PixlBit

Time to get focused on 1968 and actual video games rather than related stuff. What was released that year? Well, nothing commercially, I guess, but games were being made for the early computers at various institutions. Apparently there were a lot of business sims being written in the early programming languages and some people got creative with it like Doug Dyment and his game Hamurabi (misspelled, whether by accident or not I don't know, with one "m") which attempts, in text, to simulate the economy of a 3000 BC Sumerian city. It was also called The Sumer Game for some versions, and it was later rewritten for BASIC by David H. Ahl and put in BASIC Computer Games, published in 1973. The 1978 edition became the first million selling computer book. This version of the game is thus the best known.

The gameplay is as follows. You are asked to allocate land and food to feed a certain amount of people. This is year one. You are then tasked with a ten year reign where random events happen like plagues, new arrivals of people, rats that eat your grain, and changes in land prices. You have to buy and sell land and allocate bushels of grain to account for these changes. At the end of ten years, if your people don't starve earlier like in my first play of the game, you are given an evaluation. I played a browser based version here.

This is a pretty cool game and the precursor to economic sims like M.U.L.E. and city-building sims like Civilization. I'd like to play something modern along the same lines this weekend. I think I'll choose Zoo Tycoon for XBO.

May the BaD be with you.