History of the original

The author of “Oel” is unknown — the first line of the program holds only the signature “d s w”. The game circulated as public domain, meaning a program anyone could copy freely, on the disk series Commodore Disc (no. 47), Digital Marketing PD (no. 200) and Stonysoft (no. 1739), also under the titles “Dallas”, “Oel Pumpl”, “Oel Pumper” and “Multi-Oel”.

In 1984 it was reviewed in the guide “Rombachs C64-Spieleführer” by Oswald Reim and Martin Scholer. They found it more fun than the usual business games, especially with more players, though they complained about text that was hard to read against the coloured background.

“Oel Pompowacze” is the same program with Polish texts. The translator signed the title screen as MIŚ AL. The Polish edition has its own names for the fields and companies, such as Jasny Gwint, Wielka Dziura or Wóz-Przewóz, the agent Funny Happy Bear, and different numbers: the game runs from 1985 to 2020 instead of 1983 to 2017, fields and companies cost differently, the stocks of pipes, pumps and tankers are finite, a single purchase has a limit, and the agent takes a job with a 50% chance.

We rewrote the rules line by line from the BASIC listing published on C64-Wiki. Where the Polish edition counts differently, the port plays like it; we checked every difference in the program code from the Polish disk and in an emulator. The C64 look draws the original 40×25-character screens, and the jingle on a strike plays the notes stored in the program.

We changed one thing on purpose. In the Polish edition the last year of the game (2019) had no oil price drawn, so selling brought $0 — it looks like an oversight when the years were shifted. The port draws a price for every year.

Online play, the computer in a free seat, the autopilot for absent players and the choice of the final year are the port’s additions. They don’t change the rules.

The port is non-commercial and was made out of fondness for the original. The rights to “Oel” belong to its author, and those to the Polish translation to the translator. We don’t know who they are. If you are one of them or hold rights to the game, write: mszula.github.io.

The game is free. “Coffee” donations help keep the port running and are not a payment for the game.

• “Oel” on C64-Wiki, in German
• The full BASIC listing the rules come from
• Game rules in brief