I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Hello my name is Ben Ward for the past 3 years I have been remastering the financial game Wall Street Raider created by Michael Jenkins originally on DOS in 1986. It has been a rough journey but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just recently redid the website and thought maybe the full story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.
I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986 launched on February 10, 2026 with 721 votes, #6 of 16,627 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Wall Street Raider is a remastered version of a 1986 stock market simulation game originally created for DOS. Developer Ben Ward spent three years reverse-engineering the classic financial strategy game to bring it to modern systems. The game lets players engage in stock trading, corporate management, and financial decision-making in a simulation environment originally designed by Michael Jenkins.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
The story of how Wall Street Raider—the most comprehensive financial simulator ever made—was born, nearly died, and was resurrected. A 40-year odyssey from Harvard Law to Steam.
A Denver company that developed legal software tried. They failed. A game studio that made software for Disney tried. They spent over a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had a team of programmers in Armenia, overseen by an American PhD in mathematics. They failed. Commodore Computers tried. After three months of staring at the source code, they gave up and mailed it back. Steam looked at it once, during the Greenlight era. "Too niche," they said. "Nobody will buy it. And if they do, they'll return it." For nearly four decades, Wall Street Raider existed as a kind of impossible object—a game so complex that its own creator barely understood parts of it, written in a…from wallstreetraider.com
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- AFA friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released2022 · ▲1,157
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
Market TerminalJan 2026 · marketterminal.com · ▲219Wall Street pays up to $30k/year for terminals. They have access to better data & faster intel than most investors. That's one of the reasons why they win big. The playing field is finally changing... We built a Wall Street terminal for retail investors. Finally, retail investors can see breakouts in real-time breakouts, run AI predictions on any stock, see what stocks institutions are buying... PLUS A Lot More! All in one place, at a fraction of the cost. We spent years building it... hope you love it!
I made a sandbox game to help with financial planning2021 · simulator.money · ▲409A browser based, retro sandbox game that let
- IQI quit coding years ago. AI brought me backJan 2026 · calquio.com · ▲314
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years. Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically…
- IBI built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites2012 · linkdaq.net · ▲184
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 26d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 20d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 14d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗
Launched alongside, February 2026
the whole month →
Lovon AI Therapy▲801Feel closer and have more fun with your partner every day!
AI · Feb 2026 · lovon.app
Supaboard▲698Ask in plain English. Get accurate answers from your data
Growth · Feb 2026 · supaboard.ai