© 2026
English
Drill the wells. Run the refinery. Read the market. OIL is a free text-based simulation of running a petroleum operation, played at a 1980s green-phosphor terminal. End each year richer or bankrupt. Mind the bear market. Climb the leaderboard.
OIL is a free text-based petroleum industry simulation played at a 1980s computer terminal. You've signed a contract: one oil field, one million dollars, and a fixed number of years to turn buried crude into a fortune. Everything happens through a command prompt and a glowing CRT — no mouse required, just type and decide.
Before you begin, you choose your contract length — anywhere from a tight 20-year sprint to a grueling 100-year marathon. Your goal is simple to state and hard to achieve: finish the contract solvent. Run the field well and you retire wealthy. Overextend, misread the market, or get unlucky with a dry field, and you'll declare bankruptcy before the term is up. Every decision is made against a ticking clock, because each turn is a year you'll never get back.
Your field is a 10x10 grid of potential drilling sites, and you start out knowing nothing about any of them. Spend money to SCAN a plot and you'll learn its depth, the cost to drill it, and a reading on how much crude might be waiting underground. Drilling deep costs more, and the reservoir estimate is never a guarantee — every well you sink is a calculated bet. Hit a rich pocket and you've got a money-printer for decades. Hit a dry hole and you've burned cash for nothing. Reserves are finite: every well depletes as you pump it, and wells run dry, forcing you to keep exploring to replace falling production.
Striking oil is only the beginning. To turn crude into income you build out a full vertically-integrated operation:
There are eight tradable commodities, each with its own fluctuating price: crude, gasoline, diesel, kerosene, heavy oil, additives, premium gasoline, and jet fuel. Prices are grounded in real 1980s wholesale figures and move every year on their own schedule, cycling through bull runs, bear slumps, booms, and full-blown market crises. The core tension of the game is timing: do you sell your stock now at a decent price, or gamble on holding inventory for a spike that may never come? Sell into a crisis and you might make a killing — or watch prices collapse the year after you dumped everything.
The oil business doesn't run smoothly. Random annual events keep every run unpredictable and force you to keep a cash cushion:
Every year ends with a full report: what you produced, what you spent on operating costs, what events struck, and exactly how your cash moved. A multi-line STATUS screen tracks your company year-over-year so you can see whether you're actually growing or quietly bleeding out.
Beyond simply surviving the contract, there's a full ladder of milestones to chase: drill your first productive well, install your first pump, build your first refinery, pull off your first blend. Scale up to a ten-pump empire or a multi-refinery industrial complex. Push past two million dollars, then chase the ten-million-dollar Oil Baron fortune. Finish a brutal 100-year contract, cash out with a high score, profiteer during a market crisis, or strike a monster 150,000-barrel gusher. There are sixteen achievements in all, rewarding careful long-game strategy and lucky high-risk gambles alike.
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