King of Sumeria
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Imagine that you are living in the city of Sumer, in the year 3000 B.C. You are the king and each year you must decide how much of the city's store of grain will be given to the people as food, how much will be used for seed, and how much will be kept in storage.
At the beginning of each year your steward, Hamurabi, makes a report and asks for your decisions. The following information will assist you in formulating those decisions.
Each person needs 20 bushels of grain per year as food. If insufficient food is distributed, some people die of starvation. Half a bushel of grain is needed to plant one acre of land, and one person can plant and harvest 10 acres. The average harvest is 3 bushels per acre, but better or poorer harvest are common.
Land may be bought or sold. The price varies from year to year, but averages one acre for 20 bushels of grain.
Varying factors include the immigration of new people to the city (which is influenced by the city's prosperity), the fact that rats occasionally eat a portion of the grain left in storage, and the occasional epidemic of plague.King of Sumeria download code: 7XU33MND9V
The King of Sumeria is one of the oldest computer games. It was originally written in 1968 by Doug Dyment based on a description of the more detailed 1964 Sumerian Game, now considered lost. David Ahl later ported the game to BASIC using the name Hamurabi. The game was widely distributed on school computers (where available) and BASIC catalogues from the late 1960s to the early 1980s and inspired dozens if not hundreds of programmers. For example, Walter Bishop was inspired to create Empire, which in turn inspired Sid Meier to create Civilization.
This is the second game I ported to FUZE4 (after Spacewar!). I used a 1970 FOCAL listing, the earliest I could find. Unlike David Ahl's BASIC port, the only way to lose this game is to anger Hamurabi by asking him to complete impossible tasks. In later versions, you could only play for ten years and would lose if you proved incompetent.
When King of Sumeria was originally written, and for maybe a decade after, computers did not generally have video displays. That is why it is considered a computer game rather than a video game. To recreate that experience I wrote a template program that sort of emulates a Teletype Model 33 (essentially a printer using a roll of paper instead of sheets). You can access a bit of paper that has been pushed off-screen with the right stick. The template can be used as a GUI for any text-based program.
Teletype template download code: U6E73MND9V
~Max
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Incredible work! Your passion and respect for the history is evident.. I hadn't come across King of Sumeria before. This has been a fascinating read!
