[HN Gopher] The Sumerian Game: The ancestor of modern city builders
___________________________________________________________________
The Sumerian Game: The ancestor of modern city builders
Author : christkv
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-07-19 10:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spillhistorie.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (spillhistorie.no)
| christkv wrote:
| The pre cursor to all out city building games.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Ranks right up there with the classic Old Testament Text
| Adventure game. You have no boils. You have 100 goats. You have
| pottage.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130704104410/https://old-testa...
| jleyank wrote:
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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?".
| K0balt wrote:
| Yeah, it's kind of like being a PID controller for a few
| interrelated variables in an unstable model. The never ending
| illusion of balance followed by inevitable triumph of chaos lol
| empath75 wrote:
| Thematically it's a city builder.
|
| All games are just manipulating some numbers in a state machine
| if you strip away all the theme and ux.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| 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?
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| spogbiper wrote:
| The excellent podcast "Advent of Computing" did an episode on
| this
|
| https://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=3f94e3fa-452d-48c8-acd8-...
| gxd wrote:
| 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.
| Gothmog69 wrote:
| 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-21 23:01 UTC)