Entrepreneur Jungle (Antic Super Disk Bonus, March 1988)

What it is

A stock-market speculation game where your Atari is your “broker.” You claw from a tiny stake toward a personal net worth of one billion dollars before enforced retirement (~44 game-years, quarterly ticks). The base loop is buy-low / sell-high across a board of firms — but the game’s real identity is the corruption / influence economy layered on top: insider trading, political donations (bribes), letters of introduction, Insider Tips, the Rumor Mill, shady off-book ventures, and a Grand Jury file that thickens as you break the law — which enough influence lets you make vanish.

Mechanics (from ENTRE.DOC)

Core loop. One firm/venture is offered at a time: [B]uy, [S]ell, or [SPACE] to move on; [RETURN] confirms a dollar amount / share count. Each quarter ends with a status report; you may [D]eposit / [W]ithdraw from a Swiss Bank account. Win = $1B net worth before retirement.

Control / manipulation. Own >50% of a firm → its price fluctuation doubles; 100% → quadruples (can bankrupt a weakly-financed company — high risk, huge upside). Net worth counts tangible assets only; intangibles (futures, shady deals, R&D stakes) don’t count toward the number, though they pay out.

Tiered, gated portfolio — each firm is a personality, not uniform RNG:

• Easy Bond & Trust — cautious; rises >95% of the time but only a few dollars a quarter (the safe floor).
• Dehring Investments — “daring”; above $10, fluctuations can match the share price (volatile).
• Ajax / Crater / Flying Fox — growth tied to government contracts (macro-sensitive).
• Bear Breath Brewery — the smallest firm on the board.
• Grande Gold Mines — only offered once net worth > $1,000 (wealth-gated).
• Multinational Arms Co. — never openly traded; needs a letter of introduction from a government figure (~$5,000 accumulated “party” donations). Never bankrupts (foreign powers refinance) but can still crater — the influence-gated top tier.

Special ventures (the intangibles / influence surface):

• Risqué Futures — “finders” for anything from pork bellies to old comic books; five stake levels; results posted next quarter.
• Bi Coastal Theater Productions — at $5,000 wealth, become a Broadway “angel”; many shows fold before opening, but a hit pays box-office receipts for its whole run.
• Darkside Ventures — never publicly offered; a letter of introduction ($50–100 in donations) is required; “dealings are shady — sometimes illegal”; you buy in by “pieces” (smaller pieces for higher risk). “Keep an eye out for the Grand Jury.”
• Experitech R&D — at $10,000 assets, fund research; failures are common, but a success pays lifetime quarterly royalties (patents). Sellable for quick cash.
• Party War Chest Foundation — the channel that routes “donations (some would call them bribes)” to politicians. Optional — but donations unlock the gated tiers, the Insider Tips, and the Rumor Mill.

Corruption exposure. Illegal dealings thicken your Grand Jury file; the Antic copy notes that enough political benefaction lets you tamper with justice — “your Grand Jury files might vanish.” On [V]acation (save/pause) the game reports net worth, patent value, Grand Jury file thickness, and political-donation total — you note them and re-enter them on return (a manual save-by-numbers), and the market moves while you’re away (“you’re not the only Entrepreneur manipulating the economic forces”).

Why this is in the KN-86 inspiration set

Entrepreneur Jungle isn’t really a stock game — it’s a corporate-corruption game where information and influence are the instruments, and hacking the record is a win path. Every distinctive layer maps natively onto the deck:

1. Bribes / donations → access. Party War Chest → letters of introduction → gated tiers is a reputation / credits economy — the deck’s Universal Deck State model, where credits + reputation gate what’s available. (Reputation already sets threat density in world-engine.md §2.1.)
2. Insider Tips / Rumor Mill = recon intel. Information asymmetry as the edge maps onto bzbx / CONDUIT / RIPSAW findings feeding market moves — the recon loop is insider trading, in-fiction.
3. “Make your Grand Jury file vanish” = a data-manipulation verb. The deck’s whole premise is manipulating records and systems; a market cart where you hack away your own legal exposure fuses the economy and hacking layers — strong synergy with CONDUIT / RIPSAW / Black Ledger forensic accounting.
4. Swiss Bank / off-books wealth + net-worth-is-tangibles-only. Hidden money and unaccounted assets are Black-Ledger-native themes.
5. Authored, seed-deterministic instrument behaviors. The nine firms are hand-authored personalities with fixed parameters — exactly the “authored bones + procedural flesh” World Engine discipline (deterministic, replayable, offline).
6. Quarterly ticks + retirement cap map onto the World Clock with a clean net-worth-vs-turn-cap objective.

What KN-86 borrows directly

• The corruption / influence economy as the differentiator — not buy-low/sell-high (that’s the floor). Bribes → access → insider tips → shady ventures → legal exposure → hacking the exposure away.
• Tiered wealth / influence gating of what you can even see or buy.
• Instrument-as-personality — each tradable has a distinct authored behavior (safe / volatile / gov-tied / gated), not uniform RNG.
• Legible durable state (net worth, patents, Grand Jury thickness, donations) — the same “durable state is human-readable” instinct KN-86 already holds (cf. nfl-challenge.md’s editable-plain-text lesson + Deck State).
• The [V]acation suspend/resume as an in-fiction save framing.

What KN-86 does NOT borrow

• The literal 1988 firms / flavor (Bear Breath Brewery et al.) — reskin to the KN-86 cyberpunk corporate world.
• BASIC’s save-by-retyping-numbers — KN-86 has per-cart save + UDS.
• Real-money / real-market fiction — KN-86 is fully fictional.

Notes

• Source of truth: the game ships as ENTRE.BAS + ENTRE.DOC on the March-1988 Antic disk (a .atr image). The mechanics above are transcribed from ENTRE.DOC.
• Differentiation from Dopewars (the bundled Legacy-Terminal trade sim, ADR-0021): Dopewars is pure buy-low / sell-high; Entrepreneur Jungle’s influence + corruption + insider layer is the reason to build a separate, gameplay-integrated market cart rather than lean on the easter egg.
• Design home: the KN-86 market / corporate-corruption sim cart (under EPIC: Cartridges & Gameplay) — a cart-domain economy overlay on AmberCalc + sanctioned credit primitives; seed-deterministic; World-Clock-ticked; minigame settlement in the ADR-0047 lineage where a wager/reel surface fits.
• Verification: I initially failed to confirm this title from shallow web search and wrongly flagged it as likely non-existent; it is real (atarimania #1857), and Josh supplied the disk image. Lesson logged.