Uh oh.

Japanese arcade flyer for the 1984 Sega game:

Bank Panic / バンクパニック

Flyer by Sega

An early and quite complex Sega title, Bank Panic saw ports to the SG-1000 and Sega Master System. Dinamic Software also released a clone/copy of the game on some home computers known as West Bank.

We have had this argument before. A disaster develops: a natural disaster like Katrina, a financial and economic disaster like the Great Depression, or most recently, a health disaster like the coronavirus pandemic. Soon people who see goverment as a source of beneficent compassion, not to mention possessor of unmatched resources, begin to badger and crow. “See? Without government, we cannot act…

Boardroom talk, New York City, 2008

The Great Recession in 2007 – 2009 was a bank panic. Wave upon wave of fraud became so rampant among bankers, they gradually and then completely lost confidence in each other. They also – rightly – lost confidence in their assets. The collapse we saw resulted from bankers making a run on each other’s institutions. In the situation they had created, panic was a rational response.

First, they tried…

Loss of Savings, Not Size of Debt, Causes Bank Panic

[Caption/Credit for above photo: Bank Panic–A.D. 1907 (courtesy Google Images)] The Associated Press recently published an article entitled “The Latest:  Will Greek banks have all their money next week?”  That headline hints at the danger in fractional reserve banking. As I understand it, in the US, the fractional reserve ratio is about 10:1 meaning that out of every ten dollars deposited into…

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Wow. I'd COMPLETELY forgotten about "Bank Panic." This fucking game was supertits. 

One joystick. Left, middle & right buttons. So simple. So addictive.

And hearing this guy's review, I regret how much I didn't actually know about this game, even though I may have played it hundreds of times back in the day.

• Those little lines over the doors symbolized queueing customers? • The backs of customers showed which doors bandits would be? • "Unfair" posters meant you could've waited & gotten more money? Well, I'm glad I'm finding this out some 30 years later. A time when we can play WAY more complicated games on our phones, yet there's not a single arcade around, much less one with "Bank Panic" in it.

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