The sumerian game early computer game

Summary

We spoke with historian Andrea Contato about The Sumerian Game from 1964. I am the ruler of the city of Lagash, in ancient Sumer. Year after year, we have suffered disasters that have caused the crops to fail or rot away, and the population of Lagash is now nearly halved. I have 4,600 bushels of grain left and 230 people who rely on food. And now the question is: How much should I use to plant for the next season, how much should I use to feed my people, and how much should I store for the future? I suspect that no matter what I choose, it will end badly. What I have just described is a typical scenario in The Sumerian Game, the oldest strategy computer game we have a decent amount of information about. The game was first made available to a limited number of American schoolchildren in 1964, where it was played on mainframe computers via printer terminals. Later versions were accompanied by slides and audio recordings, which thus became a form of cutscenes. The Sumerian Game recreated on Steam. Storytelling through simple choices The Sumerian Game is not a very advanced game, though it does have a certain depth. Through the game and the text-based messages that appear along the way, players are able to construct a kind of story together with the computer’s algorithms – albeit one that often ends badly – and in the dilemmas they face can be recognized as the core of even modern strategy games. Every choice they make is interesting, in the sense that it has significant consequences for what happens next. The experiment with The Sumerian Game didn’t last very long, and it wasn’t played by many students. But it still had a major influence on the evolution of the gaming medium, as it was a direct inspiration for a game that became very popular in the early computer community: Hamurabi. This game is considered a foundational pillar in the strategy genre and an ancestor of today’s city-building and empire-management games. Of course, it would be unwise to say that these ge...