Prehistory VI: Marienbad & The Sumerian Game

This is the sixth in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The game featured here will not receive a review score, and thus will not appear on the Tier List.

The Prehistory of video games series continues into the 1960s. This pair of games seemed relatively unrelated to me at first. However, upon reflection, they both have a bit of 'global' flavour, so to speak, in different ways. One represents the spread of video games beyond the West, and the other takes inspiration from Ancient Near Eastern civilisation. Both also represent the beginnings of different legacies in gaming. One, the beginning of Poland's contribution to video games, and the other the beginnings of the resource management / city builder genres. It's fascinating (to me, anyway) how these primitive beginnings, seemingly unrelated to the current state of the video game industry, and despite their limited reach, are still part of the overall family tree.

Marienbad (1962)

Hope you know Polish.

Release Date: 1962

Platform: Odra 1003

Genre: Strategy

Developer(s): Witold Podgórski

Publisher(s): N/A

It's quite the shame that there's little to discuss for what is most likely the first non-English video game ever developed, as there is little-to-no surviving documentation, screenshots or the like available (hence why nobody's ever attempted to recreate it.) Even the photo of the print out of the game code is not original (observe the [C] 2020 on the second line.) Wikipedia has a substantial article detailing the game's development by Witold Podgórski at least, so we know how the game came to be, even if we don't know how the game played or what it looked like.

In basic terms, Marienbad is an adaptation of a variant of Nim, the ancient game of logic. Each player would take turns removing matches from a pile, with the victor forcing their opponent to take the last match. Nim became quite a popular game to implement among early programmers, by the way, and many renditions of it appeared during the 60s and 70s.

Marienbad seems an unusual name for a game of Nim, and in fact Podgórski didn't actually give it this title. Rather, it was named retrospectively, as it's based on a variant played in a French film titled Last Year at Marienbad. It's a rather fancy title considering the time, where the titles of most other games were literally just describing what the game was.

Considering that there's effectively no surviving details of Marienbad, why discuss it? What significance does it have in the story of video games? For one, it's the first documented game we know of that was developed outside of an English-speaking country, Poland. It's also the first Soviet-developed game we know of, so technically non-Western. Both Poland and the Soviets have left quite a legacy in the gaming industry, most obviously with Tetris from the Soviets, and Poland beginning to develop games in the mid-80s up until now with, most notably, CD Projekt Red and their The Witcher series and their GOG digital platform (which we should all be thankful for for their preservation of many classic PC games.)

Marienbad, then, represents the beginning of what is a significant legacy and contribution in video games from continental Europe. And that's why it should be remembered.

The Sumerian Game (1964)

Release Date: 1964

Platform: IBM 7090

Genre: Simulation

Developer(s): Mabel Addis, William McKay

Publisher(s): N/A

Now here's a game that some of you may be familiar with, although maybe not under the title The Sumerian Game. This game of resource management has been tinkered with and re-released in many forms by many programmers throughout the early days of home computers, most commonly under the name Hammurabi (most famously by David Ahl.) But this is the original source, created initially as an educational experiment, to see how computers could be used in schools. The concept was created by Mabel Addis, a primary (or elementary for my American readers) school teacher, and then programmed using Fortran on the IBM 7090 mainframe computer by William McKay. While The Sumerian Game was initially completed in 1964, it was revised a few times, with more and more additions being made to its presentation and gameplay, until a final revision was tested in-class in 1967.

The Sumerian Game had the player taking the role of three successive, fictitious kings (all named Luduga) of the city of Lagash in ancient Sumer. These three rulers represent different stages of the game. Stage 1 simply has you allocating how much grain to distribute as food for your people, how much to plant, and how much to store over a series of several turns. Each turn, a report would come from your court advisor on the result of your choices, plus any random events generated by the game. These affect how much your population grows (or shrinks), and how much food you have to allocate for the next turn. Stages two and three follow the same pattern, but add in workers that can be assigned to various tasks, and later trade and expansion. This is far more advanced than anything we've seen so far in the prehistory era with regards to strategic gameplay.

Despite The Sumerian Game itself being relegated exclusively to being a school-based experiment, its legacy is tangible and quite immediate. Doug Dyment produced a version of the game in 1968 for the PDP-8, which he title King of Sumeria (it was also sometimes called The Sumer Game), after hearing a description of it from a woman who had previously seen it. This is where the name Hammurabi enters the picture. Despite Hammurabi being the legendary king of the Old Babylonian empire - decidedly not Sumerian (ancient history is a special interest of mine), Dyment opted to rename the king in his version of the game to Hammurabi (or "Hamurabi," as he spelled it) due to it being a well-known name in ancient civilisation. [Ed. slight correction: the steward is named Hamurabi in Dyment's game, not the king.] David Ahl would then produce his own version using the BASIC programming language in 1971, which he included in his famous BASIC Computer Games book under the title Hammurabi. This version would provide the basis for many future city-building and resource management games. All this leads back to the orignial The Sumerian Game, which stands as a pioneering game in resource management, a core component of future city builders like Sim City, and strategy games, both turn-based and real time.

There's going to be plenty of versions of The Sumerian Game that'll show up on the blog later on, mostly all based on Ahl's rendition, so keep a look out for those in the future. The Sumerian Game is an exciting game for me to cover, as resource management is one of my favourite gameplay mechanics. Well-designed resource management in strategy games and even RPGs I find immensely satisfying, so being able to learn about the game in which it was pioneered is particularly exciting.

#002: Computer Space

That's an... interesting marketing campaign you've got there...

Release Date: November 1971

Platform: Arcade

Genre: Multidirectional Shooter

Developer(s): Syzygy Engineering

Publisher(s): Nutting Associates, Inc.

I think it's time to take a brief (or now unintentionally not-so-brief) break from the Prehistory series and get to playing and ranking some games! Helps that this first game is quite relevant to the most recent Prehistory article... 

Next up after Galaxy Game (the arguably-first arcade game ever made) is Computer Space (the other arguably-first arcade game), the first mass-produced, commercially sold, coin-operated arcade video game. Computer Space was developed by a little company known as Syzygy Engineering. Funky name choice, syzygy is an astronomical term referring to when three or more celestial bodies are lined up straight. What that has to do with video games, I have no idea.

But I digress, Syzygy Engineering was formed by two men whose names may be familiar to some - Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Though the reason you may not recognise the company name was that, after Computer Space was released, they had to change their name, as syzygy was already in use. The name they settled on was a term used in the Japanese board game Go, which Bushnell and Dabney played regularly - Atari. Yes, that Atari. The legendary and pioneering game company that's still around to this day (though whether it's really the same Atari now as back then is another debate entirely.) If we really want to be technical about it, then, we could say that Computer Space is actually Atari's first video game, not Pong.

So now let's have a little look into how Computer Space came to be. Bushnell came up with the idea for Computer Space after playing the legendary Spacewar! on a PDP-6 computer in 1969 (Bushnell had claimed to have seen it earlier at the University of Utah, but it's disputed whether there was actually a computer there that could've run Spacewar! at the time.) 

He felt that Spacewar! might be popular as a coin-operated game (funnily enough, he wasn't the only guy with that idea at this point in time, as we've already seen with Galaxy Game - more on that later.) The problem with his idea was that it just wasn't economically feasible in 1969 - computers were just too expensive. Heck, the PDP-1 which Spacewar! was developed on cost (in today's money) over US$1 million. Was not going to happen. 

By 1971, however, computer prices had dropped enough for the project to be viable (the computer Bushnell and Dabney used cost about $30k - still a pretty penny, mind you.) Lower-cost tech meant that there would have to be compromises in game design, so Computer Space ended up being quite different from Spacewar!. Gravity was simplified, the sun was removed, and the game was changed to one-player against computer-controlled UFOs. A prototype was manufactured by Nutting Associates, a company most well-known at the time for their Computer Quiz trivia game. The prototype's location testing in August 1971 was successful enough to convince Bushnell he was onto something. 

The arcade cabinet going for that 70s sci-fi look

Also during this month, Bushnell discovered that there was another pair that had come up with the same idea as him over at Stanford University. It's a game I've already covered - Bill Pitts & Hugh Tuck's Galaxy Game. Bushnell and those two actually had some dialogue and got to see each other's game. Pitts and Tuck were not all that impressed with Computer Space, seeing their game as a more faithful recreation of Spacewar!. Being faithful to the source does not always a good game make, however, as my review of Galaxy Game details. 

So, after producing four more cabinets for October 1971's Music & Amusement Machines Expo (all in a different colour), and receiving mostly positive feedback, Computer Space went into production in November. All in all, it's estimated around 1500 units were produced. A 2-player version was also produced later, in 1973, which also sold around the same number (created by Steve Bristow, who would eventually go on to work for Atari and develop one of their classic hits, Tank.) How many cabinets survive today is a different story, however. One estimate suggests that only a few hundred cabinets are still out in the wild in a functional or salvageable state.

The 2-player cabinet. Only comes in green.

Computer Space, despite initial positive tests, didn't fare all too well. Apparently four buttons were too much for half-drunk bar patrons to wrap their heads and hands around, and so the game was considered a commercial failure. Bushnell figured out that the problem was that it was exactly three buttons too many, and thus sought to simplify in that direction for his next stab at an arcade game. But that one's a story for another day.

Well, that's the historical component taken care of, so now let's look at the actual game. I must preface by saying that things are a little unusual when it comes to playing video games of Computer Space's vintage. You see, before 1975, microprocessors were not a thing, and therefore all video games were built using discrete components - otherwise known as transistor-to-transistor logic (TTL, the anagram I will be using henceforth for the sake of brevity.) With these TTL games, it's not as simple as dumping the ROM and booting up MAME to play a round or two. There is no ROM. To put it plainly, TTL games are effectively impossible to emulate. Or, at least, are much, much harder to emulate.

With that in mind, how then does one play Computer Space today without access to an actual cabinet or PCB of the game? Fortunately, one such boffin by the name of Mike "Moose" O'Malley thought of this way back in 2005, and produced a simulated version of the game (much akin to the previous simulators I've used in the Prehistory series), which can be downloaded here. His aim was to replicate Computer Space as accurately as possible, and I'd say he did a darn good job of it. It's not perfect by any means, but it's suitable enough for my purposes. His introductory document explains that he had plans to continue to improve the simulator after its v1.0 release, but 20 years on and there's not been a v.1.1, it seems...

Upon opening the simulator, we're met with a screen that attempts to replicate the gameplay area of the actual arcade cabinet, complete with scans of text and instructions actually featured on the arcade cabinet. The start button in the bottom right corner can actually be used to start a game if you prefer, otherwise the fire key (default A) is the default key for starting the game. The right mouse button can be used to bring up the options menu, where all sorts of mechanics and functions can be fiddled with. I tend to leave things as they are for the authentic experience, though I did adjust the controls to spread them out to make things feel better for my hands and make them seem a little closer to the actual cabinet layout.

Upon starting a game, the first thing you'll notice is the sound effects and how... vintage they are. Honestly the game sounds like an old sputtering tractor (whether the actual game made this noise is hard to say, videos of the original hardware don't seem to have it, so take it with a grain of salt.) Strange stuff. There's some analog beeps and boops also, which are high pitched and rather ear-grating, so turning down the volume is recommended. The explosion sound effects have fairly decent impact, so there's one redeeming quality in the sound.

Can be a bit hard to see what's going on here, unfortunately.

If you're at all familiar with Atari's classic Asteroids, Computer Space will look and feel very familiar (I suspect Asteroids was intended as a spiritual successor to Computer Space). The basic gameplay is essentially the same, though the objectives are different. Computer Space simply tasks you with shooting down the pair of UFOs as many times as possible within the time limit, preferably more times than the UFOs shoot you down. To control your rocket ship, you have rotate left, rotate right and thrust buttons and a button to fire missiles. These missiles are controllable with the rotate left and right buttons, which gives you a little advantage over the UFOs. Where you don't have an advantage is in missile range, with the UFOs having a significant advantage in how far their missiles travel before disappearing. Far too often I found my shots just barely out of range despite being rather close while the UFOs casually snipe me across the screen. The UFO's a decent aim, too, though not utterly relentless to the extent that the small UFOs are in Asteroids... those things give me nightmares. So it's a fair enough challenge, the lack of range on your missiles does force you to take risk in getting close enough to strike.

The hitbox on your ship is mildly suspicious... You may be able to just see the UFO's missile passing just above my ship, that counted as a hit.

It must be said that the game controls rather well. While the physics are not Newtonian-based like the source material of Spacewar!, it still feels weighty enough to give that sense of controlling a space ship while not feeling like being stuck in molasses like Galaxy Game's slow speed. Again, very similar to Asteroids, but slightly heavier.

There are a few design issues to be discussed, which seem to be more oversights than anything. The player hitbox is disproportionately large, missiles that should miss are counted as hits. Most notably is the fact that you and the UFOs can respawn on top of each other. Fortunately any collisions award a point to both sides, however you can also respawn close enough to the UFOs for them to instantly snipe you. It happens frequently enough to be an annoyance. I do find the movement of the UFOs to be quite frustrating at times. It's entirely random, but the speed they move at is similar to your ship's top speed, which means that if they keep moving away from you (which they will happily do), shooting them down becomes an exercise in frustration. Finally, the UFOs don't know what screen-wrapping is, either, so they will never attempt to wrap their missiles around in order to hit you, which you can take advantage of by hanging around the edges of the screen and wrapping your own missiles around.

I got stuck on 8 for the remaining 25 seconds. That's how this game goes.

There is one final thing to mention before getting onto the scores for Computer Space, and that's what the game calls "hyperspace." This is a feature that is not included in the simulator. It's got nothing to do with the hyperspace mechanic in Spacewar!, here it's essentially the game's extended play bonus, achieved when your score is higher than the UFO's at the end of the round. The timer is reset, effectively giving you an extra round to boost your high score, only the colours are inverted. So white background with black dots, it's an eyesore, as you could probably imagine. 

Anyway, that's all there is to mention for Computer Space. It's very simple, as you can imagine (though apparently not simple enough for the people of 1971), but it is somewhat enjoyable for what it is. Now, on to the scores!

Time Played: I've clocked in around 2 hours across several years of playing on-and-off, most likely. 

Difficulty: 6

A combination of the UFOs having decent aim, the weighty controls and the short range of your missiles can make Computer Space challenging occasionally. It varies from round to round depending on how nice the UFOs want to be, also.

Game Design: 9

The core design is simple and solid, but has some executional errors with the respawning problem. Missile range could be more balanced as it's more frustrating than it should be.

Controls: 7

Controls are sound, but ship movement is a little on the heavy side. Ergonomically they're not the most comfortable to use, either.

Sound: 2

It's not pleasant at all. Sputtering tractor engine aside, the high-pitched drone chosen for the missiles is ear-piercingly unpleasant. Explosion sounds give one redeeming sound effect.

Graphics: 3

Obviously dated, essentially consisting of a whole bunch of dots arranged on a black background. Except in hyperspace, where it's the reverse and a whole lot worse. The most interesting thing is that there's technically animation on the UFOs. The centre row of dots moves, giving a slight illusory 3D effect, which is actually somewhat ahead of its time. Those "Atari block letters," as I like to call them, are hideous as always.

Functionality: 5

Everything works as intended with no bugs or glitches in sight.

Accessibility: 4

It's quite easy to find the simulator online (an actual arcade cabinet less so), and is pretty easy to understand and play.

"Fun" Factor: 9

Obviously the most subjective category of my scoring system, but I do find Computer Space to be a enjoyable game to play a couple of rounds of on occasion, though nothing more than that. It's simplicity and lack of skill curve don't make it all that enticing to come back to very often, either. Can also be very frustrating if the UFOs don't play nice.

High Score: The best I've managed over the years of playing is 11. I don't play attention to the whole score line, just how many UFOs I managed to shoot down in the 99 seconds.

Overall, this gives Computer Space a final score of 31, which comes out as a percentage as 51.66%. As far as the tier list is concerned, it just misses out on the C-tier, ending with a spot high in the D-tier. It's actually going to be a fair score as far as 70s arcade and console games are concerned. I've played most of the games upcoming through the early-mid 70s quite a bit, so I already have a rough idea of where Computer Space sits in comparison and trust me, this is one of the better arcade/console games from this period.

If you have any interest at all in vintage gaming and haven't given Computer Space a try, I'd highly recommend it, even in spite of my relatively low score. It's a significant piece of gaming history, and I think the whole industry would look very different if it never existed. It's commercial failure led Bushnell to create Pong, so we are indebted to it just for that.