Hamurabi
1968 · Strategy · PDP-8 / BASIC
Overview
Hamurabi (also spelled Hammurabi) is one of the earliest strategy and resource management games, originally written in 1968 for the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. Players take the role of the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, managing the city of Sumeria over ten years by deciding how much land to buy or sell, how much grain to feed the people, and how much to plant for the next harvest. Random events like rats, plague, and floods add unpredictability to the decisions. The game was widely distributed through the 1970s as a BASIC program and appeared in the landmark book 101 BASIC Computer Games, introducing strategy gaming to a generation of home computer users.
Deep Dive
The original game was called 'The Sumerian Game' and was created in 1964 by Mabel Addis and William McKay for IBM. Doug Dyment rewrote and adapted it for the PDP-8 in 1968, and David Ahl later ported it to BASIC under the name Hamurabi. The game's mechanics were deceptively deep — players had to balance population growth, land prices, grain reserves, and planting decisions simultaneously, while accounting for random events. A ten-year run ended with a verdict comparing your rule to historical leaders: exceptional, mediocre, or tyrannical. Its inclusion in widely circulated BASIC game books made it one of the most-played computer programs of the early home computing era and a direct ancestor of the Civilization and SimCity franchises.
