# Talk:Hamurabi (video game)

On the lines of its influence, I think it may be worth mentioning the genre of educational sustainable environment games that have evolved from this. I know I've played 2 of them but I unfortunately can't remember the names for them. One was for the Acorn platform and one was a game made by the German government IIRC. Both have you as a supervisor for some island and you're in charge of choosing how much land you use for development (and whether the level is sustainable or not). Your decisions would affect how well the island does from year to year and you receive reports on its progress. --Rambutaan 03:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Could smb find original FOCAL code of the game and the book "Looking at History through Mathematics" (1968) by N. Rashevsky? I'm looking for the basic model of the game.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.45.133.194 (talk) 07:54, 7 July 2011 (UTC) 

The article lists Doug Dyment as the creator of the game and cites that Richard Merrill if often inaccurately attributed to the creation of the game. There is no citation or reference I can find for Doug Dynment as the creator. It's also not clear to me if Doug Dyment is being noted as the creator of The Sumer Game or this one? --Bsimser (talk) 19:37, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, I wrote Doug a letter last year or so and he answered: "I created the program as a demonstration of what could be done in a limited-memory (4K!) PDP-8, using the FOCAL interpreter. At the time I wrote the game, I was in charge of software for the Canadian arm of DEC, based in Carleton Place (near Ottawa, Canada)."  — Preceding unsigned comment added 10:08, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Is it okay to just add new implementations like this one for the Android?

http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/com.charlesmerriam.hammurabi/Hammurabi  — Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveClement (talk • contribs) 04:18, 8 February 2011 (UTC) 

So that would mean we start adding every implementation of Hamurabi there is? Or only notable ones? What makes one worthy of inclusion so this doesn't become a list. There are half a dozen Android examples, almost as many on iOS and a few on other platforms. --Bsimser (talk) 04:00, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
A list of architectures for which there is no implementation would be useful, so someone could port it

The thing about eight-character limit seems to have been in the article from the beginning (in 2006), but is there any real evidence it just wasn't a mispelling [sic]? In Ahl's book, the spelling "Hamurabi" is also included in the game texts, which are not limited by any file system limitations. And in any case, a written book does not have a file system. At least [this annotated version] of the book states it was just a misspelling. Elmo Allen (talk) 01:50, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

This review is transcluded from Talk:Hamurabi/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 00:59, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, I've come this far, so I guess it's too late to turn back now ;).  Comments to follow. Indrian (talk) 00:59, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Haha, well, I'm not going to complain, you give very good and thorough reviews. :) I do have an semi-related question for you, though- when I wrote this article, I checked out Category:1968 video games through Category:1971 video games, and you'll note that there are a few games listed there that are not in the "early history of video games" template (nor mentioned in the early history of video games article) - Civil War, Highnoon, Star Trek, etc., and aside from, you know, being universally awful articles, they generally only exist when someone made a variant BASIC version or stuck a port on a BBS in the 70s/80s. While I haven't started researching (I need to go back and do Spacewar first), I really doubt I'll be able to find a lot of sources for them- Hamurabi started 2 genres, and Space Travel launched a multi-decade OS project, and they were difficult enough. I was thinking about merging them all together into a Early mainframe games article, which would be half-article, half-list of notable games from the 60s through early 70s - does that make sense to you? Is that a terrible name? --PresN 05:22, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
That does make sense, and would be the best way to deal with these early products.  I would keep the Mayfield Star Trek game in its own article, however, as it proved highly influential on later products, including Star Raiders, one of the first killer apps in the computer game space.  Lunar Lander is the only other pre-1972 mainframe game that I can think of off the top of my head that can also stand on its own, as it spawned many imitators, including the Atari arcade game.  The name seems fine to me. Indrian (talk) 20:17, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


### Lead and Infobox
The Infobox gives both the PDP-8 and BASIC as platforms.  BASIC is not really a platform; its a language.  Even if we keep BASIC in there though, we give the only release date in the box as 1968, while the BASIC version, of course, did not hit until 1973.
Changed to personal computer, and added the second release year
"The early computer game was developed by Dyment at Digital Equipment Corporation as The Sumer Game before the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early history of video games as a piece of early software for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language." - That's a lot of earlys for one sentence.
Chopped down and reworded
It may be worth mentioning the McKay game in the lead.  I know that we cannot conclusively say that Dymet's game was based on McKay's, but it seems an awful coincidence that two people would independently decide to simulate ancient Middle Eastern economies on a computer in the 1960s.  A "possibly inspired by" phrase in the lead would not be going too far I think.
Added


### Gameplay
"too many people starve in a single round" - How many people is too many?  Apparently not the entire population since the possibility of everyone dying is listed separately.  Can we narrow this down a bit?
Fortunately, we can see the source code, so I'll just adjust it to 45%
"The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain, over the course of ten rounds of decisions, each termed a year." - This sentence is a little overstuffed.  "The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain" is a complete thought, and then the following dependent clause about time periods comes out of nowhere.  This could be a compound sentence, but it feels like a verb missing.  Also "termed a year" is awkward phrasing.
Adjusted
"The end-game appraisal, not present in the original version of the game" - Do we know when this was added?  If not, maybe we could say "not present in the original game but incorporated by the xxx version"
Noted that it was the 1973 version (Ahl added it, it's noted in his book)
The Rosenberg quote seems out of place here.  Any additional gameplay elements could be cited to this source, certainly, but the quote itself seems like more of a reception kind of thing.
Removed; it was a bit of unnecessary padding
And that's it.  The article is mostly solid, and I am confident that these fixes can be implemented relatively easily.  Therefore, I will put this nomination  On hold while concerns are addressed. Indrian (talk) 17:27, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: Thanks for the review, all done! --PresN 03:18, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
@PresN:  Still one little problem with release dates in the infobox: the 1973 release was not for PCs.  Leaving aside a few early false starts like the Micral, the microcomputer era began with the Altair in 1975, and the first microcomputer to really do really well was the TRS-80 in 1977.  Ahl did not write his book for PC users, he wrote it for people who had access to a minicomputer, particularly at schools, for at the time he was in charge of a DEC education initiative.  The book was re-released in 1979, which is when it was targeted at micro users and topped a million copies sold.  Maybe the best solution would be to keep minicomputer and PC as the platforms, but discuss release dates in terms of programming language, so "1968 (FOCAL)" and "1973 (BASIC)."  If you have a better idea though, let me know. Indrian (talk) 22:59, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
@Indrian: went with your suggestion. The "release platforms" fields in the infobox is a little weird for 60s-70s video games, yeah, since it's really "platforms you could run BASIC on", which of course is different if we're talking 1973 or 1978 or today. --PresN 23:36, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
@PresN: That's perfect.  I made a few more grammatical tweaks, and I now feel the article meets the GA criteria.  Well done! Indrian (talk) 15:22, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

This article makes reference to a 1966 game called "The Sumerian Game," as the inspiration for Dyment's 1968 "The Sumer Game." The relevant text as it appears today is

The Sumer Game was possibly inspired by the 1966 The Sumerian Game, a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children.

I have tried to find external reference to this "Sumerian Game" but I have been unable to do so. Most external articles begin their history with Dyment's 1968 title.
Will the original author, or another expert help source this claim?
Thanks,
--Semitones (talk) 13:06, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

@Semitones: Leads do not need citations, as they are summaries of the rest of the article. That sentence is from: " In 1966, IBM employee William McKay developed a business simulation called The Sumerian Game for the Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Northern Westchester County, New York. It is not known whether The Sumer Game was inspired by the prior Sumerian game, which was a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children, developed in consultation with ancient Middle East history experts.[7]", [7] being "Wing, Richard L. (1966). "Two Computer-Based Economics Games for Sixth Graders". American Behavioral Scientist. 10 (3): 31–35. ISSN 0002-7642." That's findable on google books somewhere, if I remember right. The journal article does not link the two games together; it's just suspicious that in an era that might see a dozen games released to the public total in a year, that there were two "Sumer" simulation games released within 2 years of each other completely coincidentally. That said, "possibly inspired" is maybe a bit too strong of an implacation, so I'm definitely open to other wording. --PresN 13:22, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
The link between the games is real, but unfortunately not currently confirmed in any source.  Devin Monnens interviewed Dymet for an unpublished paper, who said he created Hamurabi after learning of the Sumer Game at a conference.  He did not see the game himself, but recreated it based on a description.   Since the paper in question is not generally available, we have to keep the connection vague here for now. Indrian (talk) 14:57, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Here is a source for the above game. It appears it was designed by a woman, who is then likely to be the first woman video game designer. http://www.acriticalhit.com/sumerian-game-most-important-video-game-youve-never-heard/
--Lou Crazy (talk) 09:20, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Yep, someone sent that to me in Discord this morning; I've now updated this article with the information, and will hopefully be creating a Sumerian Game article soon. --PresN 16:01, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

I recall playing a variant of this game called "CZAR" on the time shared HP2000 minicomputer at DePaul University in the middle 1970s. The game play appears to have been very similar to Hamurabi. I can't find any references to czar on the web. Please respond if you encountered this version, know where to find source code, etc. Thanks. Michaelaoash (talk) 13:32, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Text-based games are not video games. The correct classification should be Computer Game.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.161.192 (talk) 23:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC) 

While the definition of "video game" is not 100% settled in the literature, plenty of definitions incorporate a broad range of electronic games, including text games.  It has not been about whether there are graphics or a video signal for a long time. Indrian (talk) 23:25, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
I came here to make the same comment.  In 1968 this game would have been played primarily on printing terminals like the Teletype ASR-33.  No video to be found anywhere.  It should be called a text game or computer game.  Calling it a video game is just wrong.  2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:512B (talk) 23:02, 4 February 2025 (UTC)