Oiligarchy

Oiligarchy is a web game made by La Molle Industria. You can play it here.

The game has you playing as the CEO of an oil company immediately after World War II. Your have one goal: maximize your profits by selling oil to America, or else your board of directors will have you fired. To accomplish this goal, you have to keep America hooked on oil to fuel its economy, which means greasing the palms of politicians to make them pass bills friendly to your business and unfriendly to the environmental movement. Eventually, you can get America to invade other countries for their oil, have anti-terror legislation passed to silence environmentalists and social justice advocates, bribe Third World dictatorships to drive out the tribesmen who stand in your way, and use other nefarious means to get as much oil as humanly possible.

But eventually, that oil is going to run out...

As you may have guessed by now, this game takes a very particular view of the oil industry. At the same time, however, what other game affords you the opportunity to play as a card-carrying Captain Planet and the Planeteers villain, cackling madly at your computer while poisoning lakes and killing caribou?


 * Broken Aesop
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: That'd be you.
 * Crapsack World: Keep America hooked on oil, and it will slide deeper and deeper into this, eventually culminating in World War III.
 * Cruelty Is the Only Option: The game forces you to be an absolutely evil jackass. When the Ogoni start protesting and blocking your oil fields, can you find a peaceful solution? No, your only option is to bribe the government to Kill'Em All. And you can't invest in Iraq without manipulating the US government into invading them. And let's not even get into the part about the environment.
 * Day of the Jackboot: You can organize and fund one in Venezuela if you manage to corrupt the U.S. president.
 * Eagle Land: Type 1 if you don't have the government in your pocket, and Type 2 if you do.
 * Failure Is the Only Option: Of the four endings, one involves you getting fired and another one involves the end of the world (and text saying "you spend your last days in darkness, pondering your role in creating this mess"). The third involves a happy ending for everyone except the Villain Protagonist player -- an ending in which reduced reliance on fossil fuels renders the oil industry less important. The last involves keeping the western world addicted to oil but not actually supplying it, crashing the GDP so hard that modern civilization slowly collapses due to a permanently ruined economy. It does not appear to be possible to make the game last forever without eventually running into one of these endings.
 * There are some more minor examples as well. If you do offshore drilling in Alaska, there will be a spill no matter what you do, and you will get fined for it no matter how much you corrupted the politicians. If you drill anywhere in Nigeria, the pigs and fish will die (whether or not you ignore environmental regulation), the people will start demonstrating, and the Ogoni will eventually turn violent (whether or not you get the government to attack them first). Once Iraq is invaded, there is no way to prevent an insurgency from beginning.
 * From Nobody to Nightmare: Your oil company starts off as a small post-World War II business venture and goes to... well... an oiligarchy that keeps the entire world oppressed, feeding it untold amounts of money to pay for oil obtained through everything from human rights abuses to
 * Guide Dang It: The Farewell West ending. It can be reached (although the creators believed otherwise when they first discovered the issues in obtaining it), but one can generally only do so by
 * Global Warming: Shows up around the midpoint of the game. It doesn't really affect the gameplay, though.
 * Green Aesop: If we don't stop relying on oil to run our society, then we will a) start nuking each other for oil, or b).
 * A subtle one regarding Alaskan oil drilling: once you explore for oil up there, you find that there isn't nearly as much as there is in places like Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq. Perhaps it's the developers' way of saying that "drill baby drill" won't solve our oil problems?
 * Historical Hero Upgrade: Scarily enough, Saddam Hussein, by virtue that he will neeever invade Kuwait unless you push him to by persuading the Kuwaitis to drill illegally. The fact that this echoes Baathist propaganda justifying the truly nightmarish invasion and occupation of a defenseless neighbor is....not addressed.
 * : Late in the game, once oil starts running low,
 * Multiple Endings: In the "best" ending, the US breaks its oil addiction and converts to clean energy, and you go out of business. In another, as the world runs out of oil, World War III breaks out for the last remaining reserves, and you hide in your bunker to ride it out. In yet another, all of Western civilization collapses due to the economic strife you caused and because you can no longer supply enough oil to keep it running. Finally, you can simply be fired before reaching Peak Oil if you fail to bring in profits.
 * No Party Given: The two political parties are referred to as the Donkeys and the Elephants, with no real difference between them. They will both happily pass oil-friendly bills so long as you fill their pockets with oil money.
 * No Party Like a Donner Party: One of the consequences of peak oil is that, once food distribution networks break down, people will turn to cannibalism for sustenance.
 * Sleazy Politician: Bribing Congress to pass oil-friendly, anti-environmental bills is a major part of the game, and the only real way to progress past 2030 without being made obsolete by green energy.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: See Cruelty Is The Only Option, above.
 * Villain Protagonist : You, the "protagonist of the petroleum era."
 * The War on Terror: You can get the United States to invade Iraq and open it up for oil exploitation, as well as pass things like the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Advisory System in order to keep the people scared.
 * We Have Reserves: Mercenaries cost only $50. This is nothing compared to the profits you make each year, so you can just throw away their lives carelessly - they're easy to replace.