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The wild spread of “drug wars” from your calculator to your phone

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Yes The sixth period in the late 1990s. You’re sitting in the back of the classroom, barely listening to the drone of the Algebra II lesson, while you’re playing with the TI-82 graphics calculator that came out of school. The only math you’re really learning is that cocaine costs more than acid, and heroin can be quite profitable on Coney Island.

Before everyone had cell phones, millions of teenagers across the country were found Drug Wars, A simple game about buying and selling drugs in New York neighborhoods, while Officer Hardass (yes, that’s his name) and his deputies, loggers, or trying to avoid supplying chemical smuggling to hungry customers. You have 30 days to get as much money as possible to buy and sell cheap, or at least enough to pay off the loan.

Next year Drug Wars He will turn 40 years old. It has since gone from a DOS game to a calculator game, a web browser game, and more recently, a mobile app, sometimes known as a game. Dope Wars instead.

“I’m still amazed by the number of ports in the game,” John E. Dell, the game’s original author, says in an interview with WIRED.

Dell wrote the first version Drug Wars Secondary computer in a TRS-80. He said he recently bought and sold a game for sale at his friend’s house at varying prices. Dell said it couldn’t remember which game it was, but it probably could have been tycoon. He decided to put this style of play in the products including games, speed, weed, acid, heroin and cocaine.

Dell’s teacher was happy to put him on A’s assignment.

“I especially remember him putting a wrinkled face on paper,” Dell said. “He didn’t like the subject.”

Dell would later rewrite the game in DOS and upload it to a bulletin board system (BBS), which was used by computer users in the 1980s to communicate, share files, or play online.

After high school, Dell forgot about the game and enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy when he began his military career studying computer science.

Drug Wars it continued to evolve as it was programmed into the new BBS game. It was also adapted to early editions of Windows, but occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when computers were usually reserved for the rich and / or nerds.

Drug Wars it actually became viral (a word that was once used to describe anything other than pathogens) when it appeared on the TI-82 graphing calculator, the same device that could be found in any advanced high school math class in the 1990s and 2000s.

It was rewritten by Jonathan Maier Drug Wars in his graphing calculator in 1993. Maier, then a high school sophomore, shared it with his friends using his home cable to connect his graphing calculator to his computer. From there it spread among his friends and then throughout the school.

“I knew it was successful when I walked through the math classroom and saw the teacher playing alone on the device that showed up on the calculator screen above the projector,” Maier said in an email.

Maier explained that he attracted attention to the game, like many of his classmates, because of the ban on drug content at the time. It didn’t hurt that the simplicity of the game was easy for the poorest players to understand.

“All credit should go to the original programmer for designing a great game design in the DOS version,” Maier said, referring to Dell. “I took other things with me and played some games too, but none of them became a viral sensation.”

When Maier was a mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech he learned that one of his primary school classmates had adapted his original program, added his name to it, and eventually uploaded it to a primitive site for sharing existing files. 1990s.

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