Side Note

Play Toilet Tycoon, the game where you literally put your economy in the toilet

Toilet Tycoon’s extremely gross front cover

Toilet Tycoon’s extremely gross front cover

Despite its inherent instability, the sheer amount of wild shit on the Internet Archive never ceases to amaze me. This morning I went on there and discovered that yesterday, some brave soul decided to upload the 2006 PC game Toilet Tycoon — which, as you suspect, is just like Rollercoaster Tycoon but for public toilets — to the Internet Archive’s CD-ROM Software Library collection (the same user, @rickschoenkap, also just uploaded the video game adaptation of Shrek 2, so they are truly doing the lord’s work).

Toilet Tycoon’s slightly less gross back cover

Toilet Tycoon’s slightly less gross back cover

Translated from the Dutch, the game’s description asks the player, “How would you like to be in a line of business that’s totally crisis-proof? You can see for yourself that money doesn’t stink as a MANAGER of pay toilets?” The player begins Toilet Tycoon as a humble pay-toilet entrepreneur, slowly working their way up from providing customers with regular toilets to offering them “golden bowls, silk toilet tissue, and seats with handy cup holders.”

I’d never heard of Toilet Tycoon before today, and after a cursory googling it’s not entirely clear whether this came out in America or if this was just a European. Also, as far as I can tell, though the game is in Dutch it doesn’t really matter because no one can tell what the point of it is anyway. Regardless, you can download it here.

After nearly 12 years, this game is still a perfect metaphor for capitalism.

Correction: Shortly after this post’s publication, the Twitter user @Vetarnias pointed out that the language on the cover of Toilet Tycoon — which we had originally identified as German — was, in fact, Dutch. We regret the error and have updated the post.