Hamurabi

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For the Babylonian king, see Hammurabi.

Hamurabi was one of the earliest computer games (the name is a shortening of Hammurabi to fit an eight-character limit).

Richard Merrill wrote The Sumer Game in 1969 in his FOCAL language, programming it on a DEC PDP-8.[1] Once a version of BASIC was released for the PDP-8, David Ahl ported it to BASIC. The game spread beyond mainframes when Ahl published an expanded version of it in BASIC Computer Games, the first best-selling computer book[2]. The expanded version was renamed Hamurabi [sic] and added an end-of-game performance appraisal[3]. This version was then ported to many different microcomputers.

One variant was also known as Kingdom[4].

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.

 TRY YOUR HAND AT GOVERNING ANCIENT SUMERIA
 SUCCESSFULLY FOR A 10-YR TERM OF OFFICE.
 HAMURABI:  I BEG TO REPORT TO YOU,
 IN YEAR 1, 9 PEOPLE STARVED, 13 CAME TO THE CITY
 POPULATION IS NOW 106
 THE CITY NOW OWNS 1000 ACRES.
 YOU HARVESTED 3 BUSHELS PER ACRE.
 RATS ATE 200 BUSHELS.
 YOU NOW HAVE 2800 BUSHELS IN STORE.
 LAND IS TRADING AT 24 BUSHELS PER ACRE.
 HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO BUY?

Scott Rosenberg, in Dreaming in Code, wrote of his encounter with the game[5]:

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.

As a simulation, Hamurabi influenced later games, including Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio and Civilization. The end-game appraisal compared the player to historical rulers (e.g., "YOUR HEAVY-HANDED PERFORMANCE SMACKS OF NERO AND IVAN IV."[6]), a tradition carried on by many contemporary strategy games.

Hamurabi is a social-studies based game. It is based on the Mesopotamian king, Hammurabi.