The Story of Wall Street Raider – A 40-Year Odyssey from Harvard Law to Steam Home The Story Testimonials Wishlist on Steam The Origin Story The Story of Wall Street Raider A 40-Year Odyssey from Harvard Law to Steam Wall Street Raider: from DOS to a modern Bloomberg-style interface Prologue: The Dragon That Couldn’t Be Slain 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 programming language so primitive that professional developers couldn’t decode it. The code was, in the creator’s own words, “indecipherable to anyone but me.” And then, in January 2024, a 29-year-old software developer from Ohio named Ben Ward sent an email. Michael Jenkins, 80 years old and understandably cautious after decades of failed attempts by others, was honest with him: I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I’ve been through this before. Others have tried—talented people with big budgets—and none of them could crack it. I’ll send you the source code, but I want to be upfront: I’m not expecting miracles. A year later, that same 29-year-old would announce on Reddit: “I am the chosen one, and the game is being remade. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.” He was joking about the “chosen one” part. Sort of. This is the story of how Wall Street Raider—the most comprehensive financial simulator ever made—was born, nearly died, and was resurrected. It’s a story about obsession, about code that takes on a life of its own, about a game that accidentally changed the careers of hundreds of people. And it’s about the 50-year age gap between two developers who, despite meeting in person for the first time only via video call, would trust each other with four decades of work. The Notebooks Harvard Law School, 1967 Michael Jenkins was supposed to be studying. Instead, he was filling notebooks with ideas for a board game. Not just any board game. Jenkins wanted to build something like Monopoly, but instead of hotels and railroads, you’d buy and sell corporations. You’d issue stock. You’d execute mergers. You’d structure leveraged buyouts. The game would simulate the entire machinery of American capitalism, from hostile takeovers to tax accounting. There was just one problem: it was impossible. “Nobody’s going to have the patience to do this,” Jenkins realized as he stared at his prototype—a board covered in tiny paper stock certificates, a calculator for working out
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