Hamurabi

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Hamurabi
Hamurabi.png
Hamurabi on a CBM 3008
Senior Developer Doug Dyment
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1968
platform first PDP-8 , later cross-platform
genre Economic simulation
Subject Management of an ancient city-state
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium Program printout , paper tape , cassette , diskette , Download
language English , German , French , Spanish

Hamurabi (named after King Hammurabi I ) is a text-based economic simulation that was written in 1968 by Doug Dyment on a PDP-8 in FOCAL under the name King of Sumeria . It was ported to BASIC in 1973 by David H. Ahl and made known to a wider public through the book BASIC-Computer-Spiele . The game is a reduced version of the Sumerian game without any multimedia components. Hamurabi is now available in versions for practically every known platform, including Java and HTML5 .

Game description

In Hamurabi , the player is the king of an ancient city-state. The aim of the game is to cause as few starvation deaths as possible within ten rounds and to expand the territory of the state. Each round you have to decide how many acres of land will be bought or sold and how many bushels of grain will be given to the population as food or used as seeds for the coming harvest.

Random factors influencing the game are a varying crop yield per acre and a changing land price. Other random events can be a land scourge that decimates the population and rats that eat a certain amount of the stored grain.

If the player has not been deposed or murdered by his population before the end of the tenth round, he will receive a slightly humorous assessment of his performance at the end.

Origin and technology

The game was developed in 1968 by Doug Dyment, inspired by a lecture on the Sumerian game as a demonstration for the new FOCAL programming language on a PDP-8. It is limited to a few economic components of the first and third phases of the Sumerian game , without emulating the pedagogical demands of its model.

David H. Ahl finally ported the game to BASIC in 1973 and published it in his book BASIC Computer Games . The name Hamurabi, which is used today, with only one m, is said to have originated from a typo Dyments. From then on, the game quickly spread to many BASIC-enabled computers and became one of the most popular programs in Ahl's book.

In 1982 the book BASIC-Computer-Spiele von Ahl was published by SYBEX-Verlag and contained a version of the game in German.

Due to its simplicity, the game is still used today as a program for learning or demonstrating a new programming language, which is why it also exists in many modern programming languages ​​such as Java or HTML5 .

Game historical significance

Although Hamurabi is mainly a clone of parts of another program, its legacy lies in its simplicity and the ability to be copied as a result, which has led to widespread use. Only then could the mechanisms of its model influence many later programmers. By the late 1970s, the game was expanded to include various building games, such as King and Santa Paravia . Significant borrowings can also be seen in commercial games from the 1980s such as Kaiser . Both Sid Meier and Dan Bunten stated that they used mechanisms from Hamurabi for their groundbreaking games Civilization and MULE . The game is considered an important pioneer for the genre of global strategy games .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ DECUS Program Library Catalog for PDP-8, FOCAL8 , Digital Equipment Computer Users Society, July 1973
  2. ^ David H. Ahl, Hammurabi in BASIC Computer Games - Microcomputer Edition , p. 78, Creative Computing Print, 1978, ISBN 0916688070
  3. ↑ Article on David H. Ahl's book BASIC Computer Games (English), Kidware Software, 2017
  4. ^ David H. Ahl, Big Computer Games , pp. 11-18, Creative Computing Press, ISBN 978-0-916688-40-0