Sumer

One of the early videogames made for an educational purpose is The Sumerian Game, running on a time-shared IBM mainframe 7090 in 1964. The educational and entertainment value of the game owes a lot to Mabel Addis’s work on the design and writing. Sadly, the original program is lost–but like many other early computer games, the description of the game inspired other programmers to make their own implementations.

In this case, the description of the game lead to Doug Dyment’s DEC implementation, King of Sumeria, a stripped-down 4kb version that ran on a PBP-8 in 1969. This eventually influenced David Ahi’s BASIC version, Hamuarbi [sic], in 1973.

In 2020, I was looking around for something to implement in the narrative scripting language Ink. I’d encountered the BASIC version previously, but reading an article about The Sumerian Game inspired me to create a version that brought it back a little closer to the original’s narrative focus.

Sumer is available to play at https://ikarth.itch.io/sumer.