Crude: Turmoil (2016) and the Fossil Fuel Industry

Looked at on a historical scale, the United States is a bouncing baby of a country. Many nations have a diary stretching back hundreds of years, if not more. If you live in China's Shaanxi Province, you can commune with local sculptures from the 3rd century BCE. The other month, excavators found the ruins of a Roman basilica under a London apartment block, but for the States, time doesn't begin until 1776. For the 18th and 19th-century Europeans whose homeland had been ruled by lords and kings for centuries, the US promised a historical reset, the chance to start fresh on acres of undeveloped soil. Urbanising and connecting the entire width of the States was such an undertaking that even by 1899, when London was getting its first subway trains, much of that west was still wild and ripe for resource extraction.

Of the resources that drove the States' 19th-century economic boom, the most famous are that of gold and oil, but shockingly there was a time when the sickly scent of oil didn't make American barons reach for their chequebooks. Generally, for a commodity to have aureate value, it must be useful and attainable. The blood of the Earth has uses going back to ancient Babylon. It's been a caulk, an insecticide, and an embalming fluid, yet it only attained its current applications and, therefore, value after German engineer Nikolaus Otto invented the first fully-featured petrol engine in 1876.^[1][2]

A number of advancements after that squeezed more horsepower from the accelerant. Yet, while indigenous Americans had dredged tar from viscous pits, the US only cemented its place as an oil spring when Edwin Drake drilled black gold in Pennsylvania in 1859. With oil useful and attainable, the modern industry began.^[2][3] By the turn of the century, the sector was in full swing, and a lot of that swinging was done in cowboy country. Texas became synonymous with dark gushing fountains after striking it big in Beaumont in 1901, but by 1903, the leading producer for the nation was California: the westest west there is.

Turmoil is an old-timey oil field management game from Gamious. It's an RTS where the fisticuffs are economic rather than militaristic. Based on what we've just learned, it only makes sense that Turmoil is located in a barn door American town and that it starts in 1899, as late as that might sound for a game with covered wagons in it. At least it takes place in 1899, according to its Steam page. I don't think an official year is given in-game. In each level of Turmoil, you must hire dowsers to find oil, draw pipes to syringe it from the Earth, and then purchase carts to run it to either Left Inc. or Right Inc.

Back in your one-horse town, you'll need every dollar to dilate your pipes, tend to your herds, bid on shares, and compete in auctions for more oil soil. You can't be caught slacking as three other tycoons are doing just the same, and only one can win. You win by being the first mogul to buy up 51% of shares in the town. If no one has a majority stake by the time the ville has been divvied up, the oligarch with the lowest percentage claim is eliminated. Their shares are torn to strips and thrown to the baying survivors. Another "51% percent" check is run with another possible elimination, and the process will repeat a second time if there still isn't a winner.

While other games let you take a second waltz with a failed mission, in Turmoil, you cannot redo a year of lousy revenue. All you can do is dry your tears and try better at the next dig site. Its real-time play lets you feel that this is an oil rush, and it includes an aspect of business that goes underexplored in the management genre: market competition. In Arcade Paradise, it's enough to host an entertainment complex people can call home; you don't have to worry about competing with the arcade down the street. In Dungeon Keeper, you can't go to recruit an imp and find it has been poached from you by a rival devil. Turmoil is a game about market dominance and, even more so, about the unique privileges you get in an industry when you are Smauging atop a pile of gold. Not everything in commerce is zero-sum, but some opportunities are one-of-a-kind, and if you have a unique product, who do you sell it to? The highest bidder, of course.

In Turmoil's town, as in all publicly-traded companies, only one investor, at most, can hold the majority of shares and, thus, control over the town or company. Whoever has the jangliest pockets may also get first dibs on the new merch. In this management game, shares are auctioned "Dutch" style. In a Dutch auction, the auctioneer proposes a sale at the maximum price then decrements the price until someone buys. Therefore, the most prosperous magnate has the first shot at reaping the clutch of shares. If I have $120,000 and you only have $60,000, I can close down the sale before you can imagine raising your paddle. Plots of land are also unique commodities, and there are only going to be so many with capacious basins of oil; another reason oil is highly valued. Whoever can bid the highest for one of those golden geese gets the egg.

Another seldom-tracked element of business rears its head in Turmoil: it matters not just what you sell but when you sell because the price of oil is always on the move. Games are, on the whole, right not to represent the fluctuation of market prices. If the player couldn't rely on items and upgrades having fixed costs:

• They may never be able to appreciate vendor junk or currency as rewards as they could be worth next to nothing when they take them back to town.
• They may be over or under-rewarded for their tenacity or for an application of skill.
• They may end up over or under-powered as potent items are too cheap or basic items too expensive.
• They may be unable to plan for the future.
• They may find the game too complex.

Turmoil makes swings in exchange value tractable by:

• Only giving us one commodity that undulates in value: oil.
• Only giving us two possible customers: Left and Right Inc.
• Allowing us to fix the minimum price at one or both plants most years. We can do this for a nominal fee.
• Showing the price of oil at Left and Right Inc. on permanently visible billboards.

Turmoil is right that oil is a notoriously volatile commodity. The list of reasons why reaches from my hand to the floor. There are discoveries of new oil fields, hiccups in supply lines, advancements in technologies' metabolisation of oil, and many more factors. Sometimes, the Sun shines on the industry, and sometimes, it ducks behind a cloud. It's the need to make hay when that big yellow ball shines that necessitates fossil fuel logistics with big bellies and Conga Eel veins.

You want to get the maximum product to buyers before the bubble bursts, so derricks that can extract at speed, more horsepower in the transport, more litres of oil per transport, they all mean faster profit and greater profit, as does storage. Without storage, you have to deliver your physical commodity straight from source to buyer. With storage, you can sit on it and wait for it to appreciate in value. For oil, storage can mean not just warehousing it but also keeping it in the ground. In Turmoil, turning oil taps on and off costs $150 a pop. In the real world, keeping fuel on standby has its own associated fees.

Turmoil may live a couple of centuries in the past, but the economic shockwaves of fuel storage are achingly relevant today. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and by April of that year, energy prices in my nation, the UK, had jumped 54%.^[4][5] In October, prices saw another rise of 27%.^[5] I've heard these increases frequently attributed to the Russia-Ukraine war and Russia's subsequent sealing of its westward gas lines. But if that's the sole culprit, why did prices begin rising prior to the war? And why did economically similar countries like France and Italy have lower energy prices when they were subject to the same restrictions?^[6] The answer is complicated.

The energy crisis in the United Kingdom was caused, in part, by increasing monopolisation of the energy market, lack of financial protections for consumers, and the outsized impact of natural gas prices on overall energy costs.^[6][7] An additional explanation, however, concerns fuel storage. The UK is highly reliant on natural gas compared to the rest of the EU, but also dismantled its gas containers.^[6] One gas storage facility that accounted for 70% of UK supplies was shut down in 2017, largely due to the fees associated with running it.^[8]

When Putin plugged the fossil fuel lines to Europe, Europe had a better chance at riding out the market shock because they had gas silos to fall back on. The UK, having sworn off storage, just had to choke down the extortionate price gas every time it needed to heat meals and homes because it had no reserves to tide it over.^[6] The country could have taken a lesson from Turmoil, which knows that business is not just about buying low and selling high. It's about having the facilities to execute on those intentions when the starting pistol sounds.

1899 is a long time ago. You can no longer roll up your stagecoach outside a drinking hole and just start drilling assets. By the late 1880s, John D. Rockerfeller's General Oil had taken control of 90% of the refineries in the US, and since then, the industry has been an old boys' club. This is the current of most production sectors: you start with a lot of little minnows who lay the seabed, and once they've done their part, some bass gobble them up and monopolise the space. Turmoil harkens back to a bygone era of oil without centralised power, providing us something I think we all long for: a time when oil was still innocent. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Nikolaus Otto by Encyclopedia Britannica Editors (January 25, 2025), Britannica.
2. History of Oil: Regions and Uses of Petroleum in the Classical and Medieval Periods (Definition) by Jonathan Craig (September 29, 2020), Springer Nature.
3. Titusville, Pennsylvania 1896. (Summary) (Archived) by World Digital Library Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed April 25, 2025), Library of Congress.
4. Russia-Ukraine War by Michael Ray (April 25, 2025), Britannica.
5. Domestic energy prices by Paul Bolton and Jona Stewart (December 10, 2024), House of Commons Library.
6. Why UK energy prices are rising much faster than in Europe by Anna Cooban (August 19, 2022), CNN.
7. Electricity prices dictated by gas producers who provide less than half of UK electricity by UCL Staff (September 6, 2022), University College London.
8. Why UK gas storage levels are 'concerningly low' by Nik Martin (January 16, 2025), Deutsche Welle.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.