Hamurabi (video game)

Last updated

Hamurabi
Hamurabi Screenshot.png
Screenshot of gameplay
Designer(s) Doug Dyment
Platform(s) PDP-8, personal computer
Release
  • 1968 (FOCAL)
  • 1973 (BASIC)
Genre(s) Strategy game, text-based game
Mode(s) Single-player

Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language.

Contents

The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. The Sumer Game was inspired by The Sumerian Game , a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children, developed from 1964 to 1966 by designer and elementary school teacher Mabel Addis and IBM programmer William McKay.

Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL language, but around 1971 David H. Ahl ported it to DEC BASIC and in 1973 published it in 101 BASIC Computer Games. This was later republished in Microsoft BASIC form in 1978's BASIC Computer Games . His expanded version of the game, titled Hamurabi, quickly became the more prominent version due to the popularity of both the book and the programming language. Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is also an antecedent to the city-building genre.

Gameplay

Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game centered on resource management in which the player, identified in the text as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, enters numbers in response to questions posed by the game. The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain. These are managed over the course of ten rounds, each of which represents a year. Each person can farm a set amount of land, which produces grain. Grain, in turn, can be used to feed people, who otherwise die the following round, or planted for the following year's crop. The player may also buy or sell land to their neighbors each turn in exchange for grain. Each round begins with an adviser stating "Hamurabi: I beg to report to you" the current status of the city, including the prior year's harvest and change in population, followed by a series of questions as to how many bushels of grain to spend on land, seeds, and feeding the people. [1] [2]

The game's variations are driven by random numbers: the price of land is randomly decided each round from between 17 and 26 bushels per acre, the amount of bushels generated each round is randomly decided, random amounts of bushels are eaten by rats, and new people come to the city each year in random amounts. Each year also presents the possibility of a plague reducing the population by half. The game ends after ten rounds, or earlier if the entire population of the city dies or at least 45 percent of the people starve in a single round. The end-game appraisal, added in the 1973 version of the game, compares the player to historical rulers—such as "Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV." [1]

Development

In 1962, Westchester County, New York and IBM began studying the use of computers in education, using a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to produce "economic games" for sixth-grade students. [3] [4] One, The Sumerian Game (1964), was a model of ancient Sumerian civilization, [3] written and designed by elementary-school teacher Mabel Addis and programmed by William McKay of IBM. The early mainframe game, set in 3500 B.C., has players act as rulers of the city of Lagash. In 1966 Addis revised the game and interspersed it with cutscenes of taped audio lectures and slide projector images. [3] [5]

An original DEC PDP-8 minicomputer PDP-8.jpg
An original DEC PDP-8 minicomputer

In 1968, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Richard Merrill invented the FOCAL programming language. Fellow employee Doug Dyment heard a description of The Sumerian Game after a talk at the University of Alberta, and as an early program for the language developed King of Sumeria, programming it for a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. [6] The game is sometimes erroneously attributed to Merrill in 1969, but 1969 and 1973 program catalogs by the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS) list Dyment as the original developer, though they also renamed it to The Sumer Game. [5] [6] [7]

The game was originally described as: "This is a simulation program/game which will run on a minimal PDP-8 system. The economy of a Sumerian city in the year 3000 B. C. is simulated in the fashion of a modern-day 'business game.'" [6] "Business games" were text-based business management simulation games, such as The Management Game, which was used in business schools such as at Carnegie Mellon University since at least 1958. [8] By 1961, there were over 89 different business and economic simulation games in use, with various graphical capabilities. [9] The final game was, according to Dyment, "the largest piece of FOCAL-8 code that could fit in a 4K machine: there was literally not room for a single extra character". As a result, the game uses shortened forms for much of the text, including spelling the player-controlled ruler, changed from Luduga to the Babylonian king Hammurabi, as "Hamurabi". [5]

Multiple versions of The Sumer Game were created. Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half the people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives". [10] The 1973 DECUS catalog additionally lists a French-language version by Belgians J. F. Champarnaud and F. H. Bostem for the FOCAL-69 version of the language, [11] and a 1978 catalog adds Ruben by James R. B. Howard II and Jimmie B. Fletcher, "a modification of the 'King of Sumeria' game" with additional features. [12] The French version of the game, however, despite being listed as "Sumer (French)", described itself not as a translation of the original game, but as a translation of "Hamurabi (The Sumer Game)", due to another version of the game which was already released by then. [11]

In 1970, DEC employee David H. Ahl was working in the educational sales department and found that customers outside DEC's Boston-area home were uninterested in using FOCAL. He hired a Brooklyn programmer to write a version of BASIC for the PDP-8. Around 1971, he ported a version of The Sumer Game to BASIC and published it in DEC's educational newsletter, Edu. [13] The new version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal. [1] Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was widely available on many platforms and the new version was soon found on many of them. In 1973 he re-published the game as part of the collection in 101 BASIC Computer Games , which became a best-seller with over 10,000 copies sold. [13] [14]

In 1975 the Altair 8800 was released, and soon after, Altair BASIC. The microcomputer revolution followed, and BASIC was the standard language on these machines. Ahl re-published his book once again, this time under the title BASIC Computer Games, which became the best selling computer book of all time, with well over a million copies sold. [14] The popularity of both the book and the programming language itself meant that Ahl's version of the game became the more widely known version over the relatively obscure original, as evidenced by the 1973 French FOCAL version considering "Hamurabi" to be the more prominent name. [5] [11]

BASIC Computer Games noted that the game was a modification of a game "written in FOCAL at DEC", but listed the author as "unknown". The 1978 edition of the book, which was the first million-selling computer book, noted that the game's name was intended to be "Hammurabi", but not only was one "m" dropped in the file name to fit in an eight-character limit, but Ahl consistently misspelled the name inside of the game, following Dyment's spelling, leading to the generally accepted name of the game to be Hamurabi. [1] [5]

Legacy

In addition to the multiple versions of Hamurabi, several simulation games have been created as expansions of the core game. These include Kingdom by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros, written for mainframe computers in 1972 and in BASIC in 1975, which was then expanded to Dukedom (1976). [15] [16] Other derivations include King, a.k.a. Pollution Game (1975) by James A. Storer, [17] and Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank; Santa Paravia added the concept of city building management to the basic structure of Hamurabi, making it an antecedent to the city-building genre as well as an early strategy game. [18] A conversion of this game was included on the BBC Micro's Welcome Tape and Welcome Disc as Yellow River Kingdom (1981). [19] Hamurabi inspired more complicated economic simulation games; M.U.L.E. (1983) and Anacreon (1987) are two games that critics mentioned as being similar to Hamurabi. [20] [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASIC</span> Family of programming languages

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PDP-8</span> Minicomputer product line

The PDP-8 is a family of 12-bit minicomputers that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first commercially successful minicomputer, with over 50,000 units being sold over the model's lifetime. Its basic design follows the pioneering LINC but has a smaller instruction set, which is an expanded version of the PDP-5 instruction set. Similar machines from DEC are the PDP-12 which is a modernized version of the PDP-8 and LINC concepts, and the PDP-14 industrial controller system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lunar Lander (video game genre)</span> Moon landing simulation games

Lunar Lander is a genre of video games loosely based on the 1969 landing of the Apollo Lunar Module on the Moon. In Lunar Lander games, players control a spacecraft as it falls toward the surface of the Moon or other astronomical body, using thrusters to slow the ship's descent and control its horizontal motion to reach a safe landing area. Crashing into obstacles, hitting the surface at too high a velocity, or running out of fuel all result in failure. In some games in the genre, the ship's orientation must be adjusted as well as its horizontal and vertical velocities.

TOPS-10 System is a discontinued operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for the PDP-10 mainframe computer family. Launched in 1967, TOPS-10 evolved from the earlier "Monitor" software for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 computers; this was renamed to TOPS-10 in 1970.

<i>Star Trek</i> (1971 video game) 1971 video game

Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series (1966–69) and originally released in 1971. In the game, the player commands the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. The player travels through the 64 quadrants of the galaxy to attack enemy ships with phasers and photon torpedoes in turn-based battles and refuel at starbases. The goal is to eliminate all enemies within a random time limit.

FOCAL is an interactive interpreted programming language based on JOSS and mostly used on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series machines.

Chase is a turn-based computer game in which players are tasked with escaping from robots programmed to pursue and kill them. The player attempts to destroy the robots by moving in such a way that the robots collide with each other or other obstacles. The basic concept has been part of games stretching into the 1970s, and is among the earliest of the "standards" for microcomputer platforms. Many variations exist, the most notable being the home computer-based Escape! and Zombies, Daleks on MacOS and robots on Unix.

<i>Creative Computing</i> (magazine) Periodical literature

Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented Byte.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DECUS</span> Independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation

The Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) was an independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The Connect User Group Community, formed from the consolidation in May, 2008 of DECUS, Encompass, HP-Interex, and ITUG is the Hewlett-Packard’s largest user community, representing more than 50,000 participants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bulls and Cows</span> Code-breaking game

Bulls and Cows is a code-breaking mind or paper and pencil game for two or more players. The game is played in turns by two opponents who aim to decipher the other's secret code by trial and error.

<i>Empire</i> (1977 video game) Wargame

Empire is a 1977 turn-based wargame with simple rules. The game was conceived by Walter Bright starting in 1971, based on various war movies and board games, notably Battle of Britain and Risk. The game was ported to many platforms in the 1970s and 1980s. Several commercial versions were also released, often adding basic graphics to the originally text-based user interface. The basic gameplay is strongly reminiscent of several later games, notably Civilization, which was partly inspired by Empire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David H. Ahl</span> American author

David H. Ahl is an American author who is the founder of Creative Computing magazine. He is also the author of many how-to books, including BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell more than a million copies.

<i>Starfleet Orion</i> 1978 video game

Starfleet Orion is a 1978 science fiction strategy game written and published by Automated Simulations. It appears to be the first space-themed strategy game sold for microcomputer systems. The game was originally written in BASIC for the Commodore PET, but later ported to other early home computer platforms including the TRS-80 and Apple II. The game was something of a success, leading to a string of successes for the company, notably the major hit Temple of Apshai.

TSS/8 is a discontinued time-sharing operating system co-written by Don Witcraft and John Everett at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1967. DEC also referred to it as Timeshared-8 and later the EduSystem 50.

The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s. During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.

<i>BASIC Computer Games</i>

BASIC Computer Games is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well. Among its better-known games are Hamurabi and Super Star Trek.

<i>Mugwump</i> (video game) 1973 video game

Mugwump is an early video game where the user is tasked with finding "Mugwumps" randomly hidden on a 10×10 grid. It is a text-based game written in BASIC. It was initially written for the PDP-10 and later HP2000.

Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale processes. Before personal computers, first termed microcomputers, became widely available to the general public in the 1970s, the computing industry was composed of mainframe computers and the relatively smaller and cheaper minicomputer variant. During the mid to late 1960s, many early video games were programmed on these computers. Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on. While many of these games were lost as older computers were discontinued, some of them were ported to high-level computer languages like BASIC, had expanded versions later released for personal computers, or were recreated for bulletin board systems years later, thus influencing future games and developers.

<i>The Sumerian Game</i> 1964 video game

The Sumerian Game is an early text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was developed as part of a joint research project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM in 1964–1966 for investigation of the use of computer-based simulations in schools. It was designed by Mabel Addis, then a fourth-grade teacher, and programmed by William McKay for the IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer. The first version of the game was played by a group of 30 sixth-grade students in 1964, and a revised version featuring refocused gameplay and added narrative and audiovisual elements was played by a second group of students in 1966.

BASIC-8, is a BASIC programming language for the Digital Equipment (DEC) PDP-8 series minicomputers. It was the first BASIC dialect released by the company, and its success led DEC to produce new BASICs for its future machines, notably BASIC-PLUS for the PDP-11 series. DEC's adoption of BASIC cemented the use of the language as the standard educational and utility programming language of its era, which combined with its small system requirements, made BASIC the major language during the launch of microcomputers in the mid-1970s.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Ahl, David (November 1978). BASIC Computer Games (2nd ed.). Workman Publishing. pp.  78–79. ISBN   978-0-89480-052-8. (archive)
  2. Rosenberg, Scott (2007). Dreaming in Code . Crown Publishing Group. pp. 1–2. ISBN   978-1-4000-8246-9. (archive)
  3. 1 2 3 Wing, Richard L. (June 1967). The Production and Evaluation of Three Computer-based Economics Games for the Sixth Grade: Final Report (Report). Westchester County Board of Cooperative Educational Services. pp. 1, 13–15. ED014227.
  4. Wing, Richard L. (1966). "Two Computer-Based Economics Games for Sixth Graders". American Behavioral Scientist . 10 (3): 31–35. doi:10.1177/000276426601000306. ISSN   0002-7642. S2CID   146420388.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Willaert, Kate (2019-09-09). "The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Video Game You've Never Heard Of". A Critical Hit. Retrieved 2019-09-10.
  6. 1 2 3 "DECUS Program Library Catalog for PDP-8, FOCAL8" (PDF). Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. July 1973. p. F-1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-02-07. Retrieved 2016-02-04.
  7. Winterhalter, Ryan (2010-12-15). "Game Mechanics That Are Older Than You Think". 1UP.com . Ziff Davis. Archived from the original on 2016-02-07. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  8. Smith, Alexander (2019-11-27). They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry. Vol. 1: 1971 – 1982. CRC Press. p. 27. ISBN   978-1-138-38990-8.
  9. Greenlaw, Paul S.; Herron, Lowell W.; Rawdon, Richard H. (1962). Business simulation in industrial and university education . Prentice Hall.
  10. 1 2 Pournelle, Jerry (January 1989). "To the Stars". Byte . Vol. 14, no. 1. McGraw-Hill. pp. 109–124.
  11. 1 2 3 "DECUS Program Library Catalog for PDP-8, FOCAL8" (PDF). Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. July 1973. p. F-28. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-02-07. Retrieved 2016-02-04.
  12. Program Library PDP-8 Catalog. Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. August 1978. p. 83. Retrieved 2016-02-04.
  13. 1 2 McCracken, Harry (2014-04-29). "Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal". Time . Archived from the original on 2016-02-05. Retrieved 2016-02-12.
  14. 1 2 Ahl, David. "David H. Ahl biography from Who's Who in America". Swapmeetdave. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  15. "Kingdom". People's Computer Company Newsletter . Vol. 4, no. 2. People's Computer Company. September 1975. pp. 6–7.
  16. Ahl, David (1984). Big Computer Games. Creative Computing Press. p. 11. ISBN   978-0-916688-40-0.
  17. Ahl, David (1984). Big Computer Games. Creative Computing Press. p. 96. ISBN   978-0-916688-40-0.
  18. Moss, Richard (2015-10-11). "From SimCity to, well, SimCity: The history of city-building games". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 2016-02-03. Retrieved 2016-02-04.
  19. "Yellow River Kingdom". BBC Micro Games Archive. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
  20. Pournelle, Jerry (November 1984). "NCC Reflections". Byte . Vol. 9, no. 12. McGraw-Hill. pp. 361–379.