[STEAM] This long-forgotten Monopoly game is still a joy to play (and absolutely bonkers)

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Whenever a ***** is made, green bills literally fly into your account in the top right corner, accompanied by cash machine sounds and a nice bit of dopamine. As the dreaded 6am timeslot approaches – this is when you pay your utility bills and stock up your stores, so it’s often a huge expense – a scary alarm signal plays as you get ready to watch your money disappear. It’s all good fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sometimes I flew the camera to the luscious park in the middle of the city, sook out the giant statue of Mr. Monopoly, and asked it for advice.

Also, goodness me, the soundtrack has no right to slap this hard. Every day is a five-year ******* in the game, and each decade has a separate soundtrack – from the mellow trumpets of the ‘30s to the ‘70s disco vibes and the “we’re almost in the future” electronica of the ‘90s, it’s banger after banger after banger – and the main menu theme makes me want to run to the nearest shop, buy out its owner, and embark on a business adventure right here, right now…

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It’s as American Dream as it can get.

Capitalism for dummies

Returning to the game as an adult, I found that it does a good job of getting some basic capitalistic tenets across. You have a near-infinite free line of credit, meaning you can go very far into the red, with the caveat that if you have a negative balance at midnight, you have to end the next day in the ****** or get eliminated via bankruptcy.

So the optimal strat is to go nuts on your business empire in 1930, risk bankruptcy in 1935, barely make your money back by 1940, then repeat the process again. It also doesn’t hurt if you find the real moneymakers of the game: residential buildings and taking advantage of monopolies.

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will make you pay top dollar for each property as you get closer to this goal—then wait for the rental payout the following day before buying out your opponents’ stores. This will usually crush them in whatever business metric the scenario calls for while bolstering your own, so all you need to do is not go bankrupt. The fact that monopolies also allow you to build hotels to get exorbitant income for each visitor is just a cherry on top.

I always found that the light brown locations (Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road) are the best way to go for your first monopoly: you only need to secure two of them, and they are nominally the cheapest on the board. From then on, the world is your oyster.

Scenarios range from daily profit quotas to total business empire value to getting a certain number of sales or winning elections, but this approach will always serve you well.

I got quite far into the game as a kid, but never quite cracked the code – and while I think I found the optimal strategy, I’d still struggle on the later levels if I were to force myself to try something else. But even if that’s the only reliable way to win, it is a ton of fun to execute the strat over and over again. I wonder how cutthroat the game would be in a proper multiplayer setting—which the game does support, but, you know, good luck finding a game these days for something that relied on GameSpy.

Monopoly Tycoon was a commercial slow burner, but it ultimately

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, five years after its release. Unfortunately, developer Deep Red Games (now DR Studios) has never quite lived up to its promise with their later projects, though I was surprised to see that they apparently developed Terraria’s mobile and console ports.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to listening to the soundtrack.

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