Kommersant’ by Vladimir Kharchenko and Rada Ltd, 1991.

Kommersant is a fascinating political and economic computer game that builds on the interface design of fantasy games like Oubliette (1986) where you guided a party of adventurers through a dungeon, and instead has you guide a businessman through early 2000s capitalism (as imagined in 1991). Set one decade into the future, in a world defined by a peculiar and triumphant capitalism, still beset by oil crises and currency collapses, Kommersant’ straddles the line between fantasy roleplay and earnest efforts at economic epistemology. The game is unusually real-time, with events and stock prices changing continuously, forcing the player to adjust on the fly. Oubliette, an obvious influence, conversely, was entirely turn-based, encouraging the player to pause and think before locking in a decision. In Kommersant’ decisions are always panicked. Game events include currency crises, oil crises, police raids, criminal shakedowns (but also opportunities to commit crime), and other elements crucial to the perestroika era, are imagined as normalized features of the 2000s. This creates a tense environment of financial speculation and illegal dealings. The few communities that play Kommersant online create narratives using it, by passing around a single save with each player controlling the avatar for a single year and thus complicating or improving their lot and thus the collective narrative with their contribution. The player manipulates two currencies: money and fuel, and both are treated as both commodities for trade and speculation, and actual things-in-the-world--for instance, money can be lost, while running out of fuel can lead to the player freezing to death in their home. The survival aspects of Kommersant are particularly novel, and the shift of ludic economics to real-world problems makes the game an unusual commentary on the hopes and ambitions of the 1990s. The precarity of the player avatar’s survival is undercut by games within games, as it is entirely possible to gamble away your fortune at the casino and horse-races that the game makes available, seeking out ruin via a spectacle of frenzied consumption. Overall, Kommersant combines tropes of 1980s and early 1990s representations of fast-paced capitalist luxury, with signs of precarity, risk, violence and volatility, making for engaging game play and a cutting ludic epistemology of economics in the 1990s. Notably, the creator of Kommersant’ is much better known as a video artist and poet, having received several prizes for his artistic work. The game itself was distributed almost entirely free, through early 1990s pirate networks such as FIDO and is still available as freeware online here: hhttps://www.igdb.com/games/kommersant--1.