The Game: Feel like literally “playing” the stock market? This game allows you to do so with varying degrees of accuracy, ranging from level one – simple trading – to level four, which allows buying on margins, prime rate interest calculations, and numerous other complications. A ticker across the top of the screen gives the current values of several stocks and commodities, while a ticker running across the center of the screen gives the latest news updates. The nature of that news can have drastic effects on the stocks available for trade, ranging from the sometimes silly (“electronic foot massager increases worker productivity”) to the frighteningly prophetic (“war threat in the Middle East”). (North American Phillips, 1983)
Memories: An interesting idea for a console game (whereas this sort of thing would usually be found only on computers, especially back then), The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt was the third and final Master Strategy Series game released for the Odyssey2. The Master Strategy titles were complicated and often conceptually top-heavy video/board game hybrids which cost as much as $20 more than other 
Odyssey games on the retail shelves – and just as often, their actual video game component was exceedingly simple and easy to enjoy as a stand-alone game. Of the three Master Strategy games, The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt comes closest to meriting those attempts at complexity. The beauty of it is really the simplicity of the cartridge’s program – all it needs is scrolling text, and it works.
For those who are dead-set on playing the game, board and all, and don’t have all of the accessories – namely the “investment record” pads that came with the game originally – we’re offering printable duplicates so you can recapture that element of the game. Click here for the option price calculator sheet, or here for blank scoring sheets.
The game’s model of the stock market is sometimes a little too pat and simple, but that doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable; in fact, too much realism probably would’ve bogged the game down needlessly. It’s a video game, for crying out loud, not an educational tool for macroeconomics classes.
Not a bad end to the Odyssey2’s Master Strategy Series. (For the record, a fourth game was planned, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes characters, but no prototype of the video game or any of the board game components have ever been discovered.)
