Prehistory XII: Qubic (3D Tic-Tac-Toe)

Release Date: 1968

Platform: PDP-10; Sol-20 port in 1977

Genre: Board Game

Developer(s): Original unknown; Sol-20 port by Ralph E. Hopkins

Publisher(s): DECUS

I genuinely debated whether to include this game or not. For me, it somewhat falls into the same category as the Chess game I'm skipping over; a basic, rigid implementation of a board game with no additional features. What I decided on was to try Qubic anyway and see if I could write something substantial about it, and if I could give it a working score. Seeing as you're reading this post, you know what my decision ended up being.

Qubic is another game from the BASIC Computer Games book lineup, but was originally written in 1968. The author of this particular game is completely unknown. All the info we have comes from the aforementioned book, where it only states that the game originated at Dartmouth College. If you look at the book, you might notice a slight discrepancy with what I'm playing. It calls the game 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, whereas my version (from vintage-basic.net) has it named Qubic instead. Which one's the original title? The earlier printing of 101 BASIC Computer Games has it as Qubic, so I assume that it's the original title.

It asks if you'd like to read the instructions. As 3D Tic-Tac-Toe already terrifies me as a concept, I definitely want to know how this implementation works. Inputting your moves is done in a rather abstract fashion - you input a string of 3 numbers, each representing a plane of the game board. 

1. The first number is the level of the board, with 1 being the topmost and 4 being the bottom.
2. The second represent the row on which you'd like to play, again with 1 being the top row and 4 the bottom row.
3. The third number is therefore the column, with 1 representing the leftmost column, and 4 the rightmost column.

This took quite a while to wrap my head around, and I occasionally messed up, mixing up the row and column numbers on a couple of occasions. Fortunately, the game provides a visual representation of the game board to help you get your bearings by typing in a solitary 0 instead of your move. The thing is, I originally wanted to look at this game because it appeared that this was the earliest implementation of text-based graphics out there. However, it appears that the visual representation of the game board was not in the original game. The earlier edition of 101 BASIC Computer Games states that the game does not print out a diagram, meaning you had to keep track of the moves yourself (this must have been an absolute nightmare; I'm panicking just thinking about it). Where exactly the board graphic came in, I'm not 100% sure, but if I were to hazard a guess, it may have been during the 1978 revision for the microcomputer edition of 101 BASIC Computer Games. That would also explain the name change between editions. 

There was also a port to the Sol-20 microcomputer done in 1977 by Ralph E. Hopkins, who ported many other games to the Sol-20 over the system's lifespan. Pretty much every BASIC type-in game out there was ported to it by him. More on him when I get to the Sol-20 system itself.

After giving the instructions, the game asks if you'd like to go first. If I know anything about Noughts & Crosses and all its variations, it's that you always go first. Always. It's pretty much impossible to win the standard 3x3 variation going second, so I'm not taking any chances here. For some reason, the game opts to have your moves indicated with a Y, and the computers with an M. Representing "You" and "Machine"?

Always go first. And ignore the "output is on paper" line. Load of nonsense.

Now, I'm going to spoil my playthrough of this right here and now: I actually won on my first attempt. That provides great relief to me one, because it means I'm beginning to understand how to play 3D Tic-Tac-Toe competently, and two, it means that the computer doesn't play perfectly. I have nightmares of the Atari 2600's version of this game that was utterly merciless, even on the easiest setting, so trying to master the RetroAchievements set was far harder than it had any right to be (it's a poorly designed set anyway, but I digress).

Still, it doesn't mean I had much fun doing it. While I typically enjoy strategy games, this one's always been a bit too brain-bending for me to really enjoy all that much. I study languages, so I don't like it when a game feels like trying to parse and translate a large, difficult passage of ancient Hebrew or Greek. I play games to relax and take my mind off of things, not to feel like I'm doing work. Maybe it'll get easier the more I get used to it? 

Here's what the board looks like. My recording didn't work, so I had to go back and take a screenshot.

The other problem is that games like this are meant to be played with another person, not an impersonal computer. This is the type of program you'd use to practice for a tournament, like all those Chess programs I'm ignoring (although those Chess programs were mostly designed to actually compete in tournaments themselves, not as games). That personal interaction, the competitiveness from two people going head-to-head to try and win is not there, leaving a lifeless shell.

Unfortunately, my recording of the game didn't work properly. Since the full game board can only be seen in full screen mode, that's how I played it, but OBS didn't like that apparently, so the whole 10 minute game is frozen on one frame, basically. I went back in to get the screenshot above, but that's as much as I'm willing to do for this game. 

To sum up the round I played, my strategy was to take the corners and spots to give me the most potential winning combinations, while simultaneously blocking as many of the computer's routes to victory. I fumbled with the inputs a little, occasionally making a mistake in mixing up the row and column inputs, but it still worked out okay. The computer has the occasional one-liner it throws at you, saying "nice try" when it blocks you, or "you fox" when you block it. I won fairly comfortably in the end, I don't think the computer ever got into a potentially winning position. That's really it, it wasn't a terribly exciting game.

Score time. It's actually going to get a Visual score, so Sound and Story are the only N/A categories this time. I know that the graphical part wasn't in the original game, but it's here in this version, and it's probably the only version anyone can actually play nowadays.

Time Played: 10 minutes

Difficulty: 5/10

It's difficult to judge, ironically. Most of the challenge honestly comes from trying to figure out the inputs and how 3D Tic-Tac-Toe works. I won on my first try, so the computer opponent can't be that tough.

Gameplay: 1

I was seriously tempted to put this as N/A, truly. But there is a game here, so it must be scored. The problem is how to score it. Since it's a simulation of a physical game, do I score based on my thoughts of the physical game, or how it's implemented in the video game? Or a mixture of both? Seeing as I already don't like 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, and that this is as primitive an implementation of it as you'll ever see, I'm giving it a 1. Like, it works, sure... but what's the point? As I've already said, this is a game that's meant to be played with another human being. Playing against a computer is a futile, lifeless endeavour, even if there was an attempt at giving some personality to the computer by giving it some one-liners.

Controls: 6

The inputs, while simple, are abstract and disorientating at first. They aren't the worst, but require some getting used to.

Visual: 5

It has graphics, technically... so that's something. Even though they're not in the original, I'll still consider them. It's immensely helpful to have that visual representation. Don't know how anyone could play this without it. It's a bit too big though, I had to play in full screen, which messed up OBS' recording. The text formatting is rather average, but there's a little bit of personality in the writing. Overall, I think it's okay.

Functionality: 4

One place where the game will receive little criticism from me. It works, and the formatting isn't that bad, though the generally disorienting feeling of playing this bleeds down into its functionality for me.

Accessibility: 1

Yeah, there ain't no way this is an accessible game whatsoever. Text based, obtuse inputs, a general feeling of disorientation over an already complicated base game. I can't give it a 0 because it is playable, after all...

Fun Factor: 2

If you couldn't already tell, I didn't enjoy playing Qubic. Later on, once I started to get the hang of the game, I had a very minor sense of enjoyment, but this felt like work otherwise.

So that gives Qubic a rather dismal score of 19/70. Its percentage of 27.14% just barely saves it from the disgrace of the F-tier, landing it at the bottom of the E-tier, where I suspect it will stay for a long, long time. It also awards Qubic the Wooden Spoon of 1968 as the worst game of the year, and it is also at this point the second worst game I've scored.

And so, with the end of July comes the end of my 1968 coverage. On to 1969, the year of the moon landing, which is curiously reflected in the selection of games. There's only five games, one of which is a port of Spacewar!, so that won't be getting covered. Hopefully the other four are available.

[Add.] Upon completing the rescore project, Qubic's score has gone up to 22/70 (31.42%).

Prehistory XI: Hamurabi

Release Date: 1968

Platform: PDP-8; made a BASIC type-in program in 1971, then ported to pretty much every early microcomputer system; DOS in 1995; several Browser versions since 2002; iOS in 2008

Genre: Strategy / Simulation

Developer(s): Doug Dyment; BASIC conversion done by David H. Ahl

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

So, I couldn't find Go, and Core War - while very interesting - is off the list for being multiplayer (original version is missing, too.) The PLATO version of Chess is playable (through Pterm and cyber1.org) - took me a while to figure out the inputs - but as it's a basic chess program I'm not going to cover it. I'd almost throw it in the "non-game" category. You could just go to chess.com and get the exact same experience as any of the multitude of chess programs from this era. I've decided to ignore chess programs until they start gaining a bit more substance.

That means I'm moving on to Hamurabi. Aside from Spacewar!, this is the most well-known and probably most influential game from prehistory. It, and to some extent Civil War, form the foundational building blocks for resource management in the strategy, management simulation and city-builder genres. It all starts here, folks.

There's some confusion regarding who was the original author of Hamurabi. It's sometimes attributed to Richard Merrill, the DEC computer scientist who invented the FOCAL programming language, as in the DOS port, but the true author is Doug Dyment, the software support manager at DEC. An interview with Doug exists online where he confirms himself as the author, as well as him being credited in the DECUS program catalogs of the time. He explains in the interview that he based Hamurabi - which he had originally named King of Sumeria - on a description he received from a grad student of The Sumerian Game, a game from 1964 that I've previously covered. Dyment had to simplify the gameplay to fit the limited 4K memory of the PDP-8, and thus the multiple phases of the original game were cut, leaving only the first phase of food distribution and buying / selling of land remained. This is also why Hammurabi is missing an 'm' in the game; there was literally no space to fix the typo! Contrary to the popular assumption that you're playing as Hamurabi, it's actually your steward that Dyment named Hamurabi. The king, formerly called Luduga in The Sumerian Game, is unnamed here.

Dyment created King of Sumeria in 1968, which was then listed in the DECUS program library in 1969. How much exposure it got, I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like it got quite a bit, with numerous versions of the game being written in the following years, including French versions. The single most important version, however, is the BASIC conversion programmed by fellow DEC employee, David Ahl. He would include his version of the game in his legendary book 101 BASIC Computer Games from 1973 onward (having first created the conversion in 1971), and the game's popularity would skyrocket from there, especially once the microcomputer revolution began in the mid 70s. Ahl's version would be the base of every future port, and it was pretty much ported to every computer system imaginable; there's even a German DOS translation!

Just briefly, I'll note here that - as far as I'm aware - Ahl didn't make too many changes to Dyment's program. He cleaned up some of the code, and turned lines into complete sentences, adding the "I beg to report to you" line to the start of every cycle. He also added some performance assessments at the end of the game, where the game would tell you how well (or how poorly) you managed your kingdom, and whether or not the people hate you and would like to see you assassinated. Within the code itself are some rather amusing lines, such as "Rats are running wild!!", "Let's have some babies," and "How many people had full tummies?" 

We're now beginning to get into the realm of games that I've had previous experience with. I've played Hamurabi before - the Apple I version, to be precise (yes, Apple I, that's not a typo.) - and beaten it with the highest ranking. It's exactly the same as the version I'm playing for this post (and most ports are the same, as far as I know), so everything I say here will apply to that version - or really any other, for that matter.

The game starts off the exact same way every time, you start year 1 with a population of 100, 1000 acres of land, and 2800 bushels of grain. You play 10 cycles, each representing a year, in which you have 3 basic decisions to make:

1. Whether to buy or sell land (and how much).
2. How many bushels of grain you allocate to feeding your people.
3. How many acres of land to plant grain in.

The option to sell land appears when you opt to buy no land.

The price of land is a variable, usually between 18 - 30 bushels from my experience. The decision it presents is, do you buy land when it's cheap, to have more farming land and support a bigger population? Or do you sell when it's expensive to add some extra grain to your reserves? There are benefits to both. For one, a factor the game judges you on at the end is how many acres you own per person, so making sure that it's higher than what you started with is important. On the other hand, having extra grain reserves is helpful in dealing with the game's random events (more on those in a bit.)

There is a formula to how many bushels you should feed your people to prevent starvation. It's very simple: 20 bushels per person. My usual method centres around this key number. I allocate the food necessary to keep everyone alive, and plant as much as my population allows. It does require doing some arithmetic, so I hope your maths is good, or you go the boring route and use a calculator (but where's the fun in that?) I was always a bit of a wiz with numbers, so I don't mind doing the sums in my head. Your population determines how many acres you can farm, the formula seems to be: (total population * 10) - 10. Meaning I can farm 990 of my 1000 acres with a population of 100.

Since each first year starts you off the same, the strategy for me is pretty simple:

• 2000 bushels allocated for food.
• The remaining 800 are planted.

This strategy might vary if the price of land is high, so I might sell a few acres to get some extra grain, which I can then plant in the acres that are leftover. It was only 23 bushels per acre this time, so I went with the basic strategy this time.

A plague strikes! Bring out yer dead...

So this game didn't start out too well at all... we experienced a plague, and half of my population succumbed to it. Now is a good time to expand on the game's random events!

Hamurabi throws a few random events at the player, both good and bad. On the good side, you can have a bountiful harvest or a population boom. On the bad side, a plague can occur that will wipe out half your city's population, or rats - which each a random number of bushels each cycle - can "run wild", as the code says, and can eat a substantially higher number of bushels than normal. This is where the game's challenge resides: in dealing with these random events that occur each cycle, managing your resources wisely to ensure that your people don't starve. If too many starve, the game will end early, with you being impeached, thrown out of office and declared "national fink." The game certainly has personality. These random events help increase the replayability of Hamurabi, as no two games will ever be the same. It's a much better implementation of randomness than in PDP 10 Basketball, where every event was a random chance occurrence, making your decisions effectively irrelevant.

Things were good in this cycle from an economic standpoint. My land harvested 4 bushels of grain per acre, which is quite good; usually it hovers between 1 - 3. Nothing was eaten by rats, either. I decided to buy some land in this cycle - 50 acres, forgetting that I could only work as many acres as my population allowed. I made sure my people were fed, tried to plant seed in all my fields, with the game telling me off for trying to overwork the populace. Eventually I remembered and planted according to my population.

I think these people are just lazy.

Year 3: Another plague. Only 28 people remain the city, which is obviously not much of a city anymore. The harvest was poor, and rats ate over 300 bushels, meaning supplies are getting low.

Fortunately, land is trading at 26 bushels - a good time to sell! Seeing as I can't make much use of the land I own, might as well sell a bunch of it to replenish my granaries. I sell 300 acres, netting me 7800 bushels of grain. Never running out of food now... 

For once we didn't have mass deaths, though the rats thought all their Christmases had come early.

And that's pretty much the basic gameplay loop there: buy and sell land, feed the people, plant fields and react to whatever happens over the next cycle. It's all about setting yourself up early, being well prepared for any potential disasters, or population booms. I'll briefly go over the highlights for the rest of the game:

Year 4: A relative population boom, with the population growing to 44. Rats enjoyed my freshly bought grain, though I still had more than enough in reserve for the rest of the game. Land was dirt cheap (see what I did there?), so I bought back 100 of the acres I previously sold.

Year 5: Yet another plague. Population down to 25. Rats ate nothing, and land remained at the same price as last year. I bought back another 50 acres.

Year 6: +17 population, back up to 42. Rats were busy, eating 902 bushels, and my harvest was poor, but I still had enough grain to distribute across people and fields.

Year 7: Once again, plague. Makes me question why people keep coming to the city when the bubonic plague is clearly on the rampage. The rats were too busy giving everyone plague to eat anything this year, and a decent harvest meant that my grain stocks increased. Land was back down to 18 bushels, so I took advantage and bought 10 more acres.

Year 8: Guess what? Plague. You know, there's only a 15% chance of a plague occurring in any given year. 5/8 years have had plague so far. 25 people arrived in town, only to find that everyone had died of plague. Tell you what, this makes for fun narration, at least. Rats were too busy to eat again, so things were relatively unchanged in my grain reserves.

Year 9: No plague, for once, and a population boom, with 26 people arriving to bring the total back up to 51. Rats ate some grain, but I still had more than enough to see out the year. The extra population will help with harvest.

Year 10: The 15% chance strikes again. A 6th plague. 31 people remain. A poor harvest, but no rat infestation meant I still had enough to feed everyone. For some reason I decided to sell 5 acres. I'm looking at my footage from yesterday at the time of writing this, and I cannot remember why I did this.

Year 11: The final assessment. No plague, and 13 people came to the city to make the final population 44. Now the game provides its assessment on how well I did. You're graded on your performance based on how well you managed your resources throughout your kingship. The main two factors the game considers are the average percentage of the population that starved per year, and the number of acres you own per person at the end of the 10 years compared to the start. It lets you know how well you did through a statement of assessment from your steward. There are three of these, aside from the early impeachment one:

"A fantastic performance!! Charlemange, Disraeli and Jefferson combined could not have done better!" (It's at this point Hamurabi asks who these people are...)

"Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV. The people (remaining) find you an unpleasant ruler, and, frankly, hate your guts!!"

"Your performance could have been somewhat better, but really wasn't too bad at all. (x) people dearly like to see you assassinated but we all have our trivial problems."

A fantastic performance... if you ignore all the people that died from plague, that is.

I finished with 0 deaths from starvation, and doubled the amount of land per person. Fortunately the game doesn't count deaths from plague against you, which is fair, seeing as it's out of your control. The game gave me the highest praise it could, naming all these leaders that definitely didn't exist at the time of Hammurabi. Charlemagne's name is misspelled, by the way. Couldn't have referenced some of the other great ancient kings? Sargon? The Pharaohs of the pyramids? It's not much to ask for consistency with the game's setting?

I digress, time for the scores. Once again Sound and Story are N/A.

Time Played: A playthrough takes between 6-10 minutes. Mine took 6, though I already knew what I was doing, so 10 - 15 might be more likely for a first full playthrough.

Difficulty: 2/10

It's not a difficult game to get the hang of. Once you know what the basic requirement is for keeping the population fed, it's a matter of process and reacting to variables. Even though some arithmetic is required, we have calculators to help with that. I think you'd actively have to try to play badly to get one of the worse assessments.

Gameplay: 10

It's well done for such a simple resource management game. The variables are what make it, and provide a small degree of replay value. The mechanics all work well around the central core of managing your grain resources, and all your choices have a material impact on how the game plays out. However, it does become a bit rote once you know the important numbers. The ending assessment doesn't really work out too well, either. Since it's partly based on acres per person, it's almost always going to end higher if you have a plague or two, which is almost certain at a 15% chance over 10 cycles.

Controls: 10

Very simple inputs required - only numbers, no text, and ones that aren't that big, either. Could play the whole game with a numpad.

Visual: 4

I don't quite like how Hamurabi is formatted, compared to the clarity of Civil War's presentation. It's just very... basic? The game is laid out quite plainly, without much thought to jazz it up. It gets points for the entertaining and humorous impeachment and assessment messages, but that's it.

Functionality: 5

Freebies; no glitches, and the formatting is easy to read.

Accessibility: 2

It's a text game that requires some reading and mathematics aptitude (though the maths bit can be somewhat circumvented by the handy calculator). There are no in-game instructions, either, it throws you straight into the game with a lot of details to wrap your head around straight away. My girlfriend asked about what game I was blogging about. She's not a gamer, took one look at the game and said "looks complicated!" Sort of proves my point.

Fun Factor: 9

I find it moderately enjoyable as a fan of resource management. Again, knowing the static formulas and having a calculator trivialises things a bit, but it's offset by the variables giving it some replay value. I make things more interesting on myself by not using a calculator, but I know that definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Hamurabi gets a score of 40/70 (57.14%), being the first game reaching the C-tier and comfortably overtaking Computer Space as the highest rated game. It's thoroughly deserved by my reckoning, as Hamurabi it's easily the best, most well designed game up to this time in gaming history.

[Add.] Upon completing the rescore, Hamurabi has lost its crown as the highest rated game on the blog. It also lost its C-tier placement, going down to a 36/70 (51.42%)

Civil War: Beaten!

And thus, history was changed, but maybe not for the better...

If I'm one thing when it comes to games, it's stubborn.

Despite my discouragement with Civil War yesterday, after going away from it, I couldn't stop thinking about wanting to win. I desperately wanted to beat those battles I lost before, especially Battle 3. It was eating away at me a little bit. I hate leaving something unfinished, that's a bad habit I've had for many years.

So today I decided to come back to Civil War and give it another crack. I decided I'd experiment a bit, look into those trouble battles, and see if they had a solution. I also wanted to look at the other battles to see if there were solutions that produced better results. Then, after all that, I'd go through the game once more to see if I could win the war. As you can see, I was successful. I'll briefly talk you through how I did it.

One thing I didn't mention in the first post on Civil War (because I found this out after posting it) was that there's a formula for getting high morale in every fight. High morale is tied to your food and salary spending vs. the number of men in your army. In order to get a high morale rating, you need to spend roughly 1.44 x the number of men on food and salary. I thought inflation might affect this number, but it doesn't, so inflation is basically a meaningless stat. Once I figured this out, I could get high morale for every fight. 

To figure out the precise numbers I needed for each fight, I pulled up the handy Calculator app on my laptop and my notepad document for the game, and went through each battle, did the calculations, and noted them all down. During this time, I also experimented with the strategy options to see which choice performed the best in each battle. 

A little taste of my notes for Civil War.

There were a few trouble battles when it came to finding a solution. 11 (Chickamauga) was inconsistent. I managed to win it once in my testing, but only just. I actually lost it in my winning run using that strategy (I assume the computer chose a different strategy to the test run, wasn't paying attention.) However, there were three other battles that caused me quite a bit of grief:

• Battle 3 (Seven Days)
• Battle 12 (Chattanooga)
• Battle 14 (Atlanta)

I did quite a lot of testing with these three. Actually, I did all the testing possible. What I found immensely helpful was the option to replay with 0 (which I ironically said was redundant in the first post.) It replays the battle with the exact same stats as last time, meaning I could freely test different spending combinations. It allowing you to control the Union's strategy meant I could test each possible strategy combination to see if there were any winning combinations for me. 

As it turns out, there were no winning strategies for any of these three battles. None even came close. I got absolutely annihilated at Chattanooga, and the results at Atlanta and Seven Days didn't really come close to a win for me in any instance, but were less savage. It seems very clear that these battles were programmed to be unwinnable from the outset. However, I wonder if that was the original intent of Cram, Goodie and Hibbard, or if something got altered along the way in the revisions of Civil War that caused this to occur? I mostly wonder this because the fact that I can't win Seven Days as the Confederacy makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I did a little bit of research on this battle last night, and it was a battle that the Confederates won! So how come I can't win it in this game??? I find that an immensely frustrating oversight, if it indeed was an oversight. If it's intentional, I seriously question the teaching standards of Lexington High in 1968...

Anyway, I'll put up my notes for each battle here, so you can see exactly what I did. The ammo spending did vary from what my notes had in my winning run. Numbers I have in between asterisks indicate the best performing strategies if multiple strategies worked for a single battle.

Battle 1: 

26k food & salary

29k ammo

Win defensive with *1*, 2, 4

Lose defensive with 3

Battle 2: 

58k food & salary

68k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 2, 3

Battle 3: 

138k food & salary

        170k ammo

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

Seems to me that, historically, this was a frontal assault, but it never works in game. Makes no sense, as this was a Confederate win IRL. I question if this one's bugged.

Battle 4: 

80k food & salary

89k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 3

Battle 5:

60k food & salary

68k ammo

Win offensive with 1, 3, *4*

Lose offensive with 2

Battle 6:

110k food & salary

148k ammo

Win defensive with *1*

Battle 7: 

56k food & salary

70k ammo

Win defensive with 1, 3, *4*

Lose defensive with 2

Battle 8: 

47k food & salary

74k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Battle 9: 

73k food & salary

120k ammo

Win defensive with 4

Battle 10: 

106k food & salary

184k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Battle 11: 

97k food & salary

172k ammo

Win offensive with 4

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3

Battle 12: 

55k food & salary

87k ammo

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

I think this is another unwinnable one, 1 seemed the least worst option.

Battle 13: 

92k food & salary

114k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 2, 3, 4

Battle 14: 

96k food & salary

114k ammo

Lose defensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

Also unwinnable, I think. 4 seems least worst.

All this netted me a result of 10 wins and 4 losses, and thus the game declared me to have won the American Civil War, and with a fair bit less bloodshed than the real thing, as can be seen in my winning screenshot. Strategy 1 was the best option for most battles, with 4 as second-best. I never found 2 to work outside of the first battle, and 3 worked occasionally. Nothing's changing in my scores after this run, but I did spend about another hour all up playing and experimenting with the game. Though I suspect that score revisions will happen in the future as more games are added and my experience increases. However, I'll drop the difficulty down a point to 3/10, since it's really not that hard to figure out how to win enough battles to win the war. Though I'm not entirely sure that's how war works in reality...

There's a couple of games I'm not sure about next on the list, Chess and Go. Will need to have a look into them to see if they're not missing, and then if they're worth playing. The next landmark game after that is Hamurabi, which I'm quite looking forward to.

Prehistory X: Civil War

You know, I'm starting to think my little disclaimer at the beginning of these Prehistory articles is becoming a bit superfluous. When starting the project, I assumed everything was going to be either unplayable, or unranked due to multiplayer / oversimplicity reasons, hence the disclaimer. Turns out I was wrong on that front, which is hardly surprising, since I didn't put much effort digging into this time period initially. From now on I'm not going to bother with the disclaimer note.

Before getting into Civil War, some business needs to be attended to. There are a couple of games on my list that come before it, Reflect and The New Clea Casino. Both are oddball educational games programmed for the PDP-10, but I can't find anything on them, despite MobyGames assigning them more precise dates in 1968. Searching for them or their authors just comes up with a load of bizarre, unrelated nonsense, so I'm declaring them missing and won't be covering them. They seem like interesting games, though, so I hope they appear in the future. 

Now, time to get back into playing something after the previous little history lesson... oh, wait. Never mind. We're getting another history lesson anyway (plus, it is kind of the point of this whole blog...)

Release Date: 1968; included in 101 BASIC Computer Games in 1973

Platform: HP 2000; later a BASIC type-in program and ported to various home computer systems

Genre: Strategy / Simulation

Developer(s): Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, Doug Hibbard

Publisher(s): Creative Computing Software

Moving on to 1968 now. More than twice the games I had for 1967, but I suspect most of them will turn up missing. What's strange is that 1968 in my list has more games than 1969 and 1971. 1968 has nine, while 1969 only has five, and 1971 has eight at the current count. Should be able to breeze through the rest of the decade, then. Just you wait until we get to 1970, though... 22 games! 

In case it wasn't obvious from the game's title, Civil War is... well, about the civil war. The American Civil War, to be exact. My history-minded brain needs to specify, as there have been many civil wars over the centuries. Could've been the English or Spanish Civil War, for all you know. Anyway, the game simulates 14 battles from the war, attempting to do so in precise detail with regards to facts, figures and strategic outcomes.

Most of my information comes from the outline given in the 1973 version of 101 BASIC Computer Games. Apparently, if you know your Civil War history, you can make the same choices as the generals did in the real battles and produce the same outcomes. I won't be looking into their decisions unless I get hopelessly stuck. You can also "outperform" them, if they made sub-optimal decisions due to lack of enemy intel. My knowledge of the American Civil War extends no more beyond the Oversimplified video on it, so this should be interesting...

Civil War was written by a group of high school students: Larry Cram, Luther Goodie and Doug Hibbard, from Lexington High School in Massachusetts. That school has cropped up a few times in my list research, so I assume they must've had a computer or two there for students to learn programming and whatnot. These three students are credited as program writers in Dave Kaufman's 1975 book, What to do After You Hit Return, but I'm not sure if they wrote programs other than Civil War, as its their only credited game according to MobyGames.

Upon opening the game, it asks if you'd like to read the instructions. I usually like to read the instructions before playing a new game, so I happily take up the game's offer.

The future of America is in my hands, now. This will not end well.

This is far more complicated than anything I've played up to this point in time, which I thought might bode well for the actual gameplay. I don't see myself ever using the surrender command, even if I face Unconditional Surrender himself. Who thought that was a good nickname, by the way?

Interestingly, Civil War has a two-player option. It appears to have been a later modification to the game, being added by G. Paul and R. Hess of TIES. Not much info on TIES out there, but I found a site that told me that it's a computer programming company founded in 1967. Checks out. A link was provided to their website, but it appears to redirect to another company's site, likely suggesting that TIES is no longer around. Yet another mystery, to go alongside what the actual first names of G. Paul and R. Hess are...

After saying no to the two-player mode, the game takes me to its proper introduction, where it tells me I'm playing as... the Confederacy?!? You're telling me that I'm controlling the losing side? Great. That fills me with great hope and confidence for my chances of winning this game...

I'm gonna need a whole lot more than good luck...

As a side, I typed the 0 command to replay the game once, and it replayed the scenario in two-player mode. It's a redundant command anyway, since you can simply replay the scenario by typing in its number. Interesting little side note it provides there regarding negative food entry... must've found that little glitch during playtesting. I don't know why you'd ever type a negative number for food, but thanks for the heads up, I guess?

I figured that the easiest and most logical way to proceed with the game is to do the 14 battles in the order they're given. So, after saying yes to the battle descriptions, I start with Battle 1: The Battle of Bull Run. The battle descriptions give you a very brief overview of how the real battle went, and I suspect they also act as clues for the solution to winning.

Civil War doesn't just have you select different battle strategies, but also presents a rudimentary form of resource management that influences the results of your chosen battle strategy. Each battle scenario first presents you with the description of the battle (if you opt to have them), and then the army size, funds available and an "inflation" rating. I have no idea what effect "inflation" is supposed to have, if it even has one at all. It has no bearing on the amount of money you can spend out of your total pool. You are then asked to divide your available funds between food for your army, salaries for paying your men, and ammunition. Food and salary effect troop morale - underspending results in poor morale. I generally found that spending around $10k more than the army size for both was a good guideline for getting high morale. I assume ammunition also effects how effective your army is in the battle, but I'm not entirely sure how it works.

Making sure the troops are well paid and well fed is a good start.

You can see from the screenshot how I opted to divide my resources in this first attempt at the first battle. I figured roughly even spending on each category was a sensible decision. This resulted in my troops having high morale for the battle. The game told me I was on the defensive for this battle, and asked for my strategy. I decided an artillery strike was a good idea. Turns out it was a good idea, and I won the battle comfortably.

Well, that was easy enough. This might turn out okay, after all.

One down, 13 more to go. They can't all be this easy, right? Battle 2 is The Battle of Shiloh, which the game describes the Confederates losing on account of a poorly organised surprise attack. Already fighting an uphill battle to win this one, I see. The number of troops and funds are significantly higher for this battle, with my army consisting of over 40,000 men, with $186,300 at my disposal. The Union has similar, if slightly higher numbers. I delegate $60k to food, $75k to salaries and $50k to ammo. Morale is high. Things are looking good. I choose flanking as my strategy, and we lose. Badly.

At least we had fewer deserters.

Thus, history repeats. I decide to try again, this time selecting a frontal attack as my strategy. We lose again, but not as badly as last time. Upon reflection, I think I wasn't reading the battle descriptions properly. If it was a surprise attack, wouldn't it make sense to fire an artillery barrage first, sending the enemy into a panic? That's what I tried on my third attempt, and I was successful at winning the battle.

Then it was on to Battle 3: The Battle of Seven Days, and oh boy, do I have a lot to say about this one. I could not for the life of me figure out how to win this battle (and this is one that the Confederacy won, according to the battle description.) I tried absolutely everything, but nothing worked, and I lost badly every single time. I maybe tried the battle 10 - 15 times over. 

Eventually, I noticed something as I was replaying this battle. Every time I replayed it, I had less and less money to work with. Inflation went up for me, too, and down for the Union. The numbers got pretty ridiculous, with the Union enjoying something like -40% inflation. It appears that winning and losing battles affects the inflation figures and how much money you get in each successive battle. Eventually I had less men, too, but this seems to take longer to decrease. In my first attempt at this battle, I had over $400k to work with. In my last, I had less than half that.

What kind of nightmare economy is this???

I don't know why the game does this, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It seems, to me, to treat each battle as its own isolated scenario, as there is no tally at the end of how many battles you won or lost, and if you overall won the war or not. [I found out later that it does if you type in any number above 14] So why then is there this mechanic that treats each battle as connected? It appears to be a conflicting gameplay mechanic.

Unless the intended way of playing the game was to do each battle one after the other in succession. The battles are sequenced in chronological order, so it makes sense. Start from Battle 1, finish with 14, and see if you can win all of them in a row. I decided that would be my end goal for Civil War. But first, I wanted to see how the rest of the battles went. So I restarted the program to reset the inflation and money, but I opted to start at Battle 3, as I had already won the first two. Still couldn't win Seven Days. I gave it a few more attempts before deciding to move on to the rest of the battles. 

I'll briefly list how they all went, along with the strategy I chose:

• Battle 4 (Second Bull Run): Lost. Chose offensive option 3.
• Battle 5 (Antietam): Won. Offensive option 1.
• Battle 6 (Fredericksburg): Won. Defensive option 1.
• Battle 7 (Murfreesboro): Won. Defensive option 1.
• Battle 8 (Chancellorsville): Won. Offensive option 1.
• Battle 9 (Vicksburg): Won. Defensive option 4.
• Battle 10 (Gettysburg): Won. Offensive option 1.
• Battle 11 (Chickamauga): Lost. Offensive option 4.
• Battle 12 (Chattanooga): Lost. Offensive option 1.
• Battle 13 (Spotsylvania): Lost. Offensive option 2.
• Battle 14 (Atlanta): Lost. Offensive option 3.

As you can see, I managed to win most of the middle battles, but lost the last four. Some were rather close losses, others were complete disasters. That ended my first full playthrough of Civil War, and, as it was getting late, I decided to shelf it for the night and come back the next day to try for winning all 14. My policy with this game - as is generally the case with all games - is not to look at any sort of guide unless I get seriously stuck. If I continue to get stuck on a battle, I'll go look up the actual battle and use that as a guide.

What I also noticed is that, more often than not, strategy 1 (artillery strike) is generally the best option for winning most battles. I wonder how consistent that is with how the real battles went? 

So, as the next day came, I started up another session. My plan was to start at Battle 1, and keep going until I lost, starting again from the beginning. All I can say is that Battle 3 continued to be a thorn in my side. I lost it every single time again. Strategy 1 got me the closest, but it was futile. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible to win this fight this way. I tried all sorts of spending combinations, but nothing came close. So I decided to just ignore this battle and come back later.

I managed to win Battle 4, which I didn't last time, but then things took a rather bad turn, and I lost every battle after Battle 9 (losing 8), including Battle 3 again, which I thought would go better if my stats were better. The computer simply chose a different option for itself and destroyed me. I found out that choosing a number after 14 brings up a stats page that tells you how many battles each side won, and declares a winner, also providing a comparison chart for casualties between the real war and your performance, and telling you how often you used each strategy. I mostly just used artillery since it worked well last time. It was a 7 - 7 draw on battles, and the computer decided that I'd lost the war.

History repeats.

I was rather discouraged at this point. I felt stuck. Maybe it's not possible to win? Maybe history is simply destined to repeat itself, over and over again? I decided to look for some help. 

I found a scan from at 1975 edition of Creative Computing Magazine that explains the mechanics of Civil War in greater detail. Turns out that some things I had suspected were right, some were wrong. Some things I hadn't thought of.

• The success of your previous battles is indeed intended to affect your resources and inflation for the next battle.
• Inflation does in fact do something - Apparently it "determines the present value of your money and is used in calculating the effectiveness of your money." A rather vague statement, but at least I know it does something.
• Morale is also affected by your success in battle. It basically snowballs if you keep doing well.
• The computer apparently tries to guess your strategy and counter it. I still don't know what counters what, exactly, other than the corresponding 2 and 3 strategies countering each other.

Aaannnnd that's about it as far as any talk about this game goes online. I'd have to go research these battles, and frankly, I can't be bothered doing so. It's not worth the effort for such a basic text game that is honestly not that good. With that in mind, I'm going to do the scores now, and if I get the motivation to try the game again and beat it, that'll be covered in its own post, since this one is long enough already. Sound and Story are N/A, as is standard for simulation-style text games. Yes, it's based on history, so it technically does have a story, but it's not told as a story. It's just "here's the battle, go fight."

Time Played: 1 hour; a full playthrough of all battles takes no more than 10 minutes.

Difficulty: 4/10

It's actually quite hard to judge the difficulty of this one. On the one hand, half of the battles are really easy to figure out, so much so that I won half of them on my first or second attempt. Some of the battles seem utterly impossible to win, however, without knowledge of the historical battles. Overall, though, it's not difficult to figure out the pattern for success.

Game Design: 4

Civil War represents quite a significant leap in the complexity of game design in comparison to PDP Basketball, which was designed only a year prior. It seems to add on to and modify the base that PDP Basketball started with, as Civil War includes the same 4 offensive and defensive options the former game had, but adds more in between deciding what play to choose. We have a basic form of resource management, which I appreciate as it gives some freedom in decision making, with choices actually having a difference in the battle's results. The game then builds on top of this by having the results of each subsequent battle affecting the next. Great stuff in theory, and it encourages repeat playthroughs.

In practice, however, these resource decisions seem to make little material impact on the outcome of a battle. It mostly comes down to the strategy you choose vs. the computer's choice. Inflation appears to do nothing, other than a lower number than the base number indicating that you'll have more starting cash and men. There's also a formula that can be easily figured out to ensure that funds distribution always results in high morale, cutting out the guesswork.  Even in spite of all this, a few battles are completely unwinnable. The game suggests that this would be because of the game trying to follow the historic results, but this results in inconsistencies, with battles you can win as the Confederacy that they didn't actually win, and having unwinnable battles that they actually won (Seven Days, I'm looking at you). This kind of inconsistency really annoys me when a game is claiming to be "historical". It also seems to expect you to have some prior knowledge of the American Civil War, which may seem short sighted, but this game was written in an American high school, so the presumption may have been valid in context, but I find it a bit irritating regardless.

Controls: 9

It's very easy to manage for a text-based game. Just type in the numbers and press enter. An issue can crop up due to the large numbers needing to be inputted, where I often accidentally type in a number a digit short of what I intended - usually one ending with several 0s.

Visual: 7

Civil War is formatted really well - the instructions are clear and formatted exactly how I wish PDP Basketball formatted them. The battle information is also presented very clearly, with enough blank space for information to be processed easily. Bonus points for the optional battle descriptions and the way the instructions are written - gives the game some extra personality and immersion. I didn't detect any typos either. For what it is, I really appreciate it.

Functionality: 5

Free points. UI design is great, nice and clear. In-game instructions were easy to read and understand, and there were no glitches during my time playing.

Accessibility: 2

I've already criticised it for expecting the player to have knowledge of the American Civil War, and it's also a text game - one with a lot of big numbers - so accessibility is automatically bad. It at least doesn't require you to have knowledge of the Civil War to have any success, but it still assumes it.

Fun Factor: 4

I probably enjoyed it a little more than PDP Basketball, but not by much. I'm a sucker for resource management and strategy games, so that helped draw me in a little it, but the overall simplicity and repetitiveness of the game, combined with the aforementioned frustrations made it overall not that enjoyable to play.

Overall: Civil War gets a slightly below average score of 31/70. The percentage conversion, 38.75%, gets it into the top of the E tier, just missing out on the D tier, unfortunately.

This might be my longest post to date. Lots to talk about, even with such a simple game. Plus, there's probably a second post coming once I win. Makes me wonder how things are going to be when I get to far longer and more complex games. Breaking them up over several posts will probably be the way to go.

[Add.] Upon completing the rescore, I saw yet again that I made another scoring mistake. Civil War's score was listed as out of 80, when it should have been 70. This means that it should have been up in the D-tier after all. In spite of this, its score has actually increased to 32/70, or 45.71%

Prehistory IX: Baer's "Brown Box" & Computer Quiz

This is the ninth 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.

Here we go back to a more historical style of post. Neither of these games are playable, but both are historically very important for different reasons, hence why they get their own article.

The "Brown Box"

Image from the National Museum of American History.

Release Date: 1967; technically an unreleased prototype

Platform: Dedicated Console

Genre: Various

Developer(s): Ralph H. Baer

Publisher(s): Sanders Associates

It might seem a bit odd to the casual observer to cover something that's a prototype; an experiment of sorts. But this little experiment, and its creator, had a massive impact on the formation of the commercialisation of video games.

The Brown Box was developed by Ralph H. Baer, an engineer and inventor born in Germany, migrating to the USA in 1938 prior to the outbreak of World War II due to his family's Jewish background. He ended up studying electronics, and after the conclusion of WWII (where he was drafted into the US Army in military intelligence), he worked as an engineer in various fields before landing at Sanders Associates, a defense contractor, in 1956. It's during his time with Sanders that Baer conceived and created the Brown Box, out of a growing interest in the idea of connecting a device to a TV screen to play games. This was the seventh iteration of the device. It was named the Brown Box due the wood grain vinyl applied to it, apparently to "make the prototype look more attractive to potential investors." [arcade-history.com]

According to arcade-history.com, the device had six built-in games available, a light-gun game, ping-pong, tennis, volleyball, handball and a "chase" game. The light-gun (which looked an awful lot like a real gun) and ping-pong games are of the most interest, as light guns would become a console and arcade staple for many years, and the ping-pong game had influence on Atari's Pong.

What's most important to talk about with the Brown Box is that Baer wanted to manufacture it into an actual commercial product. If it was just an experiment, I highly doubt we'd be talking about it outside of being a historical oddity akin to Relay Moe. Baer found a buyer in Magnavox, who Sanders licensed the device to to make a commercial version of it. The result of this licensing was the Magnavox Odyssey, released in November 1972 as the first home video game console. Based on the Brown Box, it featured many of the same games and functions of the Brown Box, but also expanded the horizons of the Brown Box by introducing many different games and including physical game pieces to use along with the TV part of the game. In a sense, the Odyssey was a hybrid TV/board game device. But more on that when I get around to reviewing the Odyssey proper.

In my eyes, it's pretty clear that the Brown Box makes Ralph Baer the father of console gaming. He's sometimes referred to as the father of video games in general, but there's others who could argue for that title also. Steve Russell and the other creators of Spacewar!? Nolan Bushnell for creating the first arcade game, Computer Space? Or even John Kemeny's invention of the BASIC programming language, on which most of the first home computer games were built? History is not always so simple. But Baer's contribution cannot be denied, and he most certainly invented the home console.

Now, onto the next game...

Computer Quiz

Ahh, so this is where Computer Space gets its "interesting" marketing style from...

Release Date: 1967

Platform: Arcade 

Genre: Trivia

Developer(s): Nutting Associates, Inc.

Publisher(s): Nutting Associates, Inc.

Okay, first thing to deal with is the listing of this as an arcade game. The arcade existed long before Computer Space rolled around, but they were mostly filled with pinball machines and electromechanical games that featured some 'video elements', per se, such as large projector screens with moving images, but they weren't actual video games in the sense we understand them as being played on a monitor or TV screen. This is the space in which Computer Quiz (also released under the alternate name I.Q. Computer) resides. An arcade game, but not a video game. 

Yes, this game has a screen, used to display the questions and multiple-choice answers, so in some sense one could argue it to be a video game. But most other elements are displayed using more traditional electro-mechanical elements, and there is a second screen for category selection which complicates things even more. The fact that not every aspect of the game appears on the screen disqualifies it from being a proper arcade video game. It's more of a transitional piece.

Here's a close-up of the actual machine.

That being said, why am I even bringing this thing up? Well, in actual fact, it's more about who made it rather than the game itself, as the company that developed it, Nutting Associates, and the two brothers that worked on this game, Bill and Dave Nutting, have left quite a legacy in gaming, particularly in the arcade. 

Computer Quiz was quite a strong seller, due to being able to get around the gambling stigma associated with arcades at the time by being viewed as more of an educational device. Across both the Computer Quiz and I.Q. Computer iterations, it sold almost 8000 units - a seriously impressive number at the time. Nutting Associates produced a couple more games in the late 60s, including a two-player version of Computer Quiz and a sports-themed trivia game, Sports World. Nutting Associates had become quite well-known in this trivia game sphere by the end of the decade.

Things changed for Nutting Associates when, in 1971, a young, budding entrepreneur came to them with a game he wanted to sell. It was unlike anything the company had produced before, and evidently they saw potential in the young man and his game, and agreed to manufacture it for him. Of course, I'm talking about Nolan Bushnell and Computer Space, the first true arcade video game. Computer Space was named such in reference to Computer Quiz. Computer Space didn't sell all that well, with 1500 units sold and minimal profit, and so Bushnell and Nutting parted ways. I suspect Nutting Associates may have regretted that decision, considering how Bushnell's next project turned out.

Nutting Associates continued to be involved in arcade games until 1976, with their last project being Ricochet, a licensed clone of TV Pinball by Exidy. Afterwards the company was sold to William "Si" Redd, and absorbed into video poker company Sircoma. But the story of Nutting Associates doesn't really end there, as Bill's brother, Dave Nutting, forged his own path apart from the family venture. He formed Milwaukee Coin Industries, Inc. in 1971 as an electromechanical game manufacturer, and later the creatively-named Dave Nutting Associates after a falling out with MCI. 

Dave Nutting's biggest contribution to video games is most likely his introduction of microprocessor technology into arcade game development. Microprocessors opened the floodgates of possibility for arcade game development. Prior to their integration, arcade games were developed using discrete components, commonly known as transistor-to-transistor logic (TTL.) This tech was very limited in what it could accomplish, and most games were primitive in both gameplay and graphics. Microprocessors were much simpler to program, and also allowed greater scope and complexity in game design, as well as more complex and animated graphics. 

He demoed the technology to Bally-Midway, who subsequently commissioned him to produce an arcade game with the tech, an adaptation of Taito's Western Gun, which would be released in 1975 as Gun Fight - the first arcade game to use a microprocessor. Dave Nutting Associates effectively became a subsidiary of Bally-Midway from that point onward, developing many of their classic arcade games of the mid-late 70s, most notably Sea Wolf, and also developing their second-generation home console, the Bally Professional Arcade (later known as the Astrocade.) Dave Nutting Associates closed their doors in 1984, I suspect as a result of the video game crash of 1983, with Dave Nutting himself completely quitting video games afterwards. Nutting would pass away in 2020, leaving a substantial legacy in video games that probably doesn't receive the recognition it deserves. He changed the way arcade games were developed completely.

That pretty well sums up these two games (well, technically one is a console) and their developers. While I can't play either games, this post was more about the people who made them, as they are part of the much greater history of video games, and their legacies are significant ones. Look at it like another couple of pieces of the puzzle of video game history being put in place. 

Next post I'll get back into playing some games. I might start taking them one at a time from now on, as the games are starting to get more involved and complex. It also might be easier for me to get posts out more consistently focusing on one game per post. Civil War is the next game on my list anyway, and that's quite a hefty game for the standards of the time, as far as I'm aware.