Let's Play (010) - The Sumerian Game [Sum9rx]: How to Starve A Kingdom

Release Date: 1965

Platform: IBM 7090

Genre: Resource Management, Educational

Developer(s): Mabel Addis, William McKay

Publisher(s):

I've been looking forward to covering The Sumerian Game. Ever since I discovered the collection on Steam that recovered and restored several versions of the game (alongside some other lost games I'm excited to cover), I've been itching to play it for OGC. It's especially exciting as it appeared after I did my original article on The Sumerian Game. A lost game, no more. And it brought some friends along, too.

HareSoft's The Sumerian Game collection helpfully places all the various versions of the game on a timeline, allowing us to clearly see which versions were first. According to this timeline, there are two 1965 versions, titled Sum9rx and Suilxr. The former is described as the less complete version, so that's what I've chosen to play first.

The basic gameplay outline remains the same across most forms of The Sumerian Game, and the later evolution into Hamurabi, so I'll go over it here once, and for future versions, I'll only be pointing out the differences.

The king has arrived.

All versions of The Sumerian Game place you in the position of king over a kingdom. In the earlier versions, it's the city-state of Lagash, in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Hamurabi versions, you are king of Babylon. Your job, as king, is to ensure the stable running and flourishing of your domain - by making sure everyone's fed properly.

Sum9rx begins your reign as follows:

• Population = 500
• Grain = 5,000
• Total Farm Land = 2,000 (acres)
• Cultivated Land = 500 (acres)

Here begins the gameplay loop of The Sumerian Game. The player must now decide how to use their resources. The sequence Sum9rx follows is "how much grain to store" ==> "how much grain to plant" ==> "how much grain to feed to the people." This version is extremely particular about how you distribute your grain - every last bushel must be allocated; nothing can be left over, otherwise the game will tell you off for "not meeting current economic conditions." That's a fancy way of saying that you didn't so your sums properly - try again, dummy.

This advisor of mine is one grumpy, pedantic bastard.

My familiarity with David Ahl's Hamurabi led me to think that the formula of grain per person would be same, so I played the first round accordingly.

Turns out, this was quite a ways off the mark. I forgot that Hamurabi started you with only a population of 100, not 500. As a result, 166 people died of starvation. This is going well, isn't it?

Still... could be worse.

At least I had a good amount of grain to work with for next turn. Roughly 7,000 bushels, including stored inventory. The remaining people should be better fed this turn.

I put away enough grain to bring my reserves up to 2,000. I also planted the same amount of grain as last turn, 2,000.

That left ~3,000 bushels leftover to feed the people. This is where I discovered the aforementioned annoyance of having to be pedantically specific with grain totals. I spent several minutes playing around with rough estimates until I got what the game was asking. I settled on 2,000 bushels planted, and leftover was 2,826 bushels for the people. No way are they going hungry this time!

In fact, I was apparently too generous with my food distribution. The steward called it "excessive." Well, I wasn't going to let anyone starve again, was I?!?

I mean... less people around means more food for everyone, right?

It was at this point where a problem occurred in the game. Our harvest for that turn completely failed, and there was quite literally zero new grain.

So I had to work with what I had, which was less than 2,000 grain. Foolishly I left the ~1,000 year-old bushels in storage alone. Probably should've planted those, or allocated more to the people.

At this point, the writing was on the wall. The kingdom was doomed. Even what left I had tried to plant produced nothing again. No more food, nothing to plant. It was over. Time to call the teacher to tell me what I did wrong.

You have doomed the kingdom.

I was told to try again. So that's what I did. Unfortunately, it played out in much the same way as the first time. I did learn some valuable information, though.

• The minimum formula for keeping the people fed is five bushels per person.
• This does not permit population growth, however. For that to start happening, you need to allocate at least six bushels per person.
• However (again), the population growth won't outpace the disaster deaths until you allocate at least seven bushels per person.

Whether it's actually a good idea to grow the population or not is debatable, as that means more hungry mouths to feed. I did only stick to 2,000 bushels to be planted for the previous season, so I considered whether more was required.

I did so, but the yields didn't improve at all. I knew the inevitable famine was coming...

All my planning only delayed the inevitable.

That's if, it is indeed a famine, and not a coding error causing the harvests to drop to zero. They did occur at different times in each playthrough, so maybe not. But having multiple periods of the harvest completely dropping off, regardless of how much grain is planted feels a little suspicious to me.

This is where I chose to end my time playing Sum9rx. Considering the fact that I was unable to beat this (and didn't want to play forever just to test the theory), I will be coming back to this for my first "longplay" video. I plan to do this more regularly going forward as a more "complete" and "professional" playthrough, once I know a game better. This game is the perfect tester for this type of video.

For now, we'll look at my tentative scores. These will be subject to change once I figure out if I can beat the game or not.

Scores

Time Played: 20 minutes (approximate - I played Suilxr in the same session.)

Difficulty: 10* (Impossible)
Of the two rounds I played, I lost both after a certain point where harvests stop. Whether this is part of the game, or poor programming from an early draft resulting in an unwinnable scenario has yet to be determined. So, technically impossible to win as far as I'm aware, but with an asterisk as I'll be playing this again more in-depth at a later time to discern the truth.

Gameplay: 5
Sum9rx's gameplay loop is more advanced than the previous games. It is, however, less realised than Tennis for Two. This is an early draft of The Sumerian Game, after all.

There appears to be some depth in the mechanics, from what I noticed. The volume of grain fed to the population doesn't just determine whether or not the people starve, but also population growth. Yet there's also a balance to be had here. Feed them too little, and there will be no births. Too much food and the game will tell you it was excessive. There's a Goldilocks "just right" sweet spot somewhere in the middle that I didn't find.

What was of more concern was the point in the game where crop harvests completely stopped. This seemed to happen around the same time in both rounds: late year 3 - early year 4. I'm unsure whether this is an intentional decision. I could see it being intentional as a famine scenario, testing your management of stored grain. Two seasons in a row also seems like a death sentence, and could be an forced game ending sequence. At the same time, the game also calls you out for losing. More time playing is required to determine whether this is a design choice, and I'm just missing something, or a programming error. The latter seems most likely to me, based on the early development state of Sum9rx. The former is possible if I'm misunderstanding how to play the game, in particular when the game info speaks of managing "arable" land.

The biggest annoyance I had playing this version was its insistence on every single bushel of grain being allocated somewhere. It forces the player into doing some convoluted sums, which I just used a calculator for since I couldn't be bothered. I know this was meant to be an educational game, but the precision asked for seems excessive. The next version of the game, Suilxr, does fix this, thankfully.

Controls: 5
As a rule for text-based games, I leave the controls at a standard 5, and adjust depending on the intuitiveness and logic of the inputs required. Sum9rx passes the standard test, as all you input is solid integers, but there's nothing else worth noting.

Sound: N/A
The collection has the click-clacking of the typewriter as the text is drawn on screen, but I don't really count that as actual game sound.

Visual: 1
Text-based games all receive a base 1 score. Extra points can be given for exceptional formatting and attempts at ASCII graphics. Sum9rx has neither of these, so a 1 it is.

Story: N/A
One could argue that this game has some form of base, nascent, procedural story driven by the player's actions. It gives you a clear setting and role, and your decisions ultimately affect the outcome of the game. Whether that's sufficient to make a story without a formal plot and characters (yes, there is technically you as the King, and the King's Steward), I'm not so sure.

Functionality: 5*
A tentative score, because I'm yet to find out if the game's bugged or not.

Accessibility: 3
Standard for text-based games. Yes, it's available in an easy-to-get package, but the game itself still requires a lot of reading and arithmetic, which can be bothersome for some.

Fun Factor: 4
It's somewhat more enjoyable than all the E-tier games, but not by much. Also benefits from replayability, as there's always the option to come back, experiment and try to improve your management of Lagash.

Overall: 23/80
A weighted score of 28.75 places Sum9rx at the top of the E tier pile for now. Marginally better than the early proto-games, and I'd sooner return to it (and will) over what's placed under it. This is subject to change, however, based on the results of my Longplay test.

Video:

Up Next: The Sumerian Game, Part 2 [Suilrx]

#043 - Guess: The Number, As Long As You Know it in Binary

Video in progress...

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Walter J. Koetke

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

I've probably mentioned this before, but I've done some basic programming in my time. One course I took had me program a game in C++ called Number Wizard. It's a simple number guessing game - the computer picks a number between 1 and 100, and you guess it, with the computer telling you if your guess is higher or lower than its number. I don't remember how to code it, but I know it was very easy to do.

Today's game, Guess, is one of those Number Wizard types of games. We've seen plenty already, and will see plenty in the future. Guess does have a couple of ways in which it distinguishes itself from the pack, however. One of those is its author, who is unquestionably far more interesting than his game could ever dream of being.

Origins & History

Walter J. Koetke is the author of Guess. I've played one of his other games for the blog already, Bull. Although, that's not technically his game - he just had his students convert the game, originally written by David Sweet, into BASIC. So, I suppose we could say that Guess is Walt Koetke's first actual game that he authored himself. I didn't give him much of a bio in the Bull article, so now's as good a time to do so as any.

Walter J. Koetke (1939 - 2013)

Born in Chicago in 1939 (died 2013), Walter J. Koetke was actually quite a significant figure in the realm of computer-based education. He earned a Bachelor of Science from MIT, and did his Masters in Education at Harvard. We know that he worked as a teacher at Lexington High School in Massachusetts during the late 60s and through the 1970s thanks to the games he was involved in producing, such as Guess, but his contributions go much beyond that. We'll get to his work on integrating computers into mathematics education a bit later, so I'll instead turn my attention to his later work. 

During the 1980s, he worked on a series of educational programs for the Microzine magazine, run by Scholastic. These magazines often came with a computer program that was basically a "choose your own adventure" styled educational game. Koetke worked on several of these, and also worked on a few other educational programs for Scholastic, such as Math Shop. For all this, he earned a Distinguished Teacher Award, from the Presidential Commission on Academic Scholars. Unfortunately, nobody on the internet bothered to mention when he earned this award. I even tried to do some digging myself, through the US Department of Education's online database, but to no avail. The "Distinguished Teacher Award" records go back to 2003, but they don't even have lists for all the years! All the ones I looked at didn't have Koetke's name in them, so either he's in one of the years that didn't have the list available (2005-08), or his award predates 2003.

The source for Guess.

I digress. Back to the game. What's likely the most interesting thing about Guess is where it's been sourced from in Walter Koetke's body of work. 101 BASIC Computer Games cites the original source of the game being from a book, written by Koetke himself, entitled "Computers in the Classroom." Another of Koetke's important contributions, this book is intended as a resource manual for teachers in using computers to assist students in learning algebra. Keep in mind that this book was originally written in 1968-69. To say that computers weren't commonplace in the classroom at that time would be an understatement. The original form of Guess appears across pages 40 and 41 of that book, from which someone at DEC (possibly David Ahl; 101 BASIC Games doesn't say who) converted the game from FOCAL into BASIC. This all makes Guess another game rooted in Koetke's educational purposes, though not strictly an "edutainment" game itself, unlike his 1980s projects.

Guess the Game

As I noted at the start of the article, Guess is another one of these simple number guessing games that we've already seen several of up to this point in time. Number: A Number Guessing Game, Trap, Stars, and even Letter: A Letter Guessing Game are alternative takes on the format that I've already played. None of these games rate particularly high in my esteem. Guess is no different, hence my saying that the most interesting thing about it is the where and who it originates from. Although, it does distinguishes itself slightly above all of the above in one way none else do.

The numbers - what do they mean??

Guess allows the player to choose the range of numbers the computer can select from. The lowest will always be 1, but the upper limit can be whatever you like. This was not the case in Koetke's original program - that had a set range of 1 - 100. Someone added that in for 101 BASIC Games. Once again, we don't know who that was. The idea in Koetke's mind remains the same across both versions of the program, regardless. The premise of number guessing like this was built on binary search - how computers essentially think in bits that can either be a 0 or 1, each successive bit representing the next number in a sequence of numbers always increasing to the power of 2 (think of the 2048 sequence, to use a game analogy: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on and so forth.) The logic in number guessing is that you should be able to guess the number in one less digits than required to represent the number in binary notation. So, for example, a number like 73 would require 7 digits to represent in binary (100 1001, read from right-to-left.) Therefore, it should take you no more than 6 guesses to guess the number chosen from within that range. The game will actually tell you this if you take more guesses than expected to correctly guess the number.

If we talk about this in more game-like terms, the basic strategy that gets you to this "binary-1" number of guesses is what I call "splitting the difference." If the number range is from 1 to 100, split the difference and guess 50. If the number is higher, split the difference between 50 and 100 - 75. If lower than 50, split the difference between 1 and 50 - 25, and so on and so forth. Bigger numbers simply require more splits. Thinking about it in binary notation just helps in knowing how many guesses (and splits) you'll probably need. Like, a number between 63 and 32 is going to need about 5 guesses, whereas a number between 512 and 1,023 should expect 9 guesses.

I get a lot of enjoyment out of these cartoons - mostly for the sheer oddness of them.

This is probably far more of a discussion than a game like Guess deserves, yet I'm here doing it anyway. I haven't even talked about my experience playing it yet! And, truthfully, that's because there's very little to report. I've played countless games just like this, so what new can I possibly say?

Pick a number. Any number.

Well, I can at least comment on the one thing Guess does differently. Having a choice of the upper number limit is surprisingly refreshing. There's certainly a temptation to see how high the game will let me go with it, even if, in reality, it just boils down to the same thing, but with more steps, and therefore more mental maths to do.

15 is 1111 in binary.

The one thing that does annoy me, though, is that Guess doesn't let you change the upper limit during gameplay at all. It's a pick-and-stick game, the upper limit you set is the one you're stuck with until you close and reload the game. It's a minor annoyance, but minor annoyances become major annoyances when there's nothing else to talk about.

Something a bit more adventurous. 255 is 1111 1111 in binary.
5 guesses is a good round; 7 guesses is par.

And, seeing that I now truly do have nothing else to talk about, let's do the scores.

Scores

Time Played: 11 minutes

Difficulty: 1 (Brain-dead)
I don't think I need to comment on the "challenge," or lack thereof, in a game like Guess.

Gameplay: 2
I'm giving this a 2 to distinguish it from the other "Number Wizard" games - purely because Guess lets you choose the upper limit of numbers the computer can select from. It's one more gameplay element than Letter has, and that, by default, makes it better and more interesting to play.

Controls: 5
It couldn't be simpler. Remember, I don't give extra points just for doing what should be expected.

Visual: 1
There's nothing noteworthy about the game's formatting to speak of; very standard.

Functionality: 5
Free points if the game works properly.

Accessibility: 4
It's very easy to understand a game like this, and it seems to be written in a way that's designed for younger children to understand and read. It's still text-based, which is a fundamentally inaccessible format for a video game, but Guess is probably as accessible as it gets.

Fun Factor: 1
I can at least replay Guess fairly easily, with the free choice of number limit giving opportunity to try larger and larger upper limits. It's fundamentally the same, but generates a bit more interest in my mind - compared to Letter, at least.

Overall: 18 (weighted to 22.5)

A score of 18 (weighted to 22.5) for Guess is, for what it's worth, not actually that bad. It's a E-tier game, sure, but that's the same score that Galaxy Game and Fur Trader got - which are far more complex (and more deeply flawed) games. That one, simple little act of allowing the player some customisation of the game rules has made a big difference. Relatively speaking, of course. This still ain't a good game, nor is it really worth your time.

I can't believe I've written over 1,500 words on a simple number guessing game. What madness am I succumbing to?

Anyway, this will be the last "new" game from the list for a while. I'm quite intent on finishing the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device project, and getting started with what I'm calling a "soft reboot" of the blog. I will be revisiting all former years, covering all of what I missed, and redoing the "Prehistory" series in more detail with better research and writing. As for the video side of things, I think it's inevitable that it will become asynchronous with the blog; the videos do take a lot more work now, and are predicated on my having finished the game's blog article so that I can write the script. So if you're a follower of both, take note of that moving forward.

A Brief History of... Hangman

Going to try something new here. Typically, when the first video game comes out based on a real-world game or concept, I would include a short history of that game/concept within the same article. Here, I'd like to try something different and separate the history of the source from the digital interpretation.

With the Game of Hangman article having just released, the traditional pen-and-paper game of Hangman is a perfectly suitable choice to begin this little foray into the broader world of games. I'll keep the format quite simple on these: origins of the game, the earliest video game attempts, and the state of the game in current day.

Here's one I prepared earlier.

The History of Hand-Drawn Executions

While Hangman is a now-ubiquitous little game played by likely every child who ever attended school over the past 100-120 years, there's no concrete answer on where exactly the game came from. Ah, the historian's worst nightmare: obscure and uncertain origins.

There is a mythical origin story of the game floating around the internet, the origins of which I'm uncertain of. No credible sources are around to support this story, which dates back to 17th century Europe and real hangings. A prisoner would be set up on the gallows, over a five-legged stand - the legs representing the number of guesses the prisoner had at guessing a word set by their executioner before their life would be snuffed out. If the prisoner guessed the word correctly, they'd be set free. This real life practice was then somehow, somewhere, immortalised in a pen-and-paper children's game. Great fun for all the family!

More realistically, it seems that Hangman's origins can be somewhat traced back to the Victorian-era Great Britain. Variants of the game would be regularly presented in educational publications in the mid-late 19th century. One of the more commonly known early examples of a Hangman-type game comes from an 1894 book entitled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, compiled by Alice Bertha Gomme. The variant in this book forgoes the gallows, and is instead called Birds, Beasts and Fishes. Functionally it's very similar, but focuses on the titular animals, and makes it a little easier (it's a children's game, after all) by starting the words off with the first and last letters being given. This variant being included in a "Traditional Games" type of book suggests that word-guessing games along these lines had already been around for quite some time - my guess would be multiple generations, at least.

It made its way across the Atlantic by the start of the 20th century, as reported in an... interesting article, shall we say, published by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1902. Just look up "White Cap Party", and you'll see what I mean. From that point onward, the game of Hangman appears to have stabilised into the form everyone knows it as today. Some have taken it upon themselves to devise less violent / implicitly racist (or so they claim) forms of the game in more recent years, but I'll save that discussion for the current-day state of the game later in this article.

Digital Dule Trees

As we already know from my Game of Hangman article, the origins of video game adaptations of Hangman date back well into the 1970s. Game of Hangman isn't the first one, however. There's at least one known game that pre-dates Ken Aupperle's take on the word-guessing game, dating back to 1970. I actually spent some time fiddling around with a PDP-10 emulator, and was able to get the game running! This version, whose author is unknown, plays like conventional Hangman, however the way it draws the gallows is opposite to convention. The picture of the hanging man begins fully drawn, with each incorrect guess (9 total) erasing a part of the picture, until it disappears entirely. Unusual, but the end result is functionally the same. The ASCII drawing of the hangman is also quite detailed - impressive for the time. Expect a full article dedicated this Hangman game in the future.

Aupperle's game in action.

Ken Aupperle's is likely the second Hangman video game. This, as we've already seen, plays by the conventional rules. Aupperle's drawing of the hangman is far less detailed, but he does come up with some very creative words to guess. I won't go into much more detail on this game, as I've already given it a full article, so check that post out to get all the details.

Skipping a few years forward over other early computer takes, it's the first generation of home computers, and second generation of home consoles where Hangman really gets its time in the video game spotlight. Just about every home computer and console had their own version of Hangman, most fairly early on in the generation's lifespan, too. This was still around the time where the home console developers were trying to pitch their devices as more than just entertainment devices - they could also be used for fun education, so they claimed. Consoles like the Atari 2600 and Fairchild Channel F heavily leaned into educational titles early on, of which Hangman was one, both consoles releasing their takes on the game in 1978. On the computer side of things, innovation took place pretty quickly, as developers on the Apple II came out with a series of multilingual Hangman games, beginning with 1978's The Spanish Hangman. Later, there would be German, French, Russian, and even Latin versions, all giving the twist of making the player translate words and even phrases from one language into another.

How... inquisitive.

The development of Hangman video games drops off quite significantly after the late 1970s - early 1980s. I would hazard a guess that this drop off is a fairly natural effect of the increasing proficiency and creativity of game developers, making Hangman not a terribly interesting type of game to make. There were still some rather curious takes on the formula, such as 1994's sci-fi Effacer: Hangman from the 25th Century, released for that most dreaded of consoles: the Philips CD-i. There were some later Flash and handheld console takes on Hangman, but interest in making Hangman video games has almost died out in the 21st century.

If this is what Hangman looks like in the 25th century,
I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

Modern Mock Trials

Hangman in all its forms continue to be played with regularity in the 21st century, yet not without controversy and the nature of our times affecting the way the game is perceived. Our sensitive-to-offense, obsessed-with-political-correctness culture in the West had led to many to rethink how to present Hangman without the perceived sinister undertones present in its original form. On one hand, this does make sense, as having a children's game feature an antiquated form of capital punishment is maybe not the best idea in the world. One could argue this mindset has been present since Gomme's Traditional Games book, with that variant entirely removing the gallows. Modern attempts to "clean up" the game feature a different kind of drawing being made, like a snowman, or other various activities not involving death. In the complete opposite direction, our culture also seems to love death and the grotesque, so attempts have been made to make Hangman even more violent, like in the case of the 2007 flash game Hangman Extreme.

Just in case you though regular Hangman was a bit dull,
Hangman Extreme has you covered.

On the other hand, this obsession with "cleaning up" Hangman's image can go to far into the realms of historical anachronism. One blog I read during my research equated the premise of Hangman with a lynching of all things. My professional opinion on this is that I can see how that association could be made by certain quarters of the United States. Although, I think that the historical evidence would prove without a shadow of a doubt that Hangman is a game definitely not about that hideous and awful practice. First, the game originated in Britain, not America, where the practice was totally foreign. Secondly - if the mythical origins of Hangman are to be believed - the game had a purpose completely dissociated from 19th to early 20th century American culture. People can repurpose things for nefarious purposes all the time - but that doesn't mean that the thing itself is inherently immoral. 

My personal opinion is that it's literally a game about guessing words, for crying out loud. Get over yourself. There's no big conspiracy here.

To utilise Ockham's Razor here, the simplest explanation for the origin of Hangman is likely that it comes from a time where public executions by hanging were a normal part of life, and that always weaves itself into the culture of the day. The image of hanging probably got worked into educational exercises as a familiar visual aid for students. It doesn't mean that it was a bad or good thing, that's what the culture was like at the time Hangman likely originated.

Any Last Words?

Just to quickly follow on from the last paragraph, and to provide some perspective. My job, as a historian, is simply to find out the facts and present them within the context of the culture in which they originated, while correcting any misconceptions that inevitably come from our temporal displacement from said culture. The historian isn't here to be a sort of "morality police," or to tell you, "people in the past were savages, weren't they?" Even our culture and generation has its own vices that future generations will call us savages for. We should never think that we're the generation that's "made it." Else we risk the folly of repeating the errors our forefathers made.

On a more personal note - for what it's worth, Hangman is a game I played regularly through school, and I thought nothing of it. It was just a game, and a fun one when you're in primary (elementary) school. Whether I knew what hanging was a concept at the time, I can't remember. But I don't think it matters. It didn't affect my perception of life, that I know for sure.

If you happen to be a teacher or educator reading this, and the very concept of Hangman still bothers you - change it. You are free to switch it out with something else. I've no right to judge. All I want us to know is the proper historical context.

Next up: Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.

#040: Fur Trader - The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

History

Authorship here is attributed to Dan G. Bachor (via Ann Brebner), of the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This also happens to be his only game credit, which is curious to me, as fur trading seems an odd topic for a psychology professor to make a game on. A brief scan of his available academic works also reveal that they have very little, if anything to do with the content of his game, so there's no help there in determining why he chose to make a game about fur trading. Currently, Dan Bachor is on staff at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

As far as my list is concerned, this is only the second game from Canada - the first being Bertie the Brain, all the way back in 1950. Arguably, it's not technically a video game, meaning that Fur Trader is potentially the first ever Canadian-made video game. And fitting too, considering the game's content is distinctly Canadian.

I'm not really sure what's going on in the cartoon...

After this game was included in Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, it was ported both to the Sol-20 and Commodore PET computers, the latter by Ahl's Creative Computing, and the former, interestingly, by MECC. For those who aren't clued in, MECC is the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium - the company responsible for developing the commercial version of The Oregon Trail. Fitting, as Fur Trader bears some slight similarities to The Oregon Trail. Outside of that info, crickets, though real-life fur trading role-playing games (furs not included) still appear to be rather popular in Canada as a means of teaching Canadian history to youngsters.

The Game

Fur Trader stands out initially as a type of game we haven't really seen much of up to this point in history: management simulation. There are some lost games that could potentially fall under the umbrella of business/management sims, but the closest games I've played to this would be Civil War and Hamurabi. Fur Trader still remains distinct from those two in that this is a game strictly about running a business and turning a profit. Those other two games certainly involve management, but as a means for a different purpose, rather than the management itself be the purpose of the game.

We ain't buying your clanker junk!

As I've been mentioning throughout the article, this game is also primarily concerned with Canadian history, also serving as something of an educational title. Fur Trader is set in the year 1776, and you play as the leader of a French Fur Trading expedition in the region surrounding Lake Ontario. This year's expedition has been declared a great success, and you are now returning to sell your wares at a select destination. There are three destination forts to choose from, each varying in several ways:

1. The first fort is Fort Hochelaga, in Montreal, and is the "easy" route of the game. The journey is a safe one, with the fort under the French Army's protection. On account of the ease of the return trip here, your furs sell for the least amount of the three forts, and the supply cost is the highest - no doubt to pay for the hungry soldiers.
2. The second fort is Fort Stadacona, in Quebec. This is the "medium" route. The fort here is also under the Army's protection, however the road there is more perilous, requiring your troop to make a portage and cross the Lachine Rapids. The value of your furs here is a middle ground between the other two forts, as is the cost of supplies. The soldiers must be more well-disciplined and less prone to gorging themselves on the available rations here.
3. The third and final fort is Fort New York. This is the game's "hard" route, with the Dutch controlling the fort, and the route necessitating traversing the lands of the Iroquois. One the flipside, this route gives the highest payout for furs, and has the cheapest supplies.

At these forts, your expedition has 190 furs to sell. You get to select how these 190 are distributed between the four different pelts: mink, beaver, ermine and fox. Each appears to have a different value, but the exactness of their value is something that the player can only figure out through doing some external calculations. My initial assumption was that mink would likely be the most valuable, which is generally in line with my playing experience - beaver also tends to sell quite well, while ermine was generally the poorest performing fur during my playtime. Fox pelts tended to have the most variance in value - sometimes as valuable as mink and beaver, and sometimes performing as poorly as ermine.

The starting situation.

On this, I also noticed that there seemed to be a vague formula the game uses to determine how much you get for your furs at each fort. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appeared to rely on the total amount of each fur selected, and (like the game suggests) the route chosen. At the easiest route (Fort Hochelaga), I tended to get paid around 66 - 75% of the total of each pelt I had, while at the hardest (New York), it tended to be 90 - 110% of the number of each pelt (again, with ermine typically being the worst performing). The middle route (Fort Stadacona) tended to have the most variance, with each fur netting between 75 - 110% of its total number - mink and beaver being the best performing.

No! My precious beaver pelts!

All this discussing furs a their value is well and good, but it doesn't mean much if you can't actually get them to their destination. Fur Trader makes the difficulty distinction between routes evident by having random events that can occur on each separate route that can cause harm to the year's expedition. Events can affect your overall expedition, or can be specific to one type of fur. For instance, at Fort Stadacona, there is a chance your beaver pelts may be too heavy to make the rapid crossing. Alternatively, your canoe might flip during the crossing, causing you to lose all your furs. At the most extreme point, your game can end early if, on the Fort New York route, your party is ambushed and killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Game over. Yikes. That certainly raises the stakes a bit, eh?

I'll admit, I didn't come across that event on my first playthrough, and it came through experimenting with the different routes, seeing what could potentially happen on each. From my testing, it seems that nothing bad ever happens on the easy route (Hochelaga), and the risk increases from there. The other two routes seem to have two, maybe three bad events that can occur - I'm not sure if I saw them all. One thing I did see was a random game crash, though, and that's also a bad event, but an unintended one.

RIP. Game over.

It's an intriguing game, is Fur Trader. As mentioned earlier, there's definitely some similarities to The Oregon Trail. Perilous river crossings, the threat of native raiding parties... although, Fur Trader is far more simplistic in its gameplay, by obvious comparison. I also detect within some nascent adventure game elements, with the game being more narrative driven than gameplay driven, in some sense. There isn't really a story here, though. It's more a historical setting in which your own story can develop - or, at least, that's what the idea seems to be. That's a gameplay-narrative integration concept that will be more fully explored later down the road, but we can see the seeds of the concept being sown here in Fur Trader.

Anyway, that's a lot of chat for what I've been regularly describing as a "simple" game. There just so happens to be a lot to talk about with Fur Trader, which is a nice change of pace. We still have the scores to talk about, too, so let's do that.

Scores

Time Played: 30 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)

More or less determined by the player and what fort they choose to go to, although the result of the choice of fort is random to some degree.

Gameplay: 2/20
I can only give Fur Trader a 2, unfortunately, as there's very, very little proper gameplay here, and much is reliant on the semi-random outcomes of your fort choice. The most "gameplay" aspect I can see is figuring out which of the furs has the best value and using that to determine how many of each you take each year. There's also no endgame to speak of, and no real point or objective to the game other than "make money". Unless you die, that is. You can also figure out fairly quickly which of the furs make the most money, and capitalise on them, which trivialises almost the entire point of the game.

I'm being slightly more generous with the score here, because I can give props to the game for its simple attempt at trying to immerse the player in a historical setting. I argued with myself as to whether the immersion constituted a story, and whether I should include the story metric for Fur Trader, but ultimately decided against it. Fur Trader seems more in-line with Civil War or Hamurabi in the sense that it's not exactly trying to tell a narrative, but has narrative elements built into the gameplay. If Fur Trader didn't have this narrative/immersion aspect, I'd probably have given it a 1, to be perfectly frank.

Controls: 5/10
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here.

Visual: 1/10
It's not formatted very well at all. There's large chunks of unformatted text that are cluttered and hard to read, like the descriptions of the different forts; the numbered list isn't formatted correctly. The code was ported over to the '78 edition of BASIC Computer Games, so the poor formatting suggests the author wasn't overly familiar with programming BASIC, as we've seen far more well-formatted games predating Fur Trader.

Functionality: 4/5
The game can randomly crash at certain points, but seems to be a rare occurrence.

Accessibility: 3/5
While a lot of reading is required, it's not overly wordy, and the game is intended somewhat for educational purposes. No actual knowledge of Canadian history is required to understand what's going on, either, so I'm comfortable with giving this a standard text-based game score.

Fun Factor: 3/20
I think there's some merit to exploring the possible outcomes the game provides for each fort, and for experimenting with how much of each pelt to take, so it has some replay value and interest beyond its incredibly basic gameplay. The historical setting also intrigues me, but I'm biased as a history nerd.

Overall, Fur Trader only ends up with a score of 18 - just enough to keep it out of the F-tier, and put it at the bottom of E-tier. I do feel kind of bad for the score, as a solid amount of effort has been put in to make something rather interesting. However, it just doesn't fare well from a game design perspective. There's little player agency, and there's just not really much point to the game outside of teaching some Canadian history. Feels like a lot of words for what I'd objectively call a "bad" game. At least it's an interesting kind of bad.

Next week is back to the simple, pen-and-paper type games - a common childhood game that, surprisingly, hadn't gotten the digital treatment as of 1973.

#036: Chief - Indian Boomerang Puzzle

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (Basic Type-In)

Genre: Educational, Non-Game

Developer(s): John Graham

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

Alrighty, folks - this is a weird one. Immediately I'm going to make a call on it being not a game. What we have is essentially another Boomerang Puzzle, but this time with some casual racism inserted into it. Fun! This one will, as a result, be much shorter than the last couple of articles.

#031: Boomerang Puzzle - I Know the Greeks Invented Everything, but Boomerangs?

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)

Genre: Puzzle, Non-Game

Developer(s): David H. Ahl, Nicomachus [ed. or maybe not...]

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

It seems like a bizarre place to go, but I'm about to go on a short diatribe about Greek philosophers on a video game blog. The Greeks invented everything, don't ya know?

Anyway... we owe a lot to the Ancient Greek philosophers. Much of what we know and understand about the world was originally discovered by them, as well as methods of understanding. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras - we could go on listing them. Another of these names, certainly not as well known as those I just listed, is Nicomachus of Gerasa. The distinction needs to be made, for there are several notable individuals named Nicomachus. Technically, Nicomachus of Gerasa isn't a Greek, but a Roman, for Gerasa was in Roman Syria - which is today in modern Jordan. Greco-Roman culture had a lot of overlapping though, so you could excuse thinking Nicomachus was a Greek. He was, after all, inspired by one of the great Greeks - Pythagoras. Nicomachus was a Neopythagorean philosopher, which was a movement concerned with the revival of Pythagoras' teachings. For reference, Pythagoras lived in the 6th century BC, whereas Nicomachus lived in the 1st century AD - about 600 years after Pythagoras. Nicomachus was primarily interested in the study of arithmetic and music, and produced his most notable work on the former of these - his Introduction to Arithmetic.

Artist's rendition of Nicomachus. This picture looks funny.

All of this is relevant, I promise...

Nicomachus' Introduction to Arithmetic became the standard mathematics textbook for over 1000 years. Supposedly, an arithmetic puzzle was derived from this book which was given the nickname "boomerang." Unless the Greeks invented those, too, this is a rather anachronistic nickname. This puzzle involves being able to guess a number between 1 and 100 based on the result of dividing it by either 3, 5, or 7 and the remainder.

That's David Ahl's explanation of it, anyway. He took this puzzle and digitized it for today's Boomerang Puzzle, including it in 101 BASIC Computer Games. The trouble is, I scanned through the entire Introduction to Arithmetic to find Ahl's source for the puzzle, and couldn't find what he was referring to. There wasn't really anything close to what he described, in fact. There's a "sieve" method referenced, but that doesn't even belong to Nicomachus.

Artist's rendition of... something. This picture looks terrifying.

Maybe there's a writing of Nicomachus' I've missed - Ahl cites his source as the "Arithmetica," which I assume is Introduction to Arithmetic under a different name, as no results appear when searching for "Arithmetica" online. Ahl was very insistent on the puzzle originating from Nicomachus - so much so that he titled the game after him - NICOMA in the original book, Nicomachus in the microcomputer edition. If anyone does know what Ahl's source is, please let me know in the comments.

So, maybe Nicomachus actually isn't that relevant after all...

[Ed. A helpful commentor cleared up this confusion. Ahl, or whoever he was referencing, had more than likely been mistaken or misremembered the source of the Boomerang Puzzle. In fact, the earliest example of it comes from Sunzi Suanjing, a mathematical writing from Chinese mathematician Sunzi (or Sun Zi - not to be confused with Sun Tzu) at least 200 years after Nicomachus. This formula is commonly known as the Chinese remainder theorem. If the Greeks didn't invent it... the Chinese probably did!]

Regardless, there's still a game to be played.

Or is there? 

To be perfectly frank, after playing Boomerang Puzzle, I don't actually think it's a game. This is more of a novelty program than anything. It's a "pick a number between 1 and 100" guessing game, along the lines of earlier games Trap and Stars. However, it's not you guessing the number this time - the computer is doing the "guessing." Role reversal! You think of a number and, based on the remainder of the number after being divided by 3, then 5, and finally 7, the computer knows exactly what number you chose.

At least Ahl got the date right.

I messed up my sums with my first number choice - 97. Second time around I got it right and the computer - as expected - guessed my number. One who is more obsessed than I may consider running through every number just to see if there's any chink in the computer's armour. I got up to about 14 before I got bored.

My arithmetic was indeed in error.

I must admit, I'm rather disappointed. This has ended on quite an anticlimax. All that talk of history and Greco-Roman philosophers, which is of great interest to me, built Boomerang Puzzle up to be something quite interesting. Alas, it was not. All we've ended up with is something of a novelty educational program.

In case it wasn't already obvious, I'm not giving this a score - I can't classify Boomerang Puzzle as a game; there isn't really any "gameplay" to speak of. Boomerang Puzzle is merely a novelty showcase of what you can do with coding algorithms. The only sense in which there's "gameplay" is doing your sums properly so as to not confuse the computer. It tells you when you're wrong anyway, and you just try again. No penalty for getting it wrong. In that sense, it has some use in teaching basic division with remainders, so I could argue that it's something of an educational program at least. Maybe "winning" is getting the computer to guess your number correctly? I'm clutching at straws at this point. I stand by my decision. Can't help but be disappointed, though.

Hopefully, next time, we have something more interesting.

#026: Taxman - Let Me Tell You How It Will Be...

Release Date: September, 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Educational

Developer(s): Howie Franklin

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

There's one for you, nineteen for me

'Cause I'm the Taxman

Yeah I'm the Taxman...

Revolver is the best Beatles album. Change my mind.

Unfortunately, this game is not about The Beatles. Rather, it's about one of life's inevitabilities: taxes. Except, not really. Taxman is, in fact, an educational puzzle game about numerical factors. Sounds fun, right?

Before getting into the game, let's start with the game's author. This one's a tricky one to figure out. MobyGames has the author listed as a Howie Franklin. Now, I couldn't find much of any information about him online. What to Do After You Hit Return references him as a PCC employee, but other than that, crickets. The only reference I found to him as the author of Taxman comes from a very old PCC alumni website that appeared to be maintained by Bob Albrecht. He has a page listing all the games included in the PCC newsletters over the years, and Taxman is listed there with a comment in parenthesis, which says,

"(by Howie Franklin? Great game!)"

...and that's all the information there is on him. That same site lists all PCC contributors, including Franklin, but his page is basically empty. It's kind of frustrating, seeing as there were a few opportunities to name the author, as Taxman appears in three editions of the PCC newsletter: September '73, November '73, and January '74. The newsletter created a little story surrounding the game centred on two characters, Max and Minnie, who represented different ways to play Taxman throughout the articles in each newsletter.

Should five percent appear to small, be thankful I don't take it all.

An interesting tidbit PCC gives us via What to Do After You Hit Return, is that Franklin wasn't the originator of the idea for Taxman. At the back of that book, it provides the code for all the games, and on Taxman's page, a comment is given stating that the concept for Taxman originated at the Lawrence Hall of Science - a place that's come up a few times before on this blog. Battle and the original form of Bagels originate from there. What to Do also states that the Hall didn't know who the idea came from. So that's just fantastic. I have no certain author, nor a certain originator. History is fun.

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street.

Just to complicate things further, there's the source code from the Sol20 website. This one has two names attached to it: J. Stewart and Dave Skrove. One of these two could also be the original author. This code is dated to January 11, 1974, though, so these my be the two who converted the game from the "Mankato Library," as noted by the game code itself. 

Considering the evidence, I'm inclined to go with what Bob Albrecht said on the PCC Alumni site, as his statement is effectively an eyewitness account.

If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.

With that settled, let's get into the game. As I said at the beginning, Taxman is about mathematical factors. The game does quite a good job of explaining itself, so I'll allow it to do so for me (courtesy of the Archive's "modern" version port):

If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat.

Understood? If not, maybe my playthrough will help. I mulled over how to approach a 10-number game before playing, and decided on what I thought was a pretty air-tight strategy to win. The basic premise is to try and not have the Taxman take more than one factor with each of my moves.

My first thought was to get rid of 1 as soon as possible, with it being a factor of every number. The only real viable choices for this are 2, 3, 5 and 7. 2 and 3 are factors of several other numbers on the list, and 5 is a factor of 10. That leaves 7, being a prime number, as the most logical first choice. It's not the only prime number on the list, but it is the only one that isn't a factor of any other number.

I take 7, the Taxman takes 1. Next move.

This next move took a little bit of thought. Again, wanting to make sure that Mr. Taxman only takes one number. I could've taken 4, and he take 2 - but that would leave 8 all alone for the Taxman to swoop up at the end. 6 would have him take 2 and 3 - but I need to keep 3 for 9. Taking 10 now would mean I lose 2, which I need to keep also. This really only left 9 as the only viable move, as the only number that would be taken was 3. 6 would still have 2, and 8 would still have 4, so it works perfectly.

9 is taken. Taxman gets 3.

If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

The game opens up significantly from here, as there remains three pairs of numbers: 6 and 2, 8 and 4, and finally 10 and 5. It's pretty much routine from here, and I win by a significant margin: 40 to 15.

Don't ask me what I want it for (Ha-Ha, Mr. Wilson)

That turned out to be a fun, but simple brain exercise. However, I wondered how the game would change when more numbers get added into the mix. 

Starting with 11 numbers, things don't change much. Instead of taking 7 first, I take 11. 7 has to be left for the Taxman at the end, as there's no way to remove it after taking 11. The rest of the round plays out exactly the same as a 10-number game. Thinking forward, though, things will get more and more challenging with every prime number that is added.

12 numbers makes the game much more complicated, since it's another number with 2, 3 and 4 as factors. Taking 11 and leaving 7 is still a necessary choice, as is taking 9 and losing 3 to the Taxman. It gets tricky after this. There's no real way to have Mr. Taxman only take one number here. What ends up making the most sense is having him take two of the lowest numbers, which at this point are 2 and 4. Therefore, 8 becomes the best next choice. It removes 2 and 4, while leaving 6 as a factor of 12, alongside 10 and 5. Doing this results in a 50-28 win.

If you don't want to pay some more (Ha-Ha, Mr. Heath)

13 numbers actually doesn't change much. I have to take 13 instead of 11, which leaves both it and 7 for the Taxman at the end. The strategy remains the same as the 12-number game, for a 52-39 win.

14 numbers is actually easier since there's now a way to get rid of the 7. The overall strategy doesn't change from 13 or 12 number games, I can now just take 14 at the end to have a bigger winning margin of 66-39.

Now my advice for those who die...

15 numbers is the last round I tried for this blog. Can't ruin all the fun if you want to try this at home. 15 is the next major difficulty spike, as it adds another number with 3 and 5 as factors, which takes away 9 and 10's monopoly on 3 and 5, respectively. What I decided was the best option was to leave the 9 for Taxman, and have 3 be taken by 15. This results in a win of 72-48. 

Declare the pennies on your eyes.

For those who are curious, I did have a look at what the largest game that can be played in Taxman. Turns out to be 50 numbers. This is quite a scary proposition, but I gave it a go, and it is possible to beat. I'll leave it to you, reader, to discover how.

For now, we'll have a look at how Taxman rates. Is it as good as its Beatles' namesake, or is it a tax fraud?

Time Played: 20 minutes

Difficulty: 4/10 (Mild)

I probably won't find Taxman as challenging as some. I'm a numbers guy, so this is my jam. Still, the larger groups of numbers become quite challenging to manage.

Gameplay: 7

This might surprise. I actually quite like Taxman for what it is. It's a very simple concept, but executed well. Its difficulty scales well with larger number groups, and I think the goal it has of teaching factors it achieves.

Controls: 5

Standard.

Visual: 5

It's really nothing special to look at and very much in line with everything else from this era.

Functionality: 5

I had one instance of the game bugging out on me when attempting a 50-number game, where the game decided to end itself, much like Button. The second attempt at 50 numbers had no issue, however, so I'm happy to leave this at a 5.

Accessibility: 3

It's probably in the same accessibility tier as most other text-based games.

Fun Factor: 7

For one, Taxman has great replayability. Having basically 50 levels is pretty cool for a 1973 text game. And again, I'm a numbers guy, so this sort of math game is right up my alley. For what it is, it's a pretty fun game.

Taxman gets a score of 32. That doesn't quite propel it to the heights of The Beatles, but it still does pretty well for itself at this stage in the Tier List. It's in the D-tier at 13th overall, keeping some respectable company with Lunar and Civil War. I'm sure I could come up with some joke about taxation causing an interstellar war, but the wording escapes me for the moment.

Get your driving helmets ready for the next game - we're going out to the drag strip. You can drive my car, and yes, I'm gonna be a star. 

[P.S. As a small nitpick, PCC gets the date for "Taxman" the song wrong. It's a 1966 track, not 1967. Sorry, my inner music snob just had to get that out before I finish here.]

And you're working for no one but me...