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The Sumerian Game

acriticalhit.com

67 pointskawera18 comments

Digital scans of the slides only available on site, not online. I hate that sort of thing:

https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/archival_ob...

I played this game on an Apple III! I thought it was called “Hammurabi.”

Apparently Hamurabi was inspired by The Sumerian Game.

I played it as a kid too, but in my case it was on my iPod. I had been looking for programming apps and found a BASIC app. Turns out, it was just classic BASIC games and not an interpreter, but it was good fun regardless!

Hamurabi was the first thing I ever played on a computer, a TRS-80 circa 1979-80. The BASIC listing is here (along with all the othe Ahl games):

https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=7...

There seems to be an emulation here:

https://archive.org/details/hamurabi.qb64

There is an ongoing effort to port those games from David Ahl's book into modern languages. It includes Hammurabi, if you'd like to experience it on a modern system: https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/tree/m...

This was previously discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188324

One of the end-of-year projects in my high school C++ class was to implement a simplified version of this, and the project was titled "Hammurabi", so you're not alone.

Was also available on PC in that era!

I can recall the layout of the text, although I can't be certain about the names from so long ago. It was pretty enjoyable for such a basic game.

I imagine that it was also the parent of the trader text game where instead of being in a static city you have your ship that you increase in size, travel between cities and trade as well as buy/sell guns for defense.

The Royal Game of Ur?

That is what I expected also. But no, it is a different game, text-based.

Advent Of Computing podcast (https://adventofcomputing.com/) did an episode about this which is worth a listen

Its episode 57 or is on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLI5AKoyjMM

We changed the URL from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sumerian_Game to an article with more background. (It has been posted here before but not had much discussion).

Kate Willært does great research. I highly recommend checking out the video essays: https://www.acriticalhit.com/category/video-essays/

Thanks, that article is a lot more informative.

Thanks Daniel, much better indeed.

I wonder if Textquake for the 7090 would break .00000001 FPS.

If you loved "The Sumerian Game" you will love hot new multi-player BRE and SRE coming to a BBS near you.

I played this game on MECC in 1974.

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