Prehistory VII: Sports, Sports, Sports (And a New, "Basic" Programming Language)

This is the seventh 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.

I was uncertain at first of the relevance / significance of these two games at first. However, upon looking into them more deeply, I've discovered that they, along with their author, are actually of incredible significance to the development of gaming, especially in the realm of early PC gaming. So, let's see why.

The PDP-10 Timesharing World Series (1965)

Release Date: January 13th, 1965

Platform: PDP-10

Genre: Sports Simulation

Developer(s): John G. Kemeny (later revised by Keith Bellairs)

Publisher(s): DECUS

First off: yes, that name is indeed a mouthful. For the length of this post (and for the sake of brevity), I'll be referring to it as PDP World Series. Both of these games have the same author, so I'll briefly discuss him here also.

Both games are authored by John G. Kemeny, a Hungarian-American scientist (fun fact: he worked for Albert Einstein at one time.) Quite a brilliant man who contributed massively in the area of computer science, among other things. His accomplishment most relevant to our discussion today, and to gaming as a whole, is the invention of (alongside Thomas Kurtz) the "Beginners' All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code," or, as you may know it: BASIC, the programming language that would become the lingua franca for most first and second generation home computers. Most computer games we'll see on the blog over the 70s and 80s would have been written in BASIC. A form of it - Visual Basic - is even still in use today.

Naturally, Kemeny (and others) had to show what his new language could do, so writing some programs was in order. For some reason sports were on the brain of the early BASIC programmers, Kemeny included, and thus many of the first BASIC programs were sports simulations. The first of these, written by Kemeny himself, was PDP World Series, a baseball simulation game (later revised by Keith Bellairs, and then again by Kemeny). Fortunately for us, the source code has recently been discovered and graciously converted to run on DOS by a fellow by the name of "Benedict" over at MyAbandonWare.com, meaning it's fully playable today!

*Insert funny baseball music here*

Well, when I say "playable," it's honestly not really a game at all. It's not a simulation game in the sense we think of simulation games that attempt to fully simulate a sport in every facet. This is just a text-based simulation of a game of baseball (Dodgers vs. Yankees) based on RNG. The match automatically plays with the only input from the player being to select a number as a seed at the beginning. You then simply watch how the game unfolds. For this first game I chose the number 123. Dodgers are on the left column, Yankees on the right.

Mmm, bit of a dull one so far...

I will give a word of warning here - you will need to fiddle with the DOSBox settings, otherwise the game will fly by without you being able to read anything being printed on screen beside the final result. You'll need to change the "cycles=fixed" setting in the DOSBox config to 250 or lower to get the game to run at a legible speed.

The Yankees secure a come-from-behind victory!

The game runs a 9-inning game, and declares the final score. 123 was a lower scoring but tight affair. I tried another game with 234, and that resulted in a 10-3 win for the Dodgers. It's mildly amusing as one of the text files that comes with the download has a line stating "For an exciting game, type in 234." Your wish is my command.

In reality, while it's significant for being one of - if not the first - BASIC program, it's not really a game. And I still prefer cricket.

Digital (Dartmouth) Championship Football [FTBALL] (1965)

Release Date: Late 1965

Platform: GE-325, PDP-10

Genre: Sports Simulation

Developer(s): John G. Kemeny

Publisher(s): DECUS

Now we've got our American bases covered! (I could go on a small rant about our superior Aussie football codes, but for the readers' sake I will refrain.) Kemeny wrote an American football game in the latter half of 1965 to complement the baseball game from January. Upon initial inspection, and according to MobyGames, the main version of the game available now is a port to the Wang 2200 system from 1974. I can certainly say that it's not the original program, as it has had some additions. This one is where we get the name Digital Championship Football from, it seems, as Kemeny's program was assigned the title FTBALL. It also features some additional ASCII graphics and animation that most definitely would not have been in the original.

Fortunately, there is another version of the game floating around on the Internet Archive that certainly seems more akin to the original. This one was included in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book in 1978, and is credited to John Kemeny, suggesting that it is the original (though this particular 1978 reproduction is credited to Raymond Miseyka of Butler, Pennsylvania.) It titles the game FTBALL also. This version is playable on the Archive, which is fantastic, as I originally thought this game lost when doing up my master list. Always a pleasant surprise to find such things. 

[Ed. I'm going through all these old posts and adding videos to them. The video for FTBALL is played through Vintage BASIC, whereas all the screenshots are from the Internet Archive version. There are no gameplay differences, they just look different.]

[Ed. ed. I incorrectly attributed this game to Miseyka. It is, in fact, Kemeny's original. I cover this mistake in an addendum article, in which I also score Dartmouth Championship Football, as I'm now calling it.]

I'm confident I know what I want, but thanks anyway.

Upon loading the game, it gives you an option to play either a "modern" or "classic" version of the game. Obviously I'm interested in playing the original in this instance, so classic will do nicely for me. Maybe when I come back around to this when I cover 1978 I'll have a look at the modern version.

After selecting classic, it jumps straight into the game in all its text-based glory. Curiously, the game calls itself Dartmouth Championship Football. Perhaps that's the real title for the original? Dartmouth College is where Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC, and Kemeny would go on to become president of the college. More evidence suggesting this is the original 1965 game.

Anyway, the game gives you the instructions, explaining to you that you are the quarterback for Dartmouth, and asks you to name the opposing team. I opt to face off against the 49ers.

I watched a superbowl once, so I know a football team.

Right, let's see how this goes...

Ah... that's not a good start.

The 49ers immediately score a touchdown. Great. Now it comes to my turn. I'm glad to say that this is actually a game, with actual player agency, which was completely absent in PDP World Series. Although, the results of each action are determined at random, so your choices don't really affect the outcomes.

I tried many different plays, but failed to score a touchdown or a single point. The 49ers manage to immediately score another touchdown. Clearly my team is utterly incompetent.

Strange deja vu...

Time to go around again.

Time to look for a new coach, methinks.

We end up being penalised offside, effectively ending the match with us going down 0 - 14. Quite a disappointing start. Credit to the boys, they fought hard, but the 49ers were the better team on the day. And whatever other cliché stuff that needs to be said. Aussie Rules is still better.

I must admit, I found myself actually enjoying that a little. Even though it gives the illusion of player influence, with events being determined at random, it's still mildly enjoyable seeing how things play out. While I'm tempted to break my rules and give this a score, since it is technically the original and an actual game, I don't think the games of this era are substantial enough for me to start throwing scores out just yet. This would get N/As in most of my categories.

These two games really mark the beginning of the computer gaming scene proper, as far as I'm concerned. More folks from Dartmouth produced other sports-themed games in the late 60s (including a bingo game), and BASIC would spread like wildfire after that.

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Prehistory VI: Marienbad & The Sumerian Game

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

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

Marienbad (1962)

Hope you know Polish.

Release Date: 1962

Platform: Odra 1003

Genre: Strategy

Developer(s): Witold Podgórski

Publisher(s): N/A

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

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

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

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

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

The Sumerian Game (1964)

Release Date: 1964

Platform: IBM 7090

Genre: Simulation

Developer(s): Mabel Addis, William McKay

Publisher(s): N/A

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

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

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

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

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