STONKS-9800: Stock Market Simulator is the kind of title that tells you exactly what you are getting. You sit in front of an old PC in 1980s Tokyo, watch the charts and try to turn a bit of money into a fortune. What it does not tell you is how much of the game happens away from the charts, at the bar, at the poker table or on the phone with someone who swears that a certain stock is about to go up.

The game is made by TERNOX, a solo developer from Ukraine, and has been in Early Access since July 2023. Most written reviews date back to that launch, and the game has grown quite a bit since then, especially in 2026. So the question is: How does it hold up today?

Buy low, sell high

You start by creating your character and picking a few traits. Depending on what you choose, you might begin as a gambler, a debtor, someone with Yakuza ties or the lucky kid of rich parents, which changes your start quite a bit.

The whole game happens on one computer screen. There are a handful of tabs (Home, Charts, Exchange, Profile, Advisor, Company, etc.), a few stats like happiness, comfort and stress, and a steady stream of news and phone calls that keeps the days moving. Buy shares, watch the charts, sell when it feels right. Evenings and weekends are for going out and meeting people.

I found the UI very simple, and the start felt very intuitive to me. There is no tutorial yet, so my advice is to take your first few in-game months slowly and just click around. Amy, your assistant, chimes in with advice along the way.

Most things make sense once you have tried them.

Friends, liars and insider tips

What hooked me the most were the tips. Over time, you build up a network of people around the city, and some of them will let you in on what is about to happen to a company. What you do with that information is up to you.

The catch is that not every source is equally reliable. Roughly, these are the ones you will run into:

• Yoshiro, who sells you insider calls. His price goes up the richer you get, and he is not always right.
• Drunk rumors at the bar or on a night out with friends. Cheap, but very hit or miss.
• Friends and business contacts. The closer you are to them, the better their information gets.
• Amy, who offers paid analysis and some free advice every now and then, once the two of you get along well.
• The Yakuza. Usually the most reliable source of all, but it comes with strings attached (you will be paying them, one way or another).
• The Fortune Teller trait. Since the September 2026 update, it gives you a market hint every two to three months, and those hints are right about two times out of three.

Mind that acting on insider information is a risk in itself. Even a single tip can get you investigated, and the financial regulator keeps an eye on big, fast trades as well. Get caught and you are looking at an expensive lawyer or even some time in prison.

In my own run, I met Takeuchi Nobuyuki, a board member at Ninento, at the bar on Sunday, January 13, 1985, and we had a nice chat. At that point, I had ¥985 million, a bit under a billion yen. By Friday, September 27 of the same year, it was ¥4.43 billion.

Not every tip along the way was honest. Enough of them were.

That is what makes the tips so exciting. Either a tip turns into a big win, or you realize that the person you were chatting with simply lied to you, and both of those pulled me deeper into the game.

Hey boss

Amy is your assistant, and she is charming. She lives in the Advisor tab, calls you boss, gives you advice and sometimes tells you a little story from her own life that has nothing to do with stocks.

It sounds like a small thing. But one friendly face goes a long way in a game that is mostly numbers.

You can build up your friendship with her over time, which leads to outings together, a Christmas party and a whole wardrobe of outfits (a proper romance is planned for version 1.0). Since March 2026, she also has some company at the bar, where the bartender Sae chats with you, gives you horse racing tips and deals blackjack.

The 80s are calling

The atmosphere is absolutely bonkers. It is just a few sheets on a screen, and yet you really feel yourself go inside this world. The PC-98 style art, the CRT look (which you can adjust to your liking), the news messages and the calls from people you met last week all add up to a 1980s Tokyo that feels far more alive than it has any right to.

It gave me a similar vibe to VA-11 Hall-A, a game I absolutely loved. Different genre, same kind of feeling. I am clearly not the only one, either, as players often recommend VA-11 Hall-A to people looking for more games like STONKS-9800.

I also like the parody names a lot. You trade shares of Ninento, Kanon, Sani, Toshima or Mirubisi, and you can buy yourself a Homda to drive around in.

Music and seasons

The music is great overall. The soundtrack leans into retro city pop and fits the setting perfectly. It probably helps that the developer is a musician himself.

A really nice touch is that each season has its own color palette and its own music. The interface shifts its colors over the year, holidays come and go, and bad weather can even shut down the stock market for a while. You can actually feel the year passing.

After the closing bell

When the market is closed, there is plenty to keep you busy. There is pachinko, horse racing (with seasons, weather and horses with their own traits since March), blackjack, fishing, karaoke, golf, a claw machine, a little shoot ’em up and even a minigame for giving speeches at shareholder meetings.

The minigames are fun and make for a nice break from the charts. Or a quick way to lose what you just made.

Poker, for sure

My favorite is poker, for sure. You get invited to secret poker games, and the tournaments can pay out in shares and properties, not only cash. Reading the table and deciding whether to call, raise or fold is probably one of the most fun things you can do in STONKS-9800.

For reference, the September 2026 update (0.10.2.2) fixed several poker rule problems. Side pots now work properly when someone goes all-in, the minimum raise equals the previous bet, cards are revealed right away when everyone is all-in, and three-way draws split the pot instead of burning it. If the old rules kept you away from the tables, now is a good moment to sit down again.

Save, reload, repeat

If I had to point out one thing, it is that the game is very forgiving. When a tip turns out to be a lie or a gamble goes wrong, you can simply reload your save and roll the dice again. Since the save system was reworked in April 2026, every run even has room for 10 manual saves, 10 autosaves and 5 quick saves.

I knew I was gaming the system. It did not bother me.

At the end of the day, that is not what this game is about. STONKS-9800 cares far more about the people you meet and the little stories that come out of it than about punishing you for every bad call.

If you want your decisions to carry more weight, turn up the difficulty (since June 2026 you can even adjust investment success rates) and promise yourself not to reload. The game won’t stop you from reloading, so that part is up to you.

Still growing

STONKS-9800 is still in Early Access, but it is anything but abandoned. TERNOX puts out patches every few weeks, and 2026 alone brought Sae, blackjack and the bigger horse racing in March, a new save system in April, the “Family Ties” update in June and better Steam Deck support in August. Steam Workshop mod support has been in since December 2025.

“Family Ties” lets you get married (arranged marriage proposals from CEOs and board members included), meet the relatives of your friends and sometimes even land a board seat through your in-laws. It was also announced as the last big update before version 1.0.

The full release is planned for 2026, but there is no date yet, and the story mode is not in the game so far, so for now you play in either Free Mode or CEO Mode. Players seem to agree, with about 97% of the roughly 1,500 English reviews on Steam being positive.

Conclusion

STONKS-9800 takes something as dry as the stock market and turns it into a small, charming life in 1980s Tokyo, where every trade is really a question of who you trust. Not bad for a few sheets on a screen.

If you like relaxed management games, retro Japanese aesthetics or games like VA-11 Hall-A, you should give it a shot, and you do not need to know much about real stocks to enjoy it. Is it worth it? At around 10 bucks ($9.99 on Steam, about €9.75 in Europe), it absolutely is.

You can grab STONKS-9800 on Steam.