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.”
Source: Wall Street Raider - The Origin Story | HN Discussion
