Rewind: Jones in the Fast Lane

Challenging Jones added an extra layer of depth to the game.

Back in the golden age of Sierra On-Line, many were the games the company published, most of them fitting the graphic adventure genre. Names such as King’s Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry still echo fondly in our memories. Sierra, however, published some notable exceptions to the genre, one of them being the life simulation Jones in the Fast Lane. The game was published in 1991, at a time when VGA graphics were the state of the art and few of the PC owners were lucky enough to have a sound card.

Jones is a red-haired bloke with a questionable taste in clothing. Not much else is known about this character, except that, according to the game manual, he has a wife and two kids who “have gone without Nintendos”. The family has sacrificed itself (Jones coded the game by candlelight, apparently) so that you could have a game to play. That story was made up to sensitise the audience against piracy. Since there was barely any copy protection at the time, those sensibilisation campaigns were fairly common.

You had better get a job early in the game, otherwise the whole point is missed.

The main purpose of the game is to succeed in life, and by that we mean $ucceed. You’ll have to reach certain goals to win the game. Goal points are set by the player at the start of the game in four areas: money, happiness, education and career. Complete all the goals and the game is won. There’s no romance, kids or any kind of social interaction involved, making the game purely based on grinding your way to the top. Money means earning money: the more you have, the more points you’ll get. Happiness points are obtained by buying stuff for your character such as appliances, books, etc. Graduate at the local university to gain education points (there are tons of degrees available) and get the best job to ace career points.

There's a choice of four different avatars.

You can play with up to 4 players turn-based and/or against the main character Jones. Each turn takes an in-game week to complete an you get to choose how to best spend your time. Spend too much time working and you may end up with extreme fatigue, forget to feed your character and next turn you are fined with less time to play. Should you spend the week studying to get a better job or working to increase your assets? Choices like these introduce a strategy element to the gameplay and are made so that it plays differently every time. There are also chance occurrences to spice things up a bit. These include getting robbed by Wild Willy at the bank or the supermarket, winning the lottery, and sudden changes in inflation/deflation. There are some minor customisation aspects to the game, some appliances when bought appear at your home, and your character changes clothes when you get them new ones. Some jobs even prevent you from working if you look too casual, so you’d better have an extra buck for that fancy new dress or outfit.

Weekends mark the transition between player turns.

The graphics were awesome for the time, because it featured real digitised images for the characters, a thing rarely seen in other games. Although by today’s standards the game is very short-spanned, it was very compelling and offered hours of entertainment. There was a second, improved version of the game released in 1992 in CD-ROM format. It added (cough!…*terrible*… cough!) voice acting and some minor graphical enhancements. By enhancements we mean there were different pictures for the business employees, some of them looked way more artificial than the ones in the original game. Overall it was a very innovative and entertaining piece of software, and certainly had its role in helping life simulation evolve.

The game can be found for free in some abandonware pages. There are also unofficial versions that some users created. A flash version can be found here, and there’s this free app at the Google Play store for Android users.