Chances are that, unless you happened to read my personal GOTY pick from 2023 or just have generally excellent taste in videogames, you’re not too familiar with Stonks-9800 (which you can find on Steam). That’s a shame, because the early access stock-trading sim set in the salad days of ’80s Japan is an absolute banger—oozing style and with a delicious platter of gameplay loops that will keep your eyes fixed on its line graphs for days, weeks, months at a time.
Stonks-9800 is excellent, relatively obscure, and comes from a solo dev who doesn’t have the legal resources of a major publisher, which might go some way to explaining why its assets, characters, and name have been purloined by crypto bros claiming affiliation with the SPX6900 coin. Their website plasters itself in art and assets taken from the game and even the Stonks-9800 name itself: “Stonks‑9800 Gave Birth to SPX6900,” claims the site, falsely.
I say “falsely” because, well, it’s false. For all its posturing as a successor and tribute to Stonks-9800, this site and its coin have nothing to do with the game beyond the assets it’s ripped. To add to the brazenness, I don’t think it truly has anything to do with the actual SPX6900 coin—the webpage’s links take you to price-tracking pages for a far more obscure and less valuable coin called, you guessed it, STONKS9800.
“Does anyone know how to take this to court or something like that?” asked Stonks-9800’s true developer, Ternox, on X when they became aware of the coin, “I have nothing to do with this, and my game has been used for some kind of crypto scam… I feel terrible because of this.”
I’ve reached out to Ternox to ask if they’ve made any progress taking legal action against the memecoin, but their own prognosis didn’t look great: “I don’t think I can figure this out, unfortunately,” said Ternox in a (machine-translated) follow-up tweet.
Which is a shame, because the site is truly egregious in the way it claims lineage from Ternox’s game: “SPX6900 is the continuation of [Stonks-9800’s] spirit, a living token inspired by the design language, tone, and irony of Stonks‑9800. Where the game offered fiction, the coin became belief. SPX is for the waifu traders, the chart cultists, and the faithful. A new market built on aesthetics and conviction,” reads its “manifesto.”
To add insult to injury, and in yet another in the mountain of indictments of the “Global Town Square” that X dot com purports to be, Ternox has been flooded by—likely AI—replies from X accounts assuring them that having their whole game looted by anonymous crypto nonsense is actually incredible publicity.
“Great promo for your game on the flip side,” assures one questionably human account, “Thousands if not millions of people will be aware of it more.” Another account who is likely actually a data blip on a water-guzzling server farm agrees: “Your game will become huge because of this mate.”
Which really is a picture of the internet we’ve got for ourselves—something genuinely great created by humans finding itself subverted and co-opted by an endless swarm of burrowing, synthetic ticks who create and produce nothing. Never before has the old line, that capital lives by sucking on the lifeblood of living labour, felt more appropriate.
The STONKS9800 coin currently has a market cap of around $350,000.
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