page_title: Early mainframe games
section_title: 101 BASIC Computer Games
hierarchical_section_title: Early mainframe games / 101 BASIC Computer Games
context_page_description: Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale processes. Before personal computers, first termed microcomputers, became widely available to the general public in the 1970s, the computing industry was composed of mainframe computers and the relatively smaller and cheaper minicomputer variant. During the mid to late 1960s, many early video games were programmed on these computers. Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on. While many of these games were lost as older computers were discontinued, some of them were ported to high-level computer languages like BASIC, had expanded versions later released for personal computers, or were recreated for bulletin board systems years later, thus influencing future games and developers.
context_section_description: In 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl converted two games, Hamurabi and Lunar Lander, from the FOCAL language to BASIC, partially as a demonstration of the language on the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter he edited, both ones he wrote and reader submissions. In 1973, he published 101 BASIC Computer Games, containing descriptions and the source code for video games written in BASIC. The games included were written by both Ahl and others, and included both games original to the language and ported from other languages such as FOCAL. Many of these ports were originally mainframe computer games. 101 BASIC Computer Games was a best seller with more than 10,000 copies sold, more sales than computers in existence at the time. Its second edition in 1978, BASIC Computer Games, was the first million-selling computer book. As such, the BASIC ports of mainframe computer games included in the book were often more long-lived than their original versions or other mainframe computer games.
  Hamurabi in particular is mostly known for its appearance in Ahl's book. After hearing of The Sumerian Game, Doug Dyment at DEC created his own The Sumer Game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language. The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL and FOCAL-69 languages, but an expanded, uncredited version of the game was included in 101 BASIC Computer Games as Hamurabi, and later versions of the game, even in FOCAL, referenced the new title over the old. Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is an antecedent to the city-building genre.
  The other game Ahl originally ported to BASIC, Lunar Lander, appeared in the book in three different forms. The original version of the game was called Lunar, and was originally written in FOCAL for the PDP-8 by Jim Storer while a high school student in the fall of 1969. A different version called Rocket was written in BASIC by Eric Peters at DEC, and a third version, LEM, was written by William Labaree II in BASIC. Ahl converted Jim Storer's FOCAL version to BASIC, changed some of the text, and published it in his newsletter. A year or so later, all three BASIC versions of the game appeared in 101 BASIC Computer Games, under the names ROCKET (Storer version), ROCKT1 (Peters version), and ROCKT2 (Labaree version). All three text-based games required the player to control a rocket attempting to land on the moon by entering instructions to the rocket in response to the textual summary of its current position and heading relative to the ground. Ahl and Steve North converted all three versions to Microsoft BASIC, changed the collective name to Lunar Lander, and published them in Creative Computing magazine in 1976; that name was used in the 1978 edition of BASIC Computer Games.
  Another game from the book is Civil War, a text-based computer game that puts the player against the computer in a simulation of the American Civil War. Civil War originated on multi-user mainframe computers in 1968, and simulates fourteen major battles of the conflict, with the human player as the South and the computer as the North. The player can control four direct variables which interact to determine a battle's outcome: how much of their money to spend on food, salaries, and ammunition, and which of four offensive or four defensive strategies to use. The side with the fewest casualties wins a battle, and if the player wins eight or more battles they win the game. Ahl credited the game in 101 BASIC Computer Games to L. Cram, L. Goodie, and D. Hibbard, students at Lexington High School, and to G. Paul and R. Hess of "TIES" for converting the game into a two-player game. Civil War was later one of a number of text-based games avai
caption: Modern recreation of Star Trek, running in a Linux command terminal
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