Lemonade Stand

A long, long time ago, when most of you who read this probably were not yet born, or just born, or going to kindergarten, when I finished school and went to university, I enrolled in my first computer course.

Part of the ritual was going to the university's shop, buying a single 5¼" floppy disk, which, taking everything into account, even at the reduced rate for students cost about as much as a zip disk nowadays, or even more, and taking it to the system administrator, who would then copy all the necessary data to it.

I still have this disk, and I hope I will be able to access it again some time. After all, it contains the first programs I have ever written. Besides that, it contains, of course BASIC, and, since we all need a break sometimes, two games.

One of these games was, I think, some sort of Spacewar clone; I never could figure it out, and when I tried playing it I always wound up with a rating of moron. The other game was Lemonade Stand.

It was a very simple game. At the beginning of each day, there was a weather forcast. Then, you would decide (I think) how many lemons and paper cups, how much sugar and ice you would buy (yes, I think you had to pay for the ice, too), how many cups of lemonade you would prepare and how much you would charge for one. If you suggested a dollar or more, the game would reply, "come on, be reasonable."

You couldn't go wrong with the paper cups, but the ice would melt at the end of the day, and the lemons would occasionally rot. Sometimes there would be roadworks. I can't remember if the price for ingredients was fixed or varied over time. There may have been special offers in paper cups occasionally.

After thirty days, the game was over. And the more money you had made, the better of course.

As I said, it was a simple game. You could see through it. Eventually you learned the ideal price for a cup of lemonade, and how many cups to prepare for each type of weather. And you soon learned that you could still sell four cups of lemonade when there were roadworks, for workers get thirsty, too.

Enter "Lemonade Stand" into a search engine, and you will be overwhelmed by the results. It is an easy game, not only to play, but also to code. There are countless online versions, some of them with all kinds of graphic enhancements. When I played it, it was strictly a text-based thing. But it is rather difficult to find out anything about the history of this game.

Finally I found an article, and a recent but authentic PC port with a good readme file, on Home of the Underdogs, and I know a little bit more.

Lemonade Stand was originally created by Bob Jamison of MECC. MECC stands for Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. It was founded in 1973. By 1979, its staff had written nearly 150 Apple ][ programs. Lemonade Stand must have been among them.

Soon afterwards, Charlie Kellner rewrote the program in Applesoft, and it was included for free with every Apple ][ sold, Copyright 1979, Apple Computer Inc. His version may have been simplified a bit; after all, this was not for education, just for fun. You can see a screenshot in a review of a later Apple IIGS shareware version by Eric Shepherd (who also ported Wolfenstein 3D to this platform).

Similar Games

Lemonade stand itself has been remade as Lemonade Tycoon for PalmOS. In general this type of turn-based, limited-time strategy has been quite popular in the seventies and eighties. Examples are Hamurabi and Dope Wars. A recent example is the German game Smugglers, which is set in a space theme.