Dope Wars is freeware game that has become popular via the Internet.

The game is published by Beermat Software and started as a DOS text-based game in the 1980s. You play a drug dealer who starts off £5,500 in debt with £2,000 cash. You have to travel around your choice of city (including London, LA and, more bizarrely, Derby, UK¹) buying drugs and selling them on at a profit. The game itself has no graphics to speak of, you just click various buttons to move about, buy and sell. You also have to watch out for the police too. There are claims that an actual police force has been censured because its officers were spending too much time playing Dope Wars on their office computers.

Although the game can be played purely on a workstation, it is possible to set up global cartels and master high score sheets on the Internet. The publishers had to take action in 1999 to stop cheating because players were hacking into the master data files and changing data to give themselves an advantage.