A New York City-based computer programmer, Ian Wall, updated a 1984 DOS version of the game to be Windows compatible last year. After introducing it to the computer world, another programmer from Massachusetts, Matthew Lee, took it one step further and made it available for the Palm Pilot generation. Now yuppies and students are beaming Dope Wars back and forth to each other even faster than they can sell their arsenal of dope and evade brutal cops. From speed to weed, hashish to heroin, the dealer has to evade Officer Hardass and Honest Harry the loan shark, while moving their product, occasionally suffering the hardship of being mugged or the elation of finding a stash of drugs on a corpse in the subway. The Palm version takes place in New York City but the PC and Mac versions take the dealer to 10 cities such as London, Paris, Chicago, and Johannesburg.
Various options pop up on the screen to help or hinder the dealer.
The opportunity to buy a trench coat with more pockets is an option that David Mesa, a paralegal in Berkeley, Calif., jumps on. A London lawyer, David Lancelot, said that before his Palm Pilot crashed he played it on the tube three times a week on his way to work and that his friends compare scores on the train or at the pub. A lot of office workers play the game. But not easy enough as a group of police officers in Perth, Australia, got caught playing Dope Wars at work. Their supervisor booted the game directly into the virtual trash.