The Sumerian Game

I really love this project. It's a great undertaking to research and restore one of the first video games from 1963 and its direct successors to make them playable again. The Sumerian Game is the text-based ancestor of strategy, management and city-builder games. I love those genres since the first SimCity and Civilization games i played in my youth. It's amazing that i can now experience the games that started it all even more than 20 years earlier.

5/10 Recreation of the first tycoon-type TBS from the 1960s TLDR: the main interest here is historical. The games themselves are trash by today's standards, an not even because of the "graphics" or the UI. It's simply the lack of critical data the player would need to make meaningful decisions. So, "strategy" is just non-existent. Neutral vote Good: + well, I didn't know that computer games were made as far back as in 1965! + this app re-creates several versions of the grain management game between 1965 and 1972. Though it's astonishing to see how little progress was made in 7 years, as the last version barely differs from the first one and doesn't fix the flaws that are so obvious today So-so: +/- presentation is true to the historical originals. Today it's pain stalking to type in "1" to confirm decisions. Bad: - I suppose the original games were coming with a printed manual? The first question a new player would be asking is how much 1 person needs to eat. Through experimentation, I found out that it's about 18 bushels. So, if you start with 500 people, you need to feed them 8000. At 7k or less, they will start to die out. Another rule/formula that I never figured out was h…

"The Sumerian Game" is slightly more than meets the eye, but not much. This museum piece is a recreation of a primitive 1960's mainframe (yes, mainframe) kingdom simulator. The game was made for students as a proof of concept. Really, all this does is track a few variables in a looping cycle of "turns" where you distribute grain and do other basic things as the mainframe tracks a few variables. Now, in the mid 20's, the game is back... and while this is a fascinating bit of computer history, at the same time there's a requirement to review this as a game (because it's on the Steam store) and whether people in the 20's should be downloading it and playing it 60 years later. The answer is no. What do you do in the game? As mentioned you're just typing in some numbers like how much grain to keep for seed and how much to let people eat. There's no value as a real PC game in 2025, and as a historical piece this would have perhaps been better done up as a web page and enshrined in the Internet Archive. To quote Indiana Jones, "That belongs in a museum". And, seriously, this is of enough quality to warrant being put on show in a museum. Competing on the same platform with Coun…

A very important collection of educational text-based games. The one that started it all, The Sumerian Game, was an ambitious creation devised by Mabel Addis that unfortunately could not be fully recreated today, but what is left is still impressive. She was the first video game writer and essentially created the sim and strategy genre (please remember this the next time you see an "anti-woke" streamer/content creator froth at the mouth upon seeing a woman game designer). It is wonderful that this project exists to honor her memory as best as possible, as well as those that followed in her immediate footsteps.

History. Preserve it now so future archaeologists have an easier time than rediscovering ancient Sumeria ^^.

Text based game. A very old game. Good to waste an hour or two on but not much more.