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Diary of a dope fiend
You're desperate. The loan sharks ain't in the mood for chump change, and if you don't produce by tomorrow they're gonna seriously bruise your ass. Reluctantly, you go see your man at his grungy rat-infested Manhattan crib and score 30 bags of Mexican black tar heroin. Upon leaving, a pair of vicious dogs chase you through an alleyway, tearing at your appendages. Despite the searing pain and a large chunk of meat missing from your right thigh, you feel in your trenchcoatŠ Phew... Yes indeedee, all 30 O's of smack, still intact. It was a close shave, but hey, at $5,045 a pop for uncut Mexican black tar, you couldn't pass up the deal, dogs be damned. Now it's just a matter of slipping past the cops across town, where your contact is about to make you rich. On the subway, en route to the Bronx, you stumble across a dead guy. It's impossible to resist. "Well, he's dead," you figure. "Why not?" Scanning the car to make sure no one's watching, you hold your breath and rifle his pockets. Sure enough, he's holding. A few units of MDA. Probably fetch you an easy nine large. After kicking the corpse in the ribs for good measure, laughing wildly, you pocket the goods. It's smooth sailing from here out. Like clockwork, in the Bronx you move all 30 bundles of heroin at $12,435 apiece and quickly count the coin. Ch-ching! $221,700 profit. You decide to keep the MDA for your own personal use. Just a little something to take the edge off. Hell, you can afford it now. Nothing like fighting the war. On drugs. Welcome to the seamy underworld of the highly controversial, graphically lo-fat PC game, Dope Wars. It's as simple as this. You start out with $2,000 and 30 days to wheel and deal illicit drugs, from ecstasy to cocaine to hash. The object is to buy low, sell high, flying from city to city around the globe to move your wares. You have a health meter, you have Officer Hardass and his trigger-happy deputies on your trail, and you have 30 days to become a multi-millionaire. Based on a 1984 text-only DOS version of the game "Drug Wars," Dope Wars (the next generation) has undergone many facelifts since limey Ian Wall, Queens-based programmer and president of Beermat Software, designed and uploaded a user-friendly Windows interface in April 1999. To date, more than three million people have downloaded Wall's shareware version from CNET at an average of 15,000 hits per week, earning Dope Wars a #2 ranking on Download.com's top-50 most popular games, and even making Rolling Stone's "Hot List 2,000." From places as distant as Norway, North America, Egypt and Brazil, hordes of innocents are turning to a life of crime. But Dope Wars fans aren't just couch-loafing, tube-pulling stoners, idling away the hours as hemp-happy rags-to-riches digital drug lords. Jumping on the bandwagon craze, computer geeks from seaboard to seaboard soon followed in Wall's tracks, designing programs for nearly every computer format available, including UNIX, Mac, TI calculators, and even a newly released Micro Java version for corporate junkies who want to peddle coke on their cell phones between board meetings. Indeed, the Palm OS version, designed by 20-something MIT graduate, Matthew Lee, ranks #2 at Download.com's Palm software page, with a whopping 299,166 downloads since its 1999 release, paled only by a Palm version of the English dictionary. One Palm reviewer writes: "I love it best when people ask me what I'm doing and I tell them I'm selling weed in the Bronx at a great price." Another: "I've introduced the game to all my friends and they hate me! It takes too much of their time. It rocks!" One even wrote in that her college professor is using the game as an education tool to teach business students basic economics. But the reception hasn't been so sweet on the political fore. Anti-media violence crusader, GOP Senator Sam Brownback (Kansas), took a swipe at Dope Wars in December 1999, denouncing the game as another tasteless, negative influence for teenagers in one of his typical "Carnage Culture" speeches. "Consider just a few examples," Brownback fumed in another March 2000 address on violent video games targeting teens. "The games Carmaggedon and Twisted Metal cast the player as a deranged motorist whose aim is to run over as many pedestrians and other drivers as possible. The more bystanders you kill, the higher your score. In Grand Theft Auto II, players can engage in drive-by shootings, drug dealing, and car theft as they simulate gangster activity." No doubt downloads soared that week. In the previous Dope Wars v2.0, players were armed with handguns and bazookas to shoot back at the cops, features (besides the glamorization of smuggling dope itself) which drew the ire of the DEA and law enforcement. In response, Wall ditched the cop-killing lead in the latest version of Dope Wars v2.1 released on August 22, arming players with purses and rubber chickens to slap the cops silly, on top of pea-shooters, and banana-throwing monkeys which simply scare the police away. Seasoned dealers have been drilling Wall to reprogram the firepower, but the lack of lethal weapons hasn't deterred new initiates; just last week, a record 37,068 users downloaded the updated version. Since Dave Sheridan's Ripoff Comix board game Dealer McDope hit the American underground in 1974, wave after wave of illicit drug games became the rage, leading to more high-action interactive drama like the famous stoner card game Grass, which is still in production today. First generation computer junkies enjoyed John Dell's DOS version of Drug Wars, which hit the screens in 1984, followed by the 1990s Missile Command-like Crop Commander. Today, Grand Theft Auto, Hacker, the high-speed cop chase game Need For Speed, and Dope Wars are the Johnny-come-latelies of criminal simulation. If dealing illegal substances like opium and crystal meth is your gig, it's as easy as a one-minute download at dopewars.com, where you can go it alone or hook up with fellow freaks in one of many global cartels. On the other end of the rope, D.A.R.E. offers a free PC game at dare.com, where players can transmogrify into shifty neighborhood spies, who help scrub down the streets of that slimy dope-peddling riff-raff vermin.
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