In 1968, Richard Merrill created the FOCAL (FOrmula CALculator) programming language for the DEC PDP-8. Like early versions of BASIC, it needed no operating system. It could run on low-end PDP-8s, requiring only 4k words of memory (the PDP-8 used 12-bit words). In 1969, he wrote a simple management simulation in this language and called it The Sumer Game.
When a BASIC interpreter for the PDP-8 came out in 1974, David H. Ahl ported it to this language. Four years later, he included an expanded version in his book Basic Computer Games. He called this expanded version Hamurabi (the ancient ruler and legislator is usually spelled with two Hammurabi, but most 8-bit platform had a 8+3 file name scheme, so limiting the name of the game to eight characters was a good idea).
Hamurabi is a very simple strategy game. You rule ancient Sumeria for ten years. Every year you decide whether you will buy or sell land, how many bushels you will feed to the people and how many acres you will plant with seed. Every person needs 20 bushels per year to survive and can plant 10 acres. There are immigrants, and sometimes a plague kills half your population. Land prices vary from year to year.
I played it through once online, and though I had none of my people starve, I was not liked very well at the end. Why? Seems I had fed my people mainly with speculations, buying land when it was cheap and selling when dear. And while the barns were full, one harvest would not have fed all my people at the end of my rule. So they claimed they were starving. A ruler's life ain't always easy.
Amusingly, a similar glitch (I call it a glitch; you might call it, of course, economic philosophy) occurs in a far newer game, Pharaoh. At some point in this game, your people will usually be living well off Bast's blessings, with both markets and homes holding ridiculous amounts of food. Yet, if you do not produce and/or import as much food as they consume, they will walk around complaining how hungry they are!
That's just an example how newer games usually differ from older ones mainly in graphics; there is little progress as far as gameplay is concerned.
Back to Hamurabi.
After I downloaded Leo Michels' version, I tried it again
and was rewarded with the message that
Charlemagne, Disraeli and Jefferson combined could not have done
better!
The trick is to sell some land in the beginning so as not to run out of grain and then buy some back every year, always with an eye on the prices. I have to admit, however, that this version has a rather bad random number generator, predictable events thus making your task far easier.
The archive you can download here contains three versions of the
game. The executable was compiled (or exhumed
) by
Leo Michels
in 1999. It runs without problems under XP, or in DOSBox, if you
want to play it on a non-Microsoft OS.
HAMURABI.BAS is a GWBasic program from Kindly Rat's website. It is a bit tricky: When asked whether you want to abdicate (as you are every turn, it's the game's way of giving you an option to quit), you have to type in NO exactly this way, in caps. Type anything else, like no or n as you might be used to from fdisk or del *.*, and the game will abort with a quaint error message.
HMRABI.BAS was modified for generic 8K Microsoft BASIC by Peter Turnbull. I have not tested it and do not know if it will run under GWBasic or QBasic or any of the other common BASIC interpreters.
