The Sumerian Game: A Digital Resurrection

The Sumerian Game was one of the first computer games in history, developed between 1963 and 1967 as a joint project between IBM and BOCES, a New York educational institution. The goal was to teach math and history to young students; the result was The Sumerian Game, one of the most well-known and appreciated computer games of the 1970s and 1980s, recognized worldwide, even in the Soviet Union, through the many names of its clones: from King of Sumeria to Hamurabi, from Dukedom to Pollution Game, from Kingdom to Manor, and then to more advanced but similar games, like Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio.
The Sumerian Game is the ancestor of today’s strategy, simulation, and management games, developed before SimCity and Civilization, at a time when the video game industry didn’t yet exist, and computers typically didn’t output to screens but printed on paper. Thanks to the game listings printed by teletypes, not everything from The Sumerian Game was lost when the original source code was destroyed or misplaced. Thanks to these paper rolls and the notes of superintendent Richard Wing, The Sumerian Game was not forgotten; in fact, its reconstruction has been made possible: a digital rebirth 50 years after The Sumerian Game was last run.
In The Sumerian Game: A Digital Resurrection, all available information on this game is compiled, including how it worked, how it was developed, and biographies of those involved in the project. The result of years of research, The Sumerian Game: A Digital Resurrection is the most comprehensive work on the history of The Sumerian Game and one of the most innovative works in the field of digital archaeology.