025

The Long Road to the Remaster

Ben Ward didn’t initially set out to revive Wall Street Raider. Instead, he stumbled across the game through an innocuous Reddit post of mine on the r/tycoon subreddit. My correspondence with Jenkins sparked an interest in Ben and he purchased the game, quickly falling into what Ben describes as a rabbit hole, captivated by the game’s unmatched complexity.

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Wall Street Raider, for the uninitiated, isn’t your typical tycoon simulator. It’s more akin to navigating a Bloomberg terminal—complete with mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, options, and futures. In the interview, I described losing billions on minor market fluctuations as a uniquely Wall Street Raider experience, one that requires a special breed of player.

When Ben reached out to Jenkins to propose a modernized version, the response was steeped in skepticism. Jenkins had seen this movie before—teams from JP Morgan, Disney-affiliated developers, and various others had attempted and failed to untangle Wall Street Raider’s deeply layered codebase. Jenkins’ own admission? Even he sometimes struggled to recall the rationale behind lines of code written at 3 a.m. decades ago.

Nevertheless, after months of persistence—and perhaps a dash of youthful confidence—Ben secured Jenkins’ blessing and the original source code. Their partnership symbolizes what Jenkins called a “passing of the torch,” entrusting the game’s considerable legacy to a developer uniquely prepared for the challenge.

From Chaos to Order

Tackling Wall Street Raider’s sprawling legacy wasn’t for the faint-hearted. Ben Ward’s background made him particularly suited for this monumental task: self-taught programming prodigy, seasoned full-stack developer, and financially literate enough to genuinely understand the game’s intricate systems.

Ben described early days of poring over Jenkins’ original PowerBasic code, attempting to translate it to more modern languages, only to realize he had become fluent in PowerBasic itself. The moment of clarity was profound—he realized he could bridge old and new by linking Jenkins’ original engine directly to a modern user interface. Thus, the heart of Wall Street Raider remains intact, wrapped neatly in an intuitive, Bloomberg-esque GUI.

Jenkins, impressed and reinvigorated by Ben’s dedication, even took it upon himself to extensively annotate and modernize the original variable naming conventions. In Ben’s words, Jenkins “went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable in about three days”—an effort that drastically accelerated the remaster.

What to Expect From the 2025 Remaster

Ben Ward emphasized his dedication to preserving Wall Street Raider’s complexity while dramatically improving user accessibility. Players can expect fewer clicks, streamlined navigation, immediate data accessibility, and a dynamic user interface that brings the game’s depth front and center.

The community-driven aspect remains pivotal. Ben actively collaborates with the existing Wall Street Raider community, absorbing their suggestions to guide UI improvements and future features. Ideas like taking control of the Federal Reserve to manipulate interest rates have surfaced—evidence of the community’s enthusiastic imagination and the game’s open-ended nature.

An Educational Powerhouse

One of Wall Street Raider’s most surprising revelations is its real-world impact. Hedge fund managers, financial educators, and even Ben himself noted how the game transforms abstract financial concepts into tangible, practical knowledge. Many professionals credit their successful financial careers to early experiences with Wall Street Raider.

Ben aims to deepen this educational potential by making the remaster visually appealing enough for streaming platforms, significantly widening the audience. He envisions mods, community-driven features, and even AI trading bots interacting through a planned API—turning Wall Street Raider into an unprecedented educational and experimental sandbox.

A Personal Legacy and Shared Passion

The journey of the Wall Street Raider remaster is deeply personal for everyone involved. Jenkins, now in his early 80s, sees the project as a continuation of his life’s work, safeguarded and nurtured by Ben Ward’s vision and passion. For Ben, it’s more than a side project—it’s a responsibility he feels deeply, driven by admiration for Jenkins and love for the community.

This remaster is more than just a facelift—it’s a testament to decades of passion, dedication, and community collaboration. Scheduled for early access release within the next few months, players can look forward to experiencing the rebirth of a classic.

For those intrigued by financial strategy, deep simulations, or simply want to witness a passionate revival of gaming history, Wall Street Raider’s remaster promises an unprecedented experience.

A Fitting Tribute

Wall Street Raider’s remaster is a multi-generational saga—a baton passed from a financial maestro to a uniquely gifted protégé. The game stands not only as an enduring piece of gaming history but now also as a testament to collaborative passion.

Prepare your spreadsheets and sharpen your financial acumen; Wall Street Raider is back, and it’s never looked better.

Wall Street Raider Remaster FAQ

Transcript (concise): Wall Street Raider Interview with Ben Ward

AJ Churchill:
Hello and welcome to the Outsider Gaming Podcast. I’m AJ Churchill, your host and editor-in-chief of OutsiderGaming.com. I’m so glad to have you here today because we have an absolutely incredible guest. He’s the lead developer of a completely modernized version of the classic tycoon game Wall Street Raider.

Now, Wall Street Raider is perhaps the most comprehensive finance simulator of all time. I’m personally a huge fan—I’ve gained and lost many fortunes in the original version. So it’s a real privilege to be speaking with the developer of the remake, the remaster, Ben Ward. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Ward:
Glad to be here.

AJ:
The game Wall Street Raider has been in continuous development for nearly 40 years. For those who’ve never played it, or maybe never even heard of it, how would you describe what makes this game so unique?

Ben:
You’ve played the game, so you know—there’s really nothing else like it on the market. I found Wall Street Raider because I wanted to make a game like it, and I couldn’t find anything close. Then I saw your post on Reddit—where you said you reached out to the 79-year-old creator of Wall Street Raider and shared his reply—and that sent me down a rabbit hole. I paid 30 bucks for the game. I lost terribly for hours. Then I paid another 20 or so for the manual, which was like 150 pages long, read through all of it, and I was still terrible. But I got hooked.

If I had to describe it to someone, I’d say it’s like the Dwarf Fortress or Aurora 4X of the stock market. That’s probably the simplest way to put it.

AJ:
It’s hard to explain. Most people look at it and go, “This isn’t a game. This looks like a Bloomberg terminal.” Numbers go up, numbers go down, and if gold drops one percent, you might lose a billion dollars. It’s not for everyone. But part of what’s exciting about what you’re doing is that the old UI was… let’s say difficult. Others have tried modernizing Wall Street Raider and haven’t succeeded. So when you first approached Michael Jenkins, the original creator, what was that conversation like? Was he excited? Skeptical?

Ben:
He was highly skeptical. He didn’t believe me at all. And I get it—he’s had a long line of people try and fail to remake the game. It’s like that dragon in Shrek with all the skeletons of past knights lying around. He basically gave me a canned response he’s probably fine-tuned over the last couple decades. He told me he had JP Morgan developers look at it, game studios who made titles for Disney, teams that invested hundreds of thousands of dollars—none of them could pull it off.

So, why would some 29-year-old software developer who reached out of nowhere be any different? That’s a fair question. It took months of persistence, of slowly wearing him down. Eventually, he gave me the source code—not licensed, just “Here’s the code. Leave me alone.”

I had to sign a physical NDA. He snail-mailed it to me, I mailed it back signed. I’ve done that twice now, once for the code access and once for the licensing deal. But yeah, he basically said, “Here’s the code. If you steal it, I’ll sue you. But go ahead and mess around with it if you want. You won’t get anywhere.” And then I went somewhere.

AJ:
That’s amazing. Tell me about your background—what kind of work have you done as a developer that led you to this point, to be the one who actually pulled it off?

Ben:
I got interested in programming really young. I remember getting a C++ video game programming book from the library when I was a kid. I didn’t understand much of it, didn’t even know how to run the example code, but it planted the seed. Later in my teenage years, I taught myself how to code.

I went to school for IT, but it was more geared toward full stack development. I have ADHD, which I didn’t know at the time, so I was terrible at school. I helped my classmates with their homework more than I did my own. It took me five years to finish a two-year degree, but I learned a lot—especially from helping others.

I started doing freelance work and worked for my uncle’s plastic manufacturing company. That was my first real programming gig. They were running everything through Excel, and I said, “I can build you something better.” He paid me $10 an hour to develop a custom system that ran his business for five years until he retired. It was buggy, I didn’t know anything about testing back then, but it worked.

I went on to work for a bunch of manufacturing companies, building ERP systems, warehouse management systems—stuff like that. I also recently helped build SameDayFab.com, a platform where you upload a CAD file and get parts shipped to your door. I’m also working on making it easy for people who don’t know CAD to build parts online. That should be launching soon.

But what really gave me the confidence to tackle Wall Street Raider was a side project I did: I ported Colossal Cave Adventure to Pico-8. That required me to learn FORTRAN, write a transpiler to Lua, and hack the game into the Pico-8 engine. It only took a weekend, but it was a lot of work. That experience—figuring out how to bridge two systems like that—was key.

AJ:
It sounds like you were basically lab-grown to do this.

Ben:
Honestly, yeah. It’s weird how well my experiences lined up. And I love weird challenges.

AJ:
And Wall Street Raider is definitely weird in the best way. Famously deep, famously difficult. The UI is a major hurdle. How did you approach modernizing the UI without losing the soul of the game?

Ben:
One big metric I use is clicks—how many clicks does it take to get to the thing you need? The old version, for example, to get a financial report, you’d have to go through multiple layers of menus and pop-ups. Now, you just type the ticker or click it on your watchlist and boom, it’s there—whether it’s a company or Bitcoin.

There’s still a long way to go, but even simplifying the layout and reducing scrolling helps a ton. I want it to feel like a Bloomberg terminal—maybe not as complex, but Bloomberg-esque.

AJ:
Are you working with the original code?

Ben:
Yes. The original engine is written in PowerBASIC. That company is defunct now. I have a backup of the compiler saved to GitHub—if that’s lost, we’re in trouble.

But the breakthrough was realizing I didn’t need to rewrite the code. I could build a modern UI in C++, and communicate with the old PowerBASIC code through DLLs and shared memory. So the UI is new, but the engine underneath is the same. That means all the features stay exactly as they are, just with better usability.

AJ:
Michael Jenkins described this as a “passing of the torch.” How does that feel?

Ben:
It’s intimidating. It’s a huge responsibility. But I really want to preserve his legacy. We have a good licensing deal, it’s fair. If I make money, he makes money. And I want to get this into the hands of more people—because it deserves a bigger audience. I want to grow the community without sacrificing what makes the game special.

AJ:
When’s it coming out?

Ben:
I’m aiming to release a playable version in the next two months. It won’t be fully polished, but it’ll be functional. It’ll be early access so I can keep refining it based on feedback. The biggest hurdle is making sure it’s playable and true to the original.

AJ:
Where can people follow the development?

Ben:
The subreddit is r/WallStreetRaider, and there’s a link there to the Discord. The Steam page is also live now, and you can wishlist the game.

AJ:
Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for joining the podcast. And seriously—thank you for taking on this project. It means a lot to a lot of us.

Ben:
Thanks for having me. And thanks again for writing that Reddit post. That’s the reason I even found this game. You really helped save it.

Transcript (full): Wall Street Raider Interview with Ben Ward

AJ Churchill:
Hello and welcome to the Outsider Gaming podcast. I am AJ Churchill, your host and editor-in-chief of OutsiderGaming.com. I am so glad to have you here today because we have an absolutely incredible guest with us. He is the lead developer of a completely modernized version of the classic tycoon game Wall Street Raider.

Now Wall Street Raider is perhaps the most comprehensive finance simulator game of all time. And I am personally a huge fan of this game, having gained and lost many a fortune in the original version. So it is a great privilege to be speaking with the developer of the remake, the remaster, Ben Ward. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Ward:
Glad to be here.

AJ:
The game Wall Street Raider has incredibly been in continuous development for 40 years, or nearly 40 years. So for those who’ve never played it, or maybe even never heard of the game, how would you describe kind of what makes this game so unique?

Ben:
So, I mean, you’ve played the game. I mean, there really is nothing like it on the market. And I tried—and it’s how I originally found the game—I was interested in making one, and I was looking at other games on Steam and such. And I couldn’t find anything that was really what I wanted, which was basically like a Wall Street Raider. And then I saw your post actually, which we’ve talked about, on Reddit where you said, “I reached out to the 79-year-old creator of Wall Street Raider and here’s what he wrote back.” And I was like, this is really interesting.

And I went down that rabbit hole and paid 30 bucks for the game. And then I paid, you know, I lost terribly at the game for several hours, and I coughed up another $20 or whatever for the manual—which was like 150 pages or something—and read through all that, and I still was terrible at the game. And I just got hooked. So I mean, if I was to describe it to somebody, I would say it’s like the Dwarf Fortress—and I see you got a “Losing Is Fun” shirt on—I’d say it’s like Dwarf Fortress or Aurora 4X of like the stock market. That’s like the simplest way I could probably describe it.

AJ:
It’s hard to describe, because this is a game that is—I mean, probably most people, most normal people would look at this and be like, “This isn’t a game.” This feels like, you know, you got a Bloomberg terminal open and you’re watching graphs and charts and whatnot. Numbers go up, numbers go down, and like, the price of gold went down by like 1% and I lost a billion dollars. Like that’s the kind of thing that happens in Wall Street Raider. So this is a very… it’s a very niche game, and it takes a special person I think to enjoy it. But part of what’s interesting about what you’re doing is—before—I think it’s a more special person to enjoy it because the UI—I mean, you could probably talk about it a bit more—was difficult to use.

I know that other people have tried to modernize Wall Street Raider before, but it’s such a complex game that no one before you has really been able to pull it off. So when you first approached Michael Jenkins about this project—Michael Jenkins is the developer of the original version from the ‘80s up until basically today—what was that conversation like with Michael Jenkins? Was he excited about the idea or did he have some skepticism at first?

Ben:
He was highly skeptical. He did not believe me at all. Because I am—unfortunately, I was one of a long line of… you know, imagine there’s a dragon that needs slayed, and, you know, like from Shrek, and you’ve got skeletons all over the place of past knights that tried to slay this dragon and they all failed. And then here’s another one. And he basically gave me a canned spiel—I think he’s fine-tuned it over the past 20 or 40 years or however long—if you just wanted to license the game.

“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t believe you,” because—then he would say, “I had JP Morgan developers look at it. I had the game studios who did games for Disney look at it. Teams of people investing hundreds of thousands into this project. And they all, after a year or whatever, closed up shop and gave up on it.” And so, why? Why would—I mean, it’s a very good reason to say—why would a 29-year-old software developer who reached out of nowhere and says, “I can do it”? I mean…

Let’s just say it took me months of continuous conversation and wearing him down to convince him to not license the game to me, but to say, “Here’s the source code. Leave me alone,” basically.

AJ:
Wow, okay.

Ben:
Like, I had to sign an NDA. And he’s like an old school guy. I had to snail mail—he snail-mailed me an NDA and I had to mail it back to him signed. And I’ve done that twice now. I had to do it again when we did the licensing deal. But yeah, that was just to—here’s the code. I’m gonna sue you if you, like, steal my code and do something with it, like don’t give me a cut and, like, steal everything. And then—and that was just to play with the code. That was just to like, whatever, play with it, do whatever you want. Because like, “You’re not going to get anywhere, basically. So please stop emailing me these long emails.”

AJ:
My gosh, that’s amazing. That’s really amazing. Okay, so now I want to know a bit about your background and what kind of work have you done as a developer—past projects that maybe looking back you feel like led you to this one and to be able to slay this dragon that no one else has been able to slay.

Ben:
I mean, I was interested in programming at a very young age. I think my earliest memory is going to the library and getting a “how to program video games” book, which was in C++, and it was like a massive textbook. And it was supposed to be an introductory thing, but of course, I barely probably knew how to read at that point. But it got me kind of looking at code and kind of…

I had no idea how to install a compiler or run the example code that was in this book. But it just kind of got me thinking about it. And eventually, you know, when I got older, teenage years, I started learning programming and stuff. And I’m kind of a self-taught programmer.

I went to school for IT, which was more of like—it was geared more toward like full stack development, but it was a two-year program. And I was terrible at school because I’ve got—I didn’t realize until later on in my adult life—that I have chronic ADHD. And I mean, doing homework, doing things… I was more interested in helping my fellow classmates with their homework than mine. So I would help them do all their homework and then I would turn and—I would have missing homework because I ran out of time. I wouldn’t turn mine in. I had a terrible GPA and it took me five years to get a two-year degree. But during that time I learned a lot. I learned a lot from teaching people, helping other people program.

I did a lot of freelancing on the side. I worked for my uncle’s manufacturing company, which was plastic manufacturing. And that’s what really got me into my career, which I kind of built, which is manufacturing, full stack development of building ERP systems and warehouse management systems and stuff. So when I was 18-ish, I was basically on an assembly line and I kept seeing this paperwork and I was like, “Where’s this paperwork coming from?”

And I noticed they were all using Excel to manage everything. And I was like, well, I knew how to do Java and C# and like WinForms or whatever. I was like, “I could design you something.” Honestly, thank you Uncle Steve for giving me that opportunity. He paid me like ten dollars an hour, forty hours a week—my first programming job—for like two or three months.

And of course, I didn’t know anything about communication or communicating with stakeholders or anything. So I didn’t really—I was just like in there alone, wasn’t updating him at all about it. So after two or three months he comes in and he’s basically like, “I’m gonna fire you because like I’m just paying you all this money and you’re building this and like what have you done?” And I’m like, “Well, here it is.” And then we launched it, and it ran his business for like five years until he retired.

It was very simple and very buggy. I didn’t know anything about testing or anything at that point. But that was my first gig there. Then when he sold his company, I went to work…

Well, I’ve worked at a lot of different manufacturing companies, gaining skill, becoming a—I eventually got to like a more senior level. And then recently I worked at a fintech company, and… but then I got an offer from a place that I already worked at in 2019—they wanted me back. So that’s where I’m working at right now as like a… it’s kind of a big title but the company is not very—it does a lot of business but there’s a corp team of maybe a couple dozen people.

And so I’m basically the software guy. I built their ERP system, I built their warehouse management system, a lot of stuff for them. And I guess I might as well advertise—I don’t know, is it okay to plug something? I just built samedayfab.com for them. We’re working on—that’s basically like you upload a CAD file and you can order it and it ships to your front door.

There’s a couple other people in that space that do that, but we’re also working on ways to where regular people like myself who actually don’t know how to CAD can build a CAD file online on the website. And we’re hoping to launch that in a couple weeks. I think it’s gonna open up a lot of doors for the company I’m working for—it’s gonna be pretty big. So, but anyway, I don’t want to go on and on about it, but that’s basically my background. I’m a full stack senior developer, mostly Microsoft, but I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve done like Python and all kinds of things.

But to get to the final of your question, which is what projects led to this? So I would say the main project that led to this was—my old professor, shout out to Bill Nicholson, a long time ago told me about Colossal Cave Adventure. When he was in school, I guess he was learning to program on the PDP-10 or whatever it is—IBM PC, like a terminal PC, green text, black background—and they had a game called Colossal Cave Adventure, which was a text adventure game.

And they spent a whole weekend or whatever, 20 hours or whatever they spent, on mapping the whole game out and figuring out where all the Easter eggs are. And I’ve always been kind of like low-key obsessed with the game. And then I got into like fantasy consoles—I don’t know if you ever heard of the Pico-8?

AJ:
Yeah.

Ben:
You ever heard of Pico-8? So I had this weird idea for a side project—a hobby project—which was, I kept having this vision of Colossal Cave Adventure running inside Pico-8, and I kind of got obsessed with it. And I was like, “I’m gonna do this.” I don’t know how much effort it’s gonna take, and there’s no monetary incentive for this, but I really want to do this. So I did.

It only took me about eight hours on a weekend total, but I had to read the whole Pico-8 documentation, and I had to do a bunch of hacking with it too. Because I had to write a program to build the cartridge image or something to get the code in there. Whatever. But the original code is FORTRAN. So I had to learn FORTRAN. And not only that, I had to figure out what version of FORTRAN it was, because there’s multiple versions and they all have a thousand-page manual.

And my first step was I had to find which—so I had to figure out which version it was. That took a couple hours. And then I had to write a transpiler, which, if you don’t know what a transpiler is, it’s taking one programming language and writing a program to convert it to another programming language. So converting FORTRAN to Lua is actually a lot more straightforward than you would think. And it was actually pretty easy to do.

It was time-consuming to build the transpiler, but I did that. And then I did a little wrapper code for the user interface and I shoved it into the Pico-8 cartridge and you could now play it. If you search for Colossal Cave Adventure, I think “1976 version Pico-8,” if you Google that, it will come up on the first link and you can play Colossal Cave Adventure on the Pico-8. And it’s got keyboard support.

So that was the first—that was basically where, if it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I could have—I don’t know if I would have had the confidence to do this. Because of course this is about a thousand times harder than that was.

AJ:
It sounds like basically you have been like lab-grown to be the perfect person to work on a remaster of Wall Street Raider. You’ve worked in finance, you’ve worked as a developer with games, and also literally translating a previous game—when you were a teenager—onto another platform. Just pretty impressive stuff. I mean, Wall Street Raider is incredibly deep. Like you said, there is a 125-page manual. It’s sold separately from the game and it goes into all sorts of crazy depth.

And Wall Street Raider is a very text-heavy game. The UI is famously difficult to use. It takes a lot of clicks to get anywhere that you want to go in the version that I’m accustomed to. And yet it’s still—you know, Michael Jenkins still has managed to pull off something that is incredibly addicting. So when you were thinking about bringing Wall Street Raider into a more modern era, how did you approach kind of making it more accessible to people without losing the complexity that makes Wall Street Raider so special?

Ben:
So, I mean… There’s a couple main metrics I’ve been using to drive the quality of life feature development or choosing what to work on. One of them is clicks—reducing number of clicks to get somewhere. You know, just a couple examples of what we have right now. So like, right now, you have to click like “entity info” or “general info” or something, and then you have to click “financial profile,” and then the pop-up shows up, which shows you the report.

Which is a non-expandable—you cannot make it larger, it needs a lot of scrolling—and then you have to X out of that, X out of the entity research window, and then you can go somewhere else.

Now it’s going to be a console. Like, console—you can just, if it’s in your watch list, you just click on it, boom, there’s a financial report. Or you type in a symbol into the command line, hit enter, and boom—there it is. And that works for Bitcoin too. I’ve got—type in BTC or ETH for Ethereum and it just pops right up. And so we’re still working… I’m still working out the kinks on like the layout and stuff and I’m starting to not be so…

perfectionist about it because I’m like—I had a guy the other day who reached out on the Discord—I mean, he was mad. I mean, he has reason to be mad too because it’s taken me so long to do this. But I’m like, “This isn’t an easy thing to do,” and I’m like, “I’m working on it part-time,” and I’m like, “but I’m really trying to get it done,” and I know it’s going to be released Early Access, but I want it to be playable and nice. It doesn’t have to be super polished, but…

He’s like, “I will give you 200 Canadian dollars or whatever today for like the old copy,” because—I don’t know if you know this—but you cannot buy the old copy anymore. Do you know about this?

AJ:
No, no, I did not know about that. So yeah—

Ben:
So, long story short, Michael’s e-commerce website—they went bankrupt. I don’t know if it was fraud or a bunch of stuff happened, but his e-commerce site went bankrupt. He had like… he had a lot of money, let’s say, about six months of income in escrow, and they just took it and didn’t give it back.

And of course, he’s not going to try and go after it or anything because he said all the money he would spend on trying to get it back would not recoup enough, probably. I don’t know.

But yeah, so he’s tried to set it up on itch.io or all these different merchants or records because he sells the game in like hundreds of different companies—I mean, countries—which means you have to file… I believe you have to file a tax return for each individual country. So if you sell a copy to Australia, you sell a copy to Sweden, you’ve got to file two more tax returns on top of your U.S. tax return or whatever.

And he was like, “I’m not doing that.”

So he hasn’t—they’ve all been rejecting him or ghosting him. Or he finally got in with itch.io who said, “That’s great, but you need a PayPal account.” He filled out a PayPal account with the business PayPal, and he fell through the cracks in the underwriting process somehow because it’s been a month or two and they haven’t messaged him back. He’s like, “I’m on a blacklist. Like they did not want Wall Street Raider to be sold.”

I don’t know. A lot of them were like, the legal department said they don’t want to sell it because it has to do with finance or something. That’s what I think. And just because we were—I mean, I know you don’t know this—but we were really kind of deathly afraid that Steam was going to reject this.

Because they had before. Steam originally rejected—now this was before I think Steam Greenlight or during—well whatever, Steam Greenlight was around where they were more particular. And they rejected it saying it was literally, quote-unquote, it was “too niche” of a game. They didn’t think that people would buy it or if they did buy it, they would return it. Which—I mean, coming from a credit card payment background and software—you have to pay chargeback fees. At least I think Steam eats a lot of that.

But they handle that by, “Alright, we’re getting a lot of returns here, it’s eating away at the profit—we’re just going to turn the game off,” or “We’re just going to reject it if we think it’s going to get a lot of returns.” Which is why I want to do a demo. To reduce that. Because I know Wall Street Raider, even with the new UI, is going to be very niche still.

I think there’s going to be tons of people interested in playing it, but I don’t want somebody who’s like… is going to hate it. And they’re going to pay money and then return it—I think that’s going to hurt it. So I would strongly encourage, when I release the demo—which will be like the shareware was, where you can play a year or two of it—play that first. If you like it, then you buy the new one.

But please don’t buy the game with the intention of returning it if you don’t like it. Because I mean, that really hurts—that really hurts indie game developers. I don’t know if people know that, but…

AJ:
Mm-hmm.

Ben:
At least I believe it does, if I know anything about credit card payments processing.

AJ:
That seems like a good strategy, just because the game is so niche and it’s so complex and it takes a certain kind of person that likes all that sort of… It’s not just a regular old tycoon game, it’s a tycoon game on steroids. You can do anything. You can open companies, open companies to hold those companies, short sell, buy futures, buy puts, buy options. It’s crazy.

Ben:
It’s funny—yeah, I came up with a new strategy. We talk, and if you come to the Discord, there’s all kinds of talk. There’s a Wall Street Raider strategy channel, and they talk in that all day long. And people come out of the woodwork who’ve been playing this game for 20 years and just come up with strategies. And I even came up with one—I’m sure it’s something people already do in the game—but I call it the… I forget what I call it… the cash flow snowball or something like that?

Where you can just buy 20% of a company. Now you control their cash. Then you take that cash, buy 20% of another company, and then you could—I mean, right off the bat in the game, if you got a couple billion right off the bat, you can control Apple, you can control any big company. I mean…

Now at some point it gets to the point where the biggest companies in the game with cash are the banks. And I think you start to get into like, I’m not exactly sure how the law works in the game, but you can only—there’s some anti-competition or anti-trust regulation in the game where you can’t own so many banks. So if you… you have a bank buy a bank buy a bank, then it starts to go, “Alright, you’re trying to do something illegal here.” But there are ways around it. People in the Discord—they have ways around it.

I, of course, have not mastered the game to that point. I’ve spent most of my time developing it. But yeah.

AJ:
So that’s really funny, what you just said about “There’s something in the game, I’m not sure what the law is.” So explain a little bit about how you go from the source code—taking Michael Jenkins’ source code—and then translating that into something modern. Because I want to really quick read you something that he wrote when he replied to an email that I sent a long, like four years ago—which is, we were talking about this earlier—but he says that even he doesn’t understand how certain things work. Basically, he had certain, you know, at 3 a.m…

Ben:
Yeah.

AJ:
He would write code, and then later he’d forget how it works. So, how do you even begin to parse that? What’s actually happening in the code to be able to do what you’re doing?

Ben:
A lot. Which is one of the reasons why this has been so… One of the strategies I’m using is that all these people who tried before—where they got stuck is because—man, I’m like two or three different conversations going on in my head that this could go, but I’ll try and keep it concise.

So basically, the old code is PowerBASIC. That whole company is now defunct. So I have a copy of the compiler that’s saved to GitHub, and if I lose that repo and if Michael’s computer dies, then we’re screwed. Because that’s all the copy of PowerBASIC we have. But it’s backed up in GitHub, so it’s fine—we’re good.

But there are plans to even just port the BASIC code to a new flavor of BASIC like PureBasic or FreeBASIC, which would also make it cross-platform. So that’s on the roadmap.

But what I did was I discovered that… I was like, what’s the biggest bottleneck? What’s the biggest trap to avoid here?

It’s thinking that you… you have to really think outside the box with a project like this. You’re like, “Do I have to rewrite all the code to, let’s say, C++?”
Why would I want to do that? Well, because C++ would be easier to work with. Because I know C++.
But that’s a paradox—or an oxymoron, right? Because in order to convert the code from one language to another, you have to know the original language.

So I started trying to build the transpiler from PowerBASIC to C++. I got it like 90% done. I came across a bunch of what you would call anti-patterns—where it’s like, there’s things that PowerBASIC can do that… you literally—it breaks rules in C++. You cannot translate it. Or if you really tried to do it, it would look really ugly, and it’d be counterproductive.

But by the time I got to that point, I had read the whole thousand-page PowerBASIC manual. I realized, looking at the code in the… six or twelve months I had been learning PowerBASIC, I was like…

“I can read PowerBASIC now.”
Just one day I looked at it, I was like, wait a second—I can just read this code. And I was like, what’s the point of converting it to C++?

So I started researching—like, is there a way that I could just write the UI in C++ and just plug it in?

And I realized that PowerBASIC just compiles to Windows machine code. And I was like, well, if it does that, it probably has access to Win32 API. Which means I can just create a DLL—a linked library—in C++, and I can just link it to the PowerBASIC code. And that was that.

That was the architectural problem that needed to be solved. And I will take the credit for solving that. That’s the only reason why this is happening as fast as it’s happening—because of the amazing people on the PowerBASIC forums who have lots of forums and talks like, “How do you import a DLL?” and tons of people talk.

The biggest thing is data types too. Because there’s differences. Like, you know, a quad or a long in PowerBASIC is actually like a different data type. Like a long in PowerBASIC is an integer in…

Ben (cont’d):
…in C++. So I have all the documentation on that that I’ve really worked on and I really understand. Because what you have to do then is shared memory.

So my biggest thing in creating that connection is—when you click a button in the new UI—it basically sends a command to the old engine, which can trigger or do whatever it wants. And then maybe it sends a command back. But there’s like what you would call a…

command dispatch system.

And it also has shared memory—meaning I can send a pointer or a reference to a variable in the old PowerBASIC code and share that with the C++ code, and now it’s shared. Now they can talk to each other.

So it’s not clean. It’s not like making a web app and you’ve got a JSON API. It’s not really clean. It’s all custom and kind of weird. But I don’t really—I like weird. So it’s really fun to work on.

But I forget what your original question was. I’m sorry.

AJ:
No, you answered it. I was just curious to know how you got from that to this.

Ben:
Let me answer—let me show you this. I just pulled up this email that I sent him once. It reminded me of this. I said…

Ben:
Sorry, you’re gonna have to edit this out, because I have to find this email. Because…

AJ:
No, it’s all good. So Michael’s been involved kind of in the process since you guys are, you know, after giving you his blessing, you know, after the whole saga. He has been involved in the process to help you with coding or questions or—I guess like, how has he been involved?

Ben:
He’s been extremely helpful. He even—I told him, he was like, “What’s the biggest bottleneck?” Because once I showed him the demo, he was like, “You actually have done it.” And that’s when he really started to hand over the reins and really started trying to help me out.

And he was like, “What’s the bottleneck?” And I’m like, you know, the biggest bottleneck is… I know in the old days they wrote really short abbreviations. It was kind of a thing—writing really short variable names as abbreviations. And I’m like, that’s really hurting me, because if I find a really short variable name, I can figure it out, but I have to use context clues and look at how it’s being used and stuff to figure out what this is.

I was like, “If you could just document like where that variable is defined and comment it—what this means—and like, there’s a lot of them, but you could probably pretty easily go through and do it, if you wanted to help. That’s something that would help.”

I’ll tell you, he not only commented everything—he went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable for me in about three days. Now granted, the guy’s retired, but I’m like…

AJ:
My gosh, what a hero.

Ben:
God, I’m like, dang, you know? He really—he acts like he doesn’t know how the code works, but just skimming through the code—I mean, I think he was using search and stuff like that, don’t get me wrong—but like…

AJ:
Still. It’s a lot of effort to go through and be able to do that.

Ben:
He took every variable name that was too short or thought, “Huh, maybe Ben’s going to have trouble reading this,” and he just renamed it everywhere. And that’s just using search and replace—because there’s no IDE “rename this variable” thing. It’s search and replace, and he’s compiling it, and he just did it—like flawlessly—without any bugs or issues, no side effects. In like two or three days. And then he messaged me two or three days later and was like, “Yep, here’s the new code.”

And I was like, “Are you serious?” That alone is like—I mean, that’s been exponentially helpful. It’s exponentially sped it up. Because like, I look at a variable, I’m like, “CorporateAssets”—you know, before it was “CA” or something. And that’s just one example. There’s others that are even worse.

AJ:
Yeah. It’s like decoding hieroglyphics.

Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. But I want to read you this that I wrote him once. If I can… can you still hear me?

AJ:
Yeah, yeah.

Ben:
Okay, I said—

Ben:
Here it is, here it is. Because he was telling me—he sent me a very similar email of like, “I don’t even like, know how this thing works anymore,” because he’ll write it one year, and then the next year he’ll forget what he did, and he’ll see the market going in a direction or doing something he doesn’t like. And he will just layer balancing code on top of it.

So there’s like 40 years of balancing code and constraints layered and layered and layered on top of it. It’s almost like it’s got its own laws. Like, you’re writing laws, but then those laws got interpreted wrong, so you’re writing laws on top of it. There’s like 40 years of that.

But I wrote him, I said:

“In terms of what you’re saying about how the code works, I would like to coin the phrase the Jenkins Market Hypothesis, which is the hypothesis that asset prices reflect competition between Michael Jenkins’ understanding of how Wall Street Raider worked at the point in time that he wrote the code over the past 40 years.”

So that kind of sums up a very high-level theory of how the game works. You have all these different versions of Michael Jenkins all competing against each other, and fighting each other, over how they think the markets work—how he thinks stock prices move.

And it’s all baked into there. He replied and said, “I like that theory. I think it’s very much related to chaos theory as well.”

AJ:
That’s amazing.

So Michael Jenkins has clearly been pretty involved with helping this go forward and facilitating your work. I know that Wall Street Raider has a niche but very dedicated fan base. There’s people who love it for how realistic it is, how deep it is. Have you been in touch with any longtime players during development? What kind of feedback have you gotten? How helpful have they been? And what are they looking for in this new version?

Ben:
I think you’ll see in the—I’m sure you’ve watched the Making of Wall Street Raider, Michael’s interview that he did and put on there—what he says about how Wall Street… I’ve coined the phrase, or he’s coined it—Raiders, we call ourselves. So Raiders, for one reason or another, are like really nice people. And they’re like, really funny and really smart.

And like, that’s what I originally did with the Reddit. Because like, originally the subreddit was kind of dead. And so I kind of feel bad, but like, I was reaching out to the moderators and stuff and they weren’t responding. And I was looking up like, how do you take over a subreddit? And I basically, in Wall Street Raider fashion, did a hustle takeover of the Wall Street Raider subreddit.

Because I found out there’s a thing called Reddit Requests. And it’s like, okay, you have to email the moderators, and if they don’t respond within five days, then we just give it to you. And I was like, man, this is kind of risky—because if I send them this message and they respond, it’s like, well, they’re just gonna hold on to it, and for whatever reason, they don’t want to let go of it. But I did it, and they didn’t respond.

And I got a notification that said, “It’s been transferred over to you.” And I—at that point in time it was like 200 users. And I just, I just did some, you know, community—I mean, I know nothing about community development or maintenance or anything. And I was literally just like, “What are you guys’ strategies about this?” Or like, you know, just trying to generate conversation and stuff.

And people—it went from being like a dead subreddit to like, I would post something and like a hundred—like thousands of people would be viewing this. There’s only 200 people in the subreddit, so I don’t know where these views are coming from. But I’d look at the shares—it’d be like 20 shares. I’m like, shares?

I joked about it once, like… I didn’t think if you played Wall Street Raider you had any friends. Like, if you’re somebody who plays Wall Street Raider, like, who are you—who are you gonna share it to? You’re not gonna share it to your partner or your mom or dad. And your friends aren’t interested in it. So I’m like, who are these people sharing this with?

But somebody out there who plays Wall Street Raider has a friend or two, because they were sharing these posts. And then other people are posting. So anyway, we built that. We built that out.

AJ:
Really good point. Did they make recommendations? Like, did they make recommendations that made it into the game? Or is the game kind of a one-to-one recreation?

Ben:
They haven’t made it into the game yet—they’ve made it into the user interface. A lot of those have—or are going to. Just general recommendations on the UI and stuff. But they kind of—I think they really—I’m glad that they like the new UI.

Because one guy even said—he’s like, “I love that this is like Bloomberg. Vaguely Bloomberg.” And I was like, that’s exactly what I was going for. Vaguely Bloomberg. Or Bloomberg-esque is what I was going for. I’m like, I hit the nail on the head there.

But yeah, I’ve got a Google Doc that’s like—I don’t know—ten thousand words of me literally just copy-and-pasting feature requests into a Google Doc of…

“I’m playing the—I want to unlock the years,” too, because the limit’s like 35 years. “I want to just unlock it. Whatever. You can play—if it crashes at year 1000, I don’t care.” So I’m just gonna unlock that.

But somebody’s like, “I’m on year 700 of the unlimited version, and like, there’s not much else I can do. Like, could you put it in the game to where I could somehow take over the Federal Reserve and like control interest rates to like lower or increase interest rates—because I own all the banks—and that would, you know, give me something to do.”

The guy’s just like playing—it’s like a sandbox at that point. He’s like, he’s got this save, he just opens it, plays it 10 minutes a day or whatever. And just—for me, I think it’s a role-play game. Which is what I don’t think people understand. It’s a role-play game. You’re role-playing as a billionaire, a hedge fund manager, a—you know, Carl Icahn or Warren Buffett or whatever you want to call it. Or a CEO of a company. It’s a role-playing game.

But they’ve been extremely helpful. Tons of ideas. And yeah, I mean, they’re really, really nice people.

AJ:
I mean, the game is already so feature-rich. And I assume you’re keeping all the features from the original because of the method that you’re using, right?

Ben:
Correct. Everything’s exactly the same. It’s just getting a facelift, basically, for now. There’s a lot of features I hope to add, but that’s not number one priority. The number one priority is to get people to be able to, one, buy the game again, and two, it’s going to be easier to use.

AJ:
Gotcha. I mean, Wall Street Raider, as fun as it is, I think people are sometimes—I mean, I guess it’s not that surprising if you’ve played it—but maybe if you haven’t, it’s surprising to hear that it’s actually taught real people real financial principles.

I’ve read of players of Wall Street Raider who have even gone on to start hedge funds and start businesses. Do you see this as a learning tool? Do you think that this version will continue to be used as a learning tool? Or do you think of it personally as primarily a game? I guess you just said it’s an RPG.

Ben:
I don’t want to give away my whole marketing strategy. But I think there’s enough of a competitive advantage with this here that I don’t think people are going to be able to steal or copy it. I think people have tried to copy it, and there’s no way to copy it. It’s just too complicated. Which is why I value Michael’s original simulation engine so much.

I’m not being like, “Oh, I could do this.” Originally I thought I could do this. And then I tried to—not copy it—but even try and copy some of the things in it, and I was like, I have no idea how to get this to work.

But in terms of like, its value to what audience, for what purpose… let’s just say I’ve had several hedge fund managers reach out who are like, “I played the game when I was 16, and it’s the reason I got into finance. And now I manage a billion dollars in assets. And here’s some ideas for the game,” or, “I want to use this to give to all my interns to use as just like, getting them in the right mindset of corporate finance and stuff.”

Like, “I want to just give this to every single intern that comes through the hedge fund,” or whatever. Or a lot of people are like, “I would love to run a class”—like professors—“I want to run a class and just give it to the students and like, just test it.”

So yeah. In turn, it’s a game. It’s a learning tool. I want it to play and feel and look like a game, but I also want to preserve all the real-world financial knowledge that’s in there. Because if you get really good at Wall Street Raider, I think it does help you. It’s totally changed—weirdly enough—it’s totally changed my idea of the markets.

Because I’ve tried to do things where I’m like—I’m not trying to do anything you can’t do in real life. Like, I try to do a run like that, like a role-play run of: I’m not gonna do anything you can’t legally do in real life.

And it’s really hard. It’s really hard to succeed in the game.

And I’m like, “I really wish I wanted, like—I just need to build like an ETF and be able to put—like, I just—because the market is going up. Stocks always go up, right?” That’s what Wall Street Bets would say.

Which in Wall Street Raider is not always the case, just be warned. But I want to create like an ETF—that’s like an index fund, basically. And there’s also index funds in the game, but I want to like make a massive index fund. My main goal—I want to create a total market or total world fund in Wall Street Raider. That’s one of my big asks for myself to put in the game.

Because like, that’s how I invest all my retirement—my 401ks and stuff—I invest. I’m a Boglehead. I invest in like, Vanguard World Total World Fund. And there’s a lot of people who may disagree with that. I may be—maybe I’ll change it to be more leveraged toward the U.S., or I don’t know. Right now it’s all in Total World Fund, which some people may think is dumb. A lot of Bogleheads may say that that’s exactly what they do.

But anyway. It’s like, it’s just totally changed. But that was like post-Wall Street Raider. I played Wall Street Raider and I had that idea and found Bogleheads. I was like, “This is how you manage risk.” And like, it’s totally changed my perspective.

And now I—you know—look at like the Wall Street Journal, and I’m reading stuff and I’m like, “Yeah, you know, like, CentOS wants to buy—whatever this competitor’s was—a family-owned business. And here’s how the board’s structured,” and like, I go to ChatGPT and do the deep research in ChatGPT and figure out what the structure of their business is and like…

This is all stuff I learned from Wall Street Raider. It’s like shareholder control and like how much control do you actually need in the real world to do this? And like, what is the CEO—why do they want to take this over? Or they can’t take it over—that must mean these key family members have X number of shares.

Just kind of role-playing it in your head of the real world and fantasizing about like… but it like—and then I’m like, well, that kind of helps you invest too. If you really understand how the markets move, it kind of helps you.

Now, of course, I’m not a multi-millionaire. I’m not a billionaire. So I guess it hasn’t helped me that much. But I’m also only 23 years old, so I’ve got a bit of time to really… now I’m 23. I have a bit of time to fully manifest the potential that Wall Street Raider’s knowledge has given me.

AJ:
Who knows—after this game, maybe… wait, you’re 23? Note to reader: it turns out Ben is 29; his wife in the background was waving, trying to get his attention to correct him, but alas, we were so caught up in the conversation Ben didn’t notice—or remember his age 🙂

AJ:
Yeah, you got time. That’s incredible. So tell me—do you see this as a single, definitive update to Wall Street Raider? Or do you see yourself kind of following in Michael Jenkins’ footsteps and continuing to refine and expand the game in the way that he has for many years?

Ben:
I mean, I definitely think there’s going to be a couple or several years of really like adding stuff to this game. There may be a plateau in that, but I don’t know. I could see it going—there’s two timelines, I think it could go either way.

My main goal is I just want to preserve Michael’s legacy. I mean, we have a really good licensing deal. It’s extremely fair. If I make money, he makes a lot of money. So I want to sell a lot of copies. I want to compensate him for everything he’s put into the game and help my family out, you know?

So I’m focusing a lot on the marketing side, but I’m really focused on the product side as well. And I’m hoping at some point, the marketing kind of—the word of mouth—kind of takes over and I can just focus on the game.

Because I think it’s very important for the launch to be very good. I want it to be big. I want it to be—because one thing I do want to give to the existing Raider community is a bigger community of people. Like how the Dwarf Fortress people—now, a lot of Dwarf Fortress fans may have hated it when all the people came in and it was more accessible and more people came in. I think there’s a lot of people who enjoyed the activity and all the content.

Like, there’s not a lot of Wall Street Raider content. You’ve got Clipknot, you’ve got maybe Canadian Investor. There’s a couple YouTube channels that release stuff. But it’s not a really pretty program to look at. It’s kind of boring. And I want to create something that could be streamable on Twitch or something that’s exciting.

I want to add—I don’t know if we will have icons or like company logos. Like, I think I’m going to have to remove all the real company names too. And then hope that maybe the modding community will take on that risk and create a mod to just put them all back in.

AJ:
So that’s actually a great point. That’s my other true love—I love Football Manager. Are you planning on mod support for this game?

Ben:
Like Football Manager, you know?

AJ:
On day one?

Ben:
Yeah. So that’s the strategy there.

Yeah. I want to expose—because you know me, I’m the language guy, the compiler guy—I want to exp—well, the first thing is getting the new UI. And maybe some key features, like feature requests. I want to open up—like, my vision, long-term vision is I want to open up a lot of the core simulation code to Lua or something, to where people could mod it that way.

But I also want to create like a web API that runs in the backend, and I want to attract like all the wannabe—or like—quants. People who know Python, want to learn Python. I want people in the AI research to grab onto this and say, “I’m going to build a Wall Street Raider AI that’s going to interface with the API and be able to pull the reports and monitor these companies and see if it can make money.”

Like basically like a trading bot, you know? I would not apply this trading bot to the real world because it would be extremely biased toward Wall Street Raider and probably lose a ton of money in the real world. But just as a learning tool?

I mean, there’s all different—yeah, there’s just a ton of ideas I have on where it could go. And I would love if it took off and, you know, I was able to do it full-time or something. I don’t know if that would ever happen. We will have to see.

I mean it is a very niche game. And I do really appreciate my current employer and I work really hard at my current job, and I love my current job. I have no intention of leaving, so I’m gonna do it on the side for as long as possible—if not forever.

But yeah, I just use the time that I have to work on the game to do what I can. I’ve had a lot of people, like these hedge fund guys, reach out wanting to either buy the game—not offering a ton of money or anything—but wanting to either buy it out or try it out themselves.

And it’s kind of weird because I’m like, I don’t want to be a sellout, you know? I’m like—if I don’t trust them, I’m like there’s no amount of money you could offer me to give this away, because there would be at least 400 people—if they got ahold of my address, they would come and hunt me down probably if I sold out.

So I kind of have an obligation to launch this game with the current plan that I have going forward. And maybe after that, consider—because I think it would be nice if there were more resources and you could apply people full-time to it and really polish it.

But I don’t think it’s necessary. I think getting it—people like the way I’ve got it right now, how it looks and stuff—if I just make it work, and it works really well, then I mean, it’s gonna be just Wall Street Raider, but better.

So anyway. I don’t remember what our original conversation was.

AJ:
Me neither. But that all sounds absolutely incredible.

I mean, Michael Jenkins called this—in, I believe, the interview or the video where he talked about you and this new game—he called this a passing of the torch moment. He says that he really hopes that your version will carry the game’s legacy forward.

How does it feel to have that kind of trust placed in you?

Ben:
It’s pretty intimidating, honestly. It’s a pretty huge responsibility. But, I mean, I was—yeah, I try not to think about it. Because it’s very like—like, one of the running jokes in the Discord is I said—because they’re like, “When’s it going to be released?” I’m like…

“I’m shooting for the next couple months, you know? I’m really working on shooting for the next couple months—barring I don’t get hit by a bus or something.” And they’re like, “Alright—all busing schedules in the Ohio area—we’re just gonna turn off all the buses in Ohio.” So it’s like…

I told them, the other running joke is—I look both ways when I cross the street. I promise you guys, I’m looking both ways when I cross the street. So there’s a high likelihood that this game is going to be released in some fashion.

AJ:
Okay, and I guess that brings me to my next question. So what’s the timeline for release? You said in the next few months—is there any…

Ben:
Yeah. I want to release in the next two months. I want to release a playable version in the next two months. Now, is it going to have all the features? Is there going to be—I’m hoping there’s no bugs. Michael, he has to test it. That’s part of the agreement. He has to test it before we can release it.

So I don’t think there will be any major bugs, but there may be kinks. There may be things that could be improved. That’s why I want to do it early access—to really get it dialed in and where I really see it, we’re talking six months or longer.

And they’re like, “Well, what could you get us in the next couple months?” I’m like, “Kind of this,” and they’re like, “Yeah, you need to just give it to us.”

So I’m like, maybe it’s a risk to release it before it’s fully baked, but I want to get as many—I’ve documented all the old buttons and features. So it’s gonna be weird. I don’t know if it’ll be jarring, but it will be completely new user interface.

But you’ll have the buttons. Okay, this is getting a little into the weeds a bit—but if it’s a full text report, like the financial profile or the research report or the earnings report or cash flow report, I want that to be accessible off the bat. Now, maybe you have to click a tab to get to it, but no button clicking. You’re just going to be able to see it.

Now, if we’re talking about doing an interest rate swap—I’ve totally put off redoing that screen. You’re gonna have the OG dialog. It’s going to be like a Windows 95 dialog popping up to execute or set up your interest rate swaps.

And I asked them, “Is this fine?” They’re like, “Yeah, we don’t care. Just get the game released, man.”

So that’s the plan. We’re going to try and reduce pop-ups, try and make—reduce scrolling. But my main goal is to get all the old buttons on the new interface, link up those commands to the old engine, and try and organize it better and reduce clicks—in a couple months.

AJ:
Gotcha. Just incredible. I am so excited to play this.

I guess before we finish, I wanted to read the message that I sent Michael Jenkins—that then Michael Jenkins replied to—which I then posted on the r/tycoon subreddit, which then four years later you replied to, saying that it was the inspiration—or it was the thing that I guess…

Ben:
I love this saga. I just gotta say, I love this whole saga. That’s why I’m so hooked on this. I’m like—I’m in a saga. And I gotta see what the ending looks like.

AJ:
It’s just incredible. And the fact that I played like some minuscule part—I’m over the moon about that.

Ben:
Yeah, no, definitely.

AJ:
So the letter that I wrote to Michael Jenkins four years ago was, “I’m about to purchase Speculator”—this is a different game, kind of a light version of Wall Street Raider where you just buy and sell stocks—“I’m about to purchase Speculator after enjoying the free trial. I wanted to know if buying this gives me free access to future versions of Speculator, or if those will have to be purchased separately. Thank you for your help and for the great game. Best regards, AJ.”

And then Michael Jenkins replied back:
“Thanks for asking. No, upgrades are not free, unless it’s just a minor bug fix. However, subsequent purchases are at about half the $19.95 price—$9.95. Also, as a registered user, you can buy Wall Street Raider at the discounted price of $12.95. As I make revisions over a period of a year or two, I eventually decide when I’ve done enough that it’s time to issue an upgrade version, but there is no timetable. And to be frank, I’m running out of feasible ideas for improvements to both games, and there may only be one or two more upgrades to either program. Otherwise, at age 76…” (This was four years ago, so I guess he’s 80 now?)

Ben:
Eighty-one.

AJ:
“…I may be finally coming near the end of development with my limited software skills unless I can license my code to a large software/game company that is willing to hire the kind of expensive programming talent”—that’s you—“that writes software for firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs who would be the only programmers capable of porting my game to iOS, Android, or to a classy-looking Windows GUI. And that is very unlikely. Companies I licensed to that have tried in the past couldn’t make even a vastly simplified version work. No bonds, options, futures, swaps, or complex corporate transactions like mergers, leveraged buyouts, spinoffs, liquidations, etc. They had very skilled programmers—one group had done game software for Disney—but they didn’t understand how things were supposed to work. So their attempts had nice graphics, but nothing worked correctly. Not surprising, as I’ve been tinkering with it and tweaking it almost continually since 1986. It is grotesquely complex and even I barely understand how some parts of it work, which were written at 3 a.m. some night in a fit of rationality, where I could for a moment grasp, for instance, how all the parties to a merger had to be dealt with—bondholders, stockholders, option holders, futures, interest rate swap counterparties, proper ratios for every facet, taxes, and so on.”

And then he ends with, “Unfortunately, there are few, if any, serious programmers with that kind of background knowledge of securities and tax law, accounting, economics, corporate finance, so I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of anyone ever being able to port it to one of the platforms like Android or iOS.”

So that was his message. He sent me that, replying—my question was just, “Do I get free access to future versions of Speculator?” And this guy just went off.

Ben:
Yeah. Your original question was, “Hey, do I have to pay for upgrades?” and he said, “Here is the whole situation, buddy.”

AJ:
Yes. Which I think just shows how much he loves this and how amazing this whole project is. So then you enter—Ben Ward, stage left—four years later, and you wrote:

Ben:
laughs

AJ:
“I know this is grave-digging at its finest, but I came here to report that I am the chosen one and the game is being remade. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.” And then you posted about the post that I—I posted on Reddit about what Michael Jenkins wrote. And you said, “This was the original post that introduced me to the game two years ago. It has taken me that long to convince Michael Jenkins to give me my shot. I recently signed on as official sole publisher/porter/remaker on a pure rev-share agreement. He is ready to retire, and I will be taking over from here. I think I have a good plan to make it worth Michael Jenkins’ and my while. I doubt it will be life-changing money. It’s simply a multi-generational passion project, and I am taking the torch. All because this darn post made me buy the game and I could not get the vision of the game looking like a Bloomberg terminal out of my head. So darn you OP.” (That’s me.) “Joking. Thank you so much for introducing me to the game. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure Michael Jenkins would have shut it down this year. Seriously, you inadvertently saved the game. I want you to know that.”

So… It makes me kind of emotional just thinking about that. I am…

Ben:
It makes me emotional. When I wrote that, I was very emotional. I mean, I was joking, like, the “chosen one” thing—I’m joking. I’m not eager to—

AJ:
But you are. Your life has led you to this moment. You worked in finance. You ported a game.

Ben:
Yeah, it’s kind of weird. But I wanted to give that to you, because I know it didn’t take a lot of effort from me, and I knew that—I had a feeling it was going to be nice. Like, you deserve that, because it’s true. It’s true.

AJ:
Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I’m just—I’m so glad that we got to speak. I’m so glad that you’re taking on this project. It has sentimental value to me.

So I just want to thank you for coming on the Outsider Gaming podcast and speaking to us. And I am so excited to play Wall Street Raider, the remastered version by Ben Ward, based on the masterpiece by Michael Jenkins.

Ben:
Yep. I’m gonna do my best, guys.

AJ:
So, where can people follow the progress of the game and stay updated on its release?

Ben:
There’s a couple different places. There’s the subreddit: r/WallStreetRaider. There you can find a link to the Discord—you can follow it on Discord. And there’s also the Steam page, which is now up. You can wishlist the game on Steam. Those are the main places.

AJ:
Incredible. Well, to everyone who has listened to or watched our podcast, thank you so much. It means a lot that you’ve made it this far. Please revisit OutsiderGaming.com, where we have gaming interviews like this one, other feature articles, reviews, gaming news, and gaming guides—as well as much more.

Thank you so much, Ben. I wish you the greatest success on the release of this game.

Ben:
Thanks for reaching out. And yeah—thanks again for writing that post. I mean, like, legitimately—that is the moment that I went straight to the Wall Street Raider page and bought the game. So thanks again for that. And thanks for having me on.

AJ:
Thank you. Warms my heart. All right. Take care, Ben.

Ben:
Yep, you too.