There’s videogame history, contemporary touchstones like Half-Life, Doom, Civilization, and Zelda, and videogame history. Before the visuals, mechanics, and rounded tropes of today’s established genres were fully realized, early pioneers – visionary software programmers and computer scientists – built the foundations by hand. Through Stellaris, Total War, and XCOM, strategy games remain one of the cornerstones of the PC as a platform. But their history goes back much further than you might think. Lost to the ether for 60 years, The Sumerian Game, one of the genre’s earliest cave paintings, is back, rebuilt, and available for free on Steam.
It’s the summer of 3500 BC and you are the ruler of Lagash, an ancient city between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Periodically, an advisor will appear and inform you of the developments in your kingdom – here’s how many people you currently preside over, here are their wants and needs, and here are our available resources. Your job is to decide who gets what. Simple, text-based, and originally designed for primary schools, The Sumerian Game is widely considered the first narrative strategy game in history, and one of the earliest examples of the genre wholesale.
Its designer, Mabel Addis, is one of the great unsung legends of videogame history. A fourth-grade teacher, she designed and wrote The Sumerian Game for her students, while her colleague William McKay completed the programming. Its first version was released in 1964; in 1971, Doug Dyment expanded The Sumerian Game into a more commercial city builder called Hamurabi. Addis and McKay’s original work faded into gaming history.
Until now. Owing to the research of academic, gaming historian, and author Andrea Contato, The Sumerian Game has been recreated and relaunched onto Steam. Much of the source code had been lost, but using printouts from the original version, Contato has built a working and very slightly modernized ‘remake.’
This is an essential and fascinating piece of gaming history, representing the first steps towards some of the greatest works in the entire culture. You can play The Sumerian Game for free right here.
Alternatively, try some of the best city-building games ever made, or maybe the best grand strategy games on PC.
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