Fortune Builder - The Sim City Before Sim City

One of my favourite Colecovision games is Fortune Builder. It's a simple city-building program that is similar to Sim City - specifically the Dullsville scenario, where you have to earn money and build up the population within a certain amount of time. In Fortune Builder, there are no 'residential/commercial/industrial' areas, nor do you have to worry about power plants or havock-wreaking disasters. Instead, you have to deal with events that can either help raise your profits or send them plummeting.

The game even had a two-player mode where two people could actually sabotage each others' efforts to make a fortune. Methods included building structures that made a rival player's buildings less profitable, building toll booths on rival roads, or building in a place that the other player was planning on using. In two-player games, the game would only end if and when one player either made 250,000,000 dollars or went bankrupt. In single-player games, the game ended after five years.

The structures were mostly mono-coloured, but a few(including the oil rig) had at least two, and the area looked more like a map than Sim City's overhead view. Roads were solid gray blocks, and the buildings were shown with their front sides facing up, and the cars themselves were black dots on the roads. Most buildings could only be placed on grass, beach or mountain sides, while others(like the ski lift) were meant for the snowy slopes and there were some water-only structures including fishing boats. Power stations could go on the slopes or land, boosting profitability of nearby ski lifts, factories and coal mines.

The music, while repetative, is very good and not too simple unlike most Coleco music. It includes "The Four Seasons" and "Fur Elise" by Beethoven, and a fanfare for the winner.

I won't go too much into detail about the controls of the game; instead, I will direct you to a couple sites that will be most useful. I'd also recommend getting a Coleco emulator program and either downloading the ROM or subscribing to Console Classix. Emulator and ROM programs can be found in a search; won't be linking to them here as their legality is questionable at best.

Here are the links:

Fortune Builder Walkthru
Fortune Builder Manual
Console Classix


A note on controls for emulators: On most keyboards, especially ones like mine that have no separate 10-key sections, use the '=' key to place objects - the Console Classix emulator for the Coleco system recognizes the '=' as the '#' button. By default, the 'z' and 'x' keys function as the left and right buttons. I'm not sure if multiplayer games are possible in the Meka emulator that Console Classix uses; it might be possible to link online or via some other network and I will update on this when I find out how.