Curate of Curiosities

The first game I will cover is Oiligarchy, which is the game that introduced me to this developer.

It might be one of the first Flash games I've played to have its own theme song. In my opinion, more browser games should have them.

The premise is, you are the CEO of an oil company that was founded during the post-World War II boom. Your goal is simple: drill oil, make enough money to keep your shareholders from throwing you out of a fourth-story window, and keep the public suckling at the teat of your industry.

From the start, you only have enough money to place a handful of wells. Furthermore, demand for oil isn't high enough that you can easily make back the costs.

However, it won't be long before the public starts seeing the wonders of petroleum and begging for more.

In addition, you have one particularly powerful tool in your arsenal: lobbying! Every few years in-game there will be a presidential election, where you have the chance to literally feed money to both candidates. Bribe them enough, and you end up with the government in your pocket.

Obviously, this comes with the advantage of being able make them serve your interests. If you need them to say, fund a revolution halfway across the globe, then just say the word and they'll be off.

Speaking of which, although you start out in Texas, it's not the only place you can drill for oil.

First off, there's Venezuela, which not only has underground reservoirs, but offshore reservoirs that require more expensive equipment to access.

There's Alaska, which you'd think would be fair game for drilling, but has some dumb conservation laws protecting it.

Then there's Iraq, which, having just freed itself from Western colonialism, is rather wary about providing some no-name American company with access to its resources. Nothing that a bit of Freedom and Democracy can't fix!

Finally, we have Nigeria. Plenty of oil for the taking, but something tells me the natives won't be too thrilled about us setting up shop here.

Bah. I'm sure this won't drastically effect the company.

Besides, if the natives start getting rowdy, we can always persuade the government to step in and deal with them.

After a few decades, we finally have permission to drill in Alaska.

Oops. By the way, there isn't a whole lot of oil to be found in Alaska anyway, so even if we ignored it, it wouldn't make much of a difference.But where's the fun in that?

Anyways, our attempts at facilitating regime change in Iraq turned out to be a bust. If we throw more men at the problem, though...

And there we go. The Iraqi oil fields are now ours for the taking.

But wait, looks like there's trouble brewing back home. Some dirty hippies are trying to subvert our organization through political channels. Only we can do that!

Besides, it's not like they have a point about how the oil reserves are running out or anything like that.

(Side note: Although the game brings up climate change as a consequence of the oil industry, yet it doesn't have any impact at all on the game, while the coming of Peak Oil is the turning point. Meanwhile in the real world, the effects of climate change become more extreme with every passing year, while once Peak Oil arrives--if it ever arrives at all--it will likely be in an effort to slow down the climate crisis, rather than the result of depleting reservoirs.)

In response to the coming crisis, the public begins to turn to less oil-intensive lifestyles and products.

But it's no use, thanks to our efforts, petroleum has become the lifeblood of the world's industry, so when it starts to run out, the whole world suffers.

Desperate to keep up with demand, we are given an option to build plants that convert humans into oil. However, they are nowhere near as effective as the wells we've been relying on up to this point.

In the end, faced with a collapsing supply chain and ever-shrinking oil resources, the world erupts into nuclear war--the deathblow to civilization as we know it.

Of course, this isn't the only way things can play out.

In another ending, you fail to please your shareholders, and get fired. The only times I got this ending were on purpose.

In yet another, the world is weaned off of fossil fuels, forcing you to retire. I really like how this implies that your company has been managed by the same person for the entire game, when a single playthough can easily last for 100 in-game years or more.

Finally, there's the "Farewell West" ending, where the first world undergoes a steady collapse. It is by far the hardest ending to achieve, requiring a careful balancing act, and a bit of luck, after peak oil hits. Specifically, you need to carefully manage your oil supply so that it remains just slightly below demand--any lower, and you break the world's oil dependency, putting you on the track to retirement; any higher, and the global GDP skyrockets, making the ending impossible to reach. According to the game's creators, since so few players were even aware of its existence, they suspected that it was, in fact, impossible to achieve.

So, that was Oiligarchy. Sure, it's a scathing, extremely heavy handed view of the fossil fuel industry--but damn if it wasn't fun.