How I Made 99 Trillion Dollars in One Day

The image you see above is a screenshot of my bank in the ridiculously silly but highly addictive MySpace game Mafia Wars.

The game is a simple old-school text-based game. You do “Jobs” consisting of bank robberies, muggings, corner store hold-ups, and more. The jobs earn you money and experience points, which you spend on weapons to defeat your enemies easier, or properties to earn you more money.

Along with earning money and experience points, you can also “Fight” other players via the “FIGHT!” menu or the “Hitlist” which contains users that others have put a “hit” on for a certain amount of cash.

The Hitlist is pretty hard to get at times, since the names pop up only for a few seconds before someone else takes them out and wins the bounty, anywhere from $10k to much, much higher. It’s a simple skill of refreshing the list constantly and hoping that you are the one that gets the click when you attack.

My girlfriend and I got pretty addicted to the game last week, and started checking our status multiple times throughout the day. The usual routine when we got home was that I would start cooking dinner while she checked our pages, doing jobs and hits.

She checked her page, and then logged onto mine. On a whim she started attacking people on the hitlist, and she noticed one player had a $99 trillion dollar hit out on them. $99,999,999,999,999. She never expected to win, but she did.

From the living room I hear “OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD”, which initially brought concern, then she told me what happened. I had to have her tell me three times, and then see the computer screen myself before I believed it.

As instantly happy as I was, a moment later I was disappointed. Why? Because earning all that money ruined the game for me. The whole objective is to earn your way up to buying expensive properties to make the most amount of money you can. I now have no need to make any more money, or buy any more properties (since I immediately went and bought 35 casinos).

So to try to get it back to normal, or at least a somewhat state of normalcy, I’ve been putting “hits” on random people that have attacked me, for about 10 trillion dollars a piece. I’ve managed to get my bank from $99 trillion to the amount you see above, $29.9 trillion.

I’m trying to figure out a way to give her the money somehow since the game doesn’t allow player trading. I’m thinking of putting up a hit on someone else and have her refresh the same time as I submit the hit, but who knows.

Anyone want some fake Mafia money?