Cartels & Cutthroats

Cartels & Cutthroats puts the player in the role of the head of a business company trying to dominate the market for a chosen commodity and push the competition to the brink of bankruptcy. Instead of battlefields, the fighting here happens through price lists, advertising campaigns, research and product development, and underhanded practices such as sabotaging rival factories or industrial espionage. The game is purely turn-based and menu-driven, with the player dividing limited resources each round between production, marketing, and expansion while watching the reactions of AI-controlled rivals. As the game progresses, the market map changes depending on which company managed to better gauge demand and strike in the right place.

On the Atari 8-bit, the game is presented through text screens with overviews of finances, production, and market share, supplemented by simple graphs for quick orientation in the numbers. Neither graphics nor sound were the main draw; the emphasis was on the depth of the economic model and the ability to track a company's long-term development over time. Players could observe how individual decisions about pricing or advertising investment gradually changed their company's standing against the competition, which required patient planning several rounds ahead. It was precisely this precision and the breadth of ways to defeat the competition that made the title one of the more notable business simulations of its time.

Among fans of strategy games, Cartels & Cutthroats earned a reputation as a cult item for its unusual combination of dry economic modeling and black humor hidden behind corporate intrigue. In its time, it was one of the few games that dared to build its entire core loop purely on business rivalry, without any combat. Today it is interesting mainly as a forerunner of later tycoon games and a reminder of how diversely the strategy genre could be interpreted on eight-bit computers, long before similar economic simulations were popularized by more modern platforms.

Why play it: For players longing for a strategy game without a single shot fired, Cartels & Cutthroats offers dry economic modeling and black humor as a forerunner of later tycoon games.