The Game That Ate Four Decades
In 1967, a Harvard Law student named Michael Jenkins started filling notebooks with ideas for a board game that would simulate the entire machinery of American capitalism – hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, tax accounting, the works. There was just one problem: the technology to run it didn’t exist yet.
So he waited. Sixteen years.
The Impossible Codebase
When Jenkins finally got his hands on a Kaypro computer in 1983, he taught himself BASIC from a manual written by Bill Gates and started coding. By 1986 he’d retired from law to work on the game full-time, and he never really stopped. The result: 115,000 lines of BASIC code, 1,600 simulated companies, derivatives trading, a karma system, and financial mechanics dense enough that people started calling it “the Dwarf Fortress of the stock market.”
The problem? Jenkins coded in marathon late-night sessions he called “fits of rationality,” writing complex merger logic while the understanding was fresh. Later, he admitted: “When I look at that code today, I still don’t quite understand it.”
Everyone Failed
Over the decades, multiple professional teams tried to modernize Wall Street Raider. All of them crashed and burned:
- A Denver legal software company couldn’t crack it
- A Disney-affiliated game studio threw Armenian programmers, a PhD mathematician, over a year of effort, and hundreds of thousands of dollars at an iPad port – and failed
- Commodore Computers stared at the source code for three months, then mailed it back
- Steam Greenlight rejected it as “too niche”
The core issue was brutal: you couldn’t rewrite the code without understanding corporate finance, tax law, securities regulation, and economics at Jenkins’ level. Programmers who could code couldn’t understand the finance. Finance people couldn’t read the code.
“I Am The Chosen One”
Enter Ben Ward, a 29-year-old developer from Ohio. In January 2024, he emailed the now-80-year-old Jenkins. The response was gentle but blunt: “I’ve been through this before. Others have tried – talented people with big budgets – and none of them could crack it.”
Jenkins sent the source code anyway, requiring only an NDA – snail-mailed, old school. Then Ward went silent for an entire year.
He was reading.
The Insight That Changed Everything
Where every previous team tried to rewrite Jenkins’ code from scratch, Ward had a different idea: don’t touch the engine at all. Instead, layer a modern interface on top of it – the same approach enterprise companies use for legacy system modernization. Wrap a Bloomberg terminal-style UI around the original 115,000 lines of proven, battle-tested logic.
It worked.
When Ward finally showed Jenkins a screen recording of the prototype, Jenkins was floored: “I was astonished to learn that he had spent the past year studying my code.”
The trust between these two – separated by 50 years in age and having never met in person – deepened when Jenkins did something remarkable. After Ward mentioned that cryptic variable names were slowing progress, Jenkins went through the entire codebase and renamed every variable. Search-and-replace across 115,000 lines. No bugs. No side effects. Three days.
The Accidental Career Factory
Here’s the part that makes this story genuinely wild: before the remaster was even announced, Jenkins had received messages from over 200 CEOs and investment professionals who credited Wall Street Raider with shaping their careers. Forex traders in Shanghai. Hedge fund managers. Morgan Stanley employees. One player reported using strategies learned in the game to earn 44% annual returns.
All from a game running in a DOS window with a text-based interface.
From Notebooks to Steam
Jenkins, now 81, has officially passed the torch to Ward. The remaster is heading to Steam with 5,000+ wishlists, an 800-member Discord, and a beta that attracted 500+ testers (200 of whom logged over 100 hours each).
Jenkins’ parting words to Ward carry the weight of someone who knows exactly what he’s handing off: “It will take over your life.”
Ward’s response: “It already has. I can’t escape from it now.”
From 1967 notebooks at Harvard Law to a 2025 Steam release – fifty-eight years in the making. Sometimes the best code is the code you don’t rewrite.
Source: Wall Street Raider - The Origin Story | HN Discussion
!