Entrepreneur (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.3 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  T. McDonald
• Reviewed on: 10/14/1997
• Updated on: 05/01/2000
• Released on: 08/31/1997
• Originally published on GameSpot: Entrepreneur (PC) Review

The success of Stardock's Galactic Civilizations taught it a valuable lesson in capitalism: monopolies are good. Stardock pretty much owned the OS/2 game market because, well, no one else wanted it. Since there were so few native OS/2 games, all those astigmatic LAN managers wearing "LUV A WOOKIE" pins and swearing that OS/2 was the Second Coming (even though it ruined every system I put it on) would buy any native games. They had to. It's in the geek manual. So Galactic Civ was a pretty strong seller and garnered a few awards along the way.

Well, OS/2 has gone the way of the woolly mammoth, but Stardock is still around. Its latest game is Entrepreneur, and while you won't mistake it for Capitalism, it's a decent real-time economic game with good Internet support. Entrepreneur is pretty much a real-time conquest game with a different motif. Instead of using armies, you use salesmen and marketers. It's all kind of strange, actually, and vaguely reminiscent of MULE.

Entrepreneur puts you at the head of a corporation selling computers. The game ships with only this market, but more are promised, possibly for free over the Internet. You begin a game on one of a variety of maps by selecting a specialization in marketing, manufacturing, or research. (You'll use all three of these areas, but the specialization provides a bonus.) Play unfolds on a large map of the world that is divided into regions. You and the competition are trying to secure a dominant share of the market in these regions, and the player who achieves a monopoly in computer manufacturing wins.

This is done in a number of ways. First, you research regions to determine what elements they like to see in their computers. (Do they prefer ease of use over reliability?) You control a single region at the beginning, and here you build your main offices and facilities. Five structures can be built and upgraded: research, production, marketing, sales, and recreational. Using sliders, you hire and fire people to work in these buildings, and they in turn produce whatever you need. Engineers, for instance, conduct research into a wide area of product improvement areas, like cost, production speed, operating system, keyboard, monitor, and so on. Marketers create either positive or negative marketing campaigns that you send into other regions.

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