Hamurabi is a text-based game of land and resource management and is one of the earliest computer games. Its name is a shortening of Hammurabi

Hammurabi

Hammurabi Hammurabi Hammurabi (Akkadian from Amorite ʻAmmurāpi, "the kinsman is a healer", from ʻAmmu, "paternal kinsman", and Rāpi, "healer"; (died c...

, reduced to fit an eight-character limit.

History

Doug Dyment wrote The Sumer Game in 1968 as a demonstration program for the FOCAL programming language, programming it on a DEC PDP-8

PDP-8

The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of...

. The game has often been inaccurately attributed to Richard Merrill

Richard Merrill

Richard Merrill was a Digital Equipment Corporation employee who invented the FOCAL programming language and programmed the first two interpreters for the language in 1968 and 1969, for the PDP-8...

, the designer of FOCAL. Once a version of BASIC

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

 was released for the PDP-8, David H. Ahl

David H. Ahl

David H. Ahl is the founder of Creative Computing magazine. He is also the author of many how-to books, including BASIC Computer Games, the first million-selling computer book....

 ported it to BASIC. The game spread beyond mainframes when Ahl published an expanded version of it in BASIC Computer Games

BASIC Computer Games

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...

, the first best-selling computer book. The expanded version was renamed Hamurabi and added an end-of-game performance appraisal. This version was then ported to many different microcomputer

Microcomputer

A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...

s.

Gameplay

Like many BASIC games of the time, Hamurabi was mainly a game of numeric input. As the ruler, the player could buy and sell land, purchase grain and decide how much grain to release to his kingdom.

Scott Rosenberg

Scott Rosenberg (journalist)

- External links :**...

, in Dreaming in Code, wrote of his encounter with the game:

I was fifteen years old and in love with a game called Sumer, which put me in charge of an ancient city-state in the Fertile Crescent. Today's computer gamers might snicker at its crudity: its progress consisted of all-capital type pecked out line by line on a paper scroll. You'd make decisions, allocating bushels of grain for feeding and planting, and then the program would tell you how your city was doing year by year. "Hamurabi," it would announce, like an obsequious prime minister who feared beheading, "I beg to report..."

Within a couple of days of play I'd exhausted the game's possibilities. But unlike most of the games that captivate teenagers today, Sumer invited tinkering. Anyone could inspect its insides: the game was a set of simple instructions to the computer, stored on a paper tape coded with little rows of eight holes.

The end-game appraisal compared the player to historical rulers (e.g., "Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV."), a tradition carried on by many contemporary strategy game

Strategy game

A strategy game or strategic game is a game in which the players' uncoerced, and often autonomous decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome...

s.

Influence

As a simulation, Hamurabi influenced later games such as Sid Meier

Sid Meier

Sidney K. "Sid" Meier is a Canadian programmer and designer of several popular computer strategy games, most notably Civilization. He has won accolades for his contributions to the computer games industry...

's Civilization

Civilization (series)

Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy, 4X video games produced by Sid Meier. Basic gameplay functions are similar throughout the series, namely, buiding a civilization on a macro-scale from prehistory up to the near future...

and inspired a number of similar resource-management simulators:

• Kingdom (1974) by Lee Schneider and Todd Voros.
• Dukedom (1976), an expanded version of Hamurabi.
• King (1978) by James A. Storer, set in modern times and printed in Ahl's More Basic Computer Games.
• Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio
  Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio
  Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio is a video game in which each player becomes the ruler of a fledgling Italian city-state around the year 1400. The goal of the game is to become king or queen; to do so the player must manage their city-state so that it may grow....
  
  (1978) by George Blank which takes place in Renaissance Italy.
• Dynasty
  Dynasty (computer game)
  Dynasty is a text-based resource-management game for the Apple II family of computers, written in BASIC in December 1978 by Weyman Fong and distributed by San Francisco-based Apple Core. The game is an expanded version of the earlier Hamurabi....
  
  , a somewhat expanded version of Hamurabi set in feudal China.
• Manor (1986), a derivative of Dukedom.

External links

• July 1973 DECUS Catalog listing for FOCAL8-5 The Sumer Game - pdf
• David Ahl's BASIC program listing — scan
• David Ahl's BASIC program listing — text
• JavaScript port at HammurabiGame.com
• JavaScript port by Russell Glasser
• C99 port by Brian L. Troutwine
• Dylan port
• Back to BASICs, a site hosting old GW-BASIC games and other programs, including Manor