The Sumerian Game 2.0 Preview

Dear players,

as promised, we’ve been working hard on a new version of the game. There are so many improvements that we decided to completely rewrite the entire program — not only to fix some pesky bugs, but above all to make it easier to use, with a responsive GUI that adapts smoothly to 1920x1080 resolutions and above, without graphical glitches.

And while we were at it, we also expanded the gameplay experience: we included more versions of The Sumerian Game and its derivatives, added a greater amount of educational content, and — hopefully — made everything more engaging with a large set of achievements.

Here are a few screenshots from The Sumerian Game 2.0!

The main menu has been completely redesigned with a small infographic that not only shows all versions of the game, but also arranges them in chronological order. It displays the technologies used to create each one (FAP on IBM, FOCAL-68 or 69 on PDP, BASIC, and so on) in a kind of family tree that clearly indicates which games influenced later ones, or evolved into their next versions.

Each version or game is accompanied by a background image carefully chosen to be historically accurate. For the Suilxr version of The Sumerian Game, you can see a young student who took part in a photo shoot for IBM and actually tested that specific version of the game. We paid close attention to every detail — for example, the red-colored player input. The IBM 1050 terminal used by students at the time was capable of printing in two colors: red and black. It had been programmed to print user input in red and system output in black. Surviving printouts from that era are indeed two-colored. Fascinating, isn’t it?

The improved Suilxr version — featuring slides and questions (not historically accurate, unfortunately, as the original questions have been lost and the exact slide mechanics are unknown) — has been enhanced. This is an optional piece of content that can be played by purchasing the Supporter Pack.

The Sum9rx version has also been improved — it was developed in parallel by IBM at the Mohansic Laboratory in Torktown Heights. This version, too, is playable with the purchase of the Supporter Pack.

Thanks to the work of a researcher friend, Kate Willaert, we were able to reconstruct the very first version of King of Sumeria by Douglas Dyment. It’s quite different from the more well-known one — and the most practical way to spot the differences is… to play it :) Here it is: King of Sumeria for FOCAL-68.

Much less known than the other versions — but mentioned on Wikipedia! — here is Sumer (French), a French-language version programmed by two university researchers from Liège. It’s a much more poetic take, I’d say.

Hamurabi for BASIC, written by David Ahl based on the work of Dyment, but with the “influence” of games and modifications made by the students of Lexington High School — also the birthplace of Lunar Lander and Civil War.

Preview of Pollution Game, the midway point between The Sumerian Game and Hamurabi. Programmed by James Storer — the creator of Lunar Lander — Pollution Game is also one of the most entertaining versions in the great Sumerian Game family. Welcome to Setates Detinu!

And to keep things interesting — or to give you a reason to play one more round — here come lots of new achievements! They weren’t designed to make the game harder, but rather to