The Sumer Game

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.

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. One, The Sumerian Game (1964), was a model of ancient Sumerian civilization, written and designed by elementary-school teacher Mabel Addis with corresponding slide projector images 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 with revised slide projector images.

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. 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.

In addition to the multiple versions of Hamurabi, several simulation games have been created as expansions of the core game. a. The Pollution Game (1970) by James A. Storer, and 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).

Other derivations include 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. A conversion of this game was included on the BBC Micro's Welcome Tape and Welcome Disc as Yellow River Kingdom (1981). E. (1983) and Anacreon (1987) are two games that critics mentioned as being similar to Hamurabi.