The Sumerian Game: The ancestor of modern city builders

Sumer was my first exposure to computers. I used my mom’s account at the university to access the VAX over a DECwriter 100 dot matrix teletype terminal.

At 6 years old, I got quite good at the game. Left alone, to my own devices wandering the halls of the universities engineering buildings, I played Sumer and wandered in and out of labs and lectures, and occasionally offices.

I soon used up all of my moms computer time in the first week of each month, but by then I had learned to access user reports and other administrative logs, and found unused employee accounts from places like the physical plant and grounds maintenance. I would log into these perpetually unused accounts and use up their cpu time so I had basically unlimited access to the VAX by the time I was seven.

I learned how to use mail and a little Fortran. Sometimes I could use the tekscope video terminal to play other games, and I discovered a Star Trek based space war variant, which I started modifying to make it more fun to my seven year old sensibilities. I’m not sure that was appreciated by the others that probably played the game from that file, but it never really crossed my mind. I’m sure that someone was puzzled by all of the janitors and groundskeepers that contributed to their codebase lol.

I would not call it a city builder unless you stretch this category to include games with no map at all. I'm not sure if this genre has a name but it's basically a turn based game with the state modeled as a fixed length vector of numbers which represent resources or dangers. The player interaction is also limited to inputting numbers which the game logic translates into deltas on the state vector.

There were lots of games like this, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugsy_(video_game). "How many boys do you want to send collecting payments for protection?", "Rival gangs are on the rise. How much money do you want to spend on guns?".

Related. Others?

The Sumerian Game is playable again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41577752 - Sept 2024 (1 comment)

The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Video Game You've Never Heard Of (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40896470 - July 2024 (19 comments)

The Sumerian Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30186688 - Feb 2022 (18 comments)

The Sumerian Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532122 - Dec 2021 (1 comment)

The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Video Game You've Never Heard Of - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045101 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)

That and lunar lander were the first games I encountered on the PDP-8 back in ancient times. Somebody transliterated them into FOCAL… Possibly downscaled due to memory limitations but it let us all start tinkering and encouraged making our own.

I think text-only games have a certain special power that modern games can't quite emulate. Modern city planners are more accessible and better in most ways, but there is a raw gameplay elegance in games like Sumer that I think could make a comeback one day. Perhaps the game equivalent to vinyl records.

The excellent podcast "Advent of Computing" did an episode on this

https://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=3f94e3fa-452d-48c8-acd8-...

Cool! TFA is not clear on how the slides and audio would be triggered from the teletype though. I've never heard of any application from that era doing this.

Also, who else wants to see the (lost) game source code in APL?

The pre cursor to all out city building games.

I used to play a similar game I believe it was called something along the lines of santa fia machia? Anyone know it? I can't find it but was similar with grain and rats and whatnot