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.
The Contract
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.
Find the Oil
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.
Build the Operation
Striking oil is only the beginning. To turn crude into income you build out a full vertically-integrated operation:
Pumps — Install pumps on your drilled wells to extract crude every year. Each carries an annual maintenance bill whether the market is good or bad.
Refineries — Raw crude is cheap; refined product is where the money is. Build refineries to process crude into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, heavy oil, and additives. Configure each refinery's primary output and set production targets to match the market.
Blending — Combine your refined stock into high-value premium products — premium gasoline and jet fuel — that command the best prices on the market.
Storage — Tanks have limits. Expand your storage capacity so a good production year doesn't overflow and spill profit onto the ground.
Play the Market
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.
Survive the Unexpected
The oil business doesn't run smoothly. Random annual events keep every run unpredictable and force you to keep a cash cushion:
Oil booms and recessions swing market prices up or down by large margins.
Labor strikes cut your pumps to half output for the year.
Refinery outages knock a plant offline when you were counting on it.
Pipeline bursts destroy a chunk of your stored product.
Environmental fines take a bite out of your cash reserves.
Gushers suddenly boost a well's reserves, and energy subsidies and tax rebates throw you the occasional lifeline.
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.
Goals and Achievements
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.
Features
Authentic 1980s text-terminal interface with a CRT aesthetic — fully keyboard-driven
Choose your own contract length, from 20 to 100 years
Procedurally generated 10x10 oil field — every game's geology is different
Scan, drill, and pump management with finite, depleting reserves
Multi-stage production chain: crude refining, byproducts, and premium blending
Eight commodities with an independent, simulated market that booms and crashes
Annual random events that reward planning and punish overextension
Year-over-year company tracking and detailed end-of-year reports
Sixteen achievements spanning early milestones, scale, wealth, and playstyle
Completely free to play
Sign the contract. Drill the field. Beat the market. Or go broke trying.
