Filename
Drugwars
Summary
Buy and sell drugs to pay off your debt and make money
Original Author
Original Release Date
December 1994
Compatibility
TI-82, TI-83(+), TI-85, TI-86, TI-89
Language
Drug Wars (or Drugwars) is one of the definitive TI calculator games that everybody was playing back in the heyday of calculator games from 1998 to 2004. The first version of the game was programmed in TI-Basic by Jonathan Maier for the TI-82 and released in December 1994.
The game is based off of the John E. Dell game with the same name released in 1984. The basic premise is that you are a drug dealer who owes $5,000 to a loan shark. With $2,000 in cash, you have thirty days to pay back the loan shark and to make as much money as possible. There are different kinds of drugs that you can buy and sell, as well as different cities where you can go to sell them. The prices of the drugs change, however, based on rival drug dealers, the city, and the police.
Program Significance
The popularity of Drug Wars on the TI-82 caused other people to not only port the game to the rest of the TI graphing calculators, but also to make their own variations. Some of the more popular variations included dope wars, hobo wars, pimp quest, nerd wars, and beer hunt. In addition, there was a graphical version of the game released for the TI-83, as well as an assembly version made for the TI-86 by Jonah Cohen.
You won't find the game on any of the major TI sites, however, as Drug Wars was removed from ticalc.org in 2001 after the CD disaster. Ticalc.org and Texas Instruments (TI) had reached an agreement to include a portion of the ticalc.org archives on a CD, which was then bundled with a TI graphing calculator in a kit for students. There were no real restrictions on program content at that time, and a parent discovered some questionable content on the CD (in particular, pornographic ASCII images). Although ticalc.org removed the inappropriate content from the site, TI and ticalc.org ceased working together; TI still doesn't link to ticalc.org to this day.