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)
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| 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.
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