Apologies for the tardiness of this week’s Friday Flashback! Well, Saturday Flashback now. This week we’ll look at one of the deepest and most obscure empire-building sims of the 90′s. You don’t raise armies or build a civilization or craft a city in this game. You build a financial empire. This is Trevor Chan’s Capitalism.

In Capitalism, you build and shape a business into whatever you want. You want to own a chain of department stores? Go for it. Want to build cars? Go ahead. Want to mine gold? Start digging. The choices are amazingly broad, and you can insert yourself anywhere in the supply chain of any product, whether you want to process raw materials or sell other companies’ wares to consumers.

On the surface, the game looks and plays a lot like Sim City. You navigate a large overworld map that’s either pre-made and based off of a specific region, like North America, or randomly generated. You can build several different facilities all over the world, including department stores, farms, mines, research labs, and factories. Each building serves a specific purpose depending on your business plan and where you’re building. Department stores are great for selling premade products, and work best in large cities. Mines need to be built on specific resource points, and can provide anything from gold to sulfur to silica. Farms work best in rural areas, and their ideal locations vary depending on the climate and what crops you want to grow.

Once you construct a building, you have to set it up. Each facility has nine spaces for different modules, like warehouse space, retail space, factory floors, and shipping centers. These modules have to be strung together in a pseudo-puzzle-minigame for buildings to get anything done. They let you customize the activity of each building, so you can make sure your factories build and ship computer chips, your stores track and sell cars, and your farms raise and slaughter cattle.

Capitalism is a strange and abstract economics simulator that not everyone will get. Still, it tickles that strange part of the brain that makes games like Sim City and Civilization so popular. It’s not quite as epic as Will Wright or Sid Meier’s games, but it’s very deep and rewarding to anyone who’s willing to put some time into it.

If you want to give Capitalism a try, you can buy the enhanced version of the original game, Capitalism Plus, for $6 from GOG.com. The game’s isometric, Sim City 2000-like sequel, Capitalism 2, is also available on the site for $10.