"8-Bit Wolf: The NES Game That Taught Kids Wall Street Strategies"
Wall Street Kid, a video game released for the NES in 1990, is a celebration of wealth and its accumulation, where players must prove their money management prowess in the stock market to inherit their wealthy uncle's $600 billion estate. The game is a caricature of the American dream, where players point and click in the right sequence to unlock riches beyond imagining. However, revisiting the game as an adult, the author is mostly sad that this is still the way many folks see the world, and distressed at the degree to which our real-world economy is gamified.