The History of City-Building Games (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: If you ask most gamers, the first city-building game they played was SimCity, or some sequel thereof. Though SimCity ended up defining the genre for years, it was far from the first. This article goes through the history of city-building games. It began before man first landed on the moon: "While extremely limited in its simulation, Doug Dyment's The Sumer Game was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management. He coded The Sumer Game in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, using the FOCAL programming language. David H. Ahl ported it to BASIC a few years later retitled as Hamurabi (with the second 'm' dropped in order to fit an eight-character naming limit). The Sumer Game, or Hamurabi, put you in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer. You couldn't build anything, but you could buy and sell land, plant seeds, and feed (or starve) your people. The goal was to grow your economy so that your city could expand and support a larger population, but rats and the plague stood in your way. And if you were truly a terrible leader your people would rebel, casting you off from the throne."

Comments

Incomplete

[Anonymous Coward]

These games, some of which are great, will remain incomplete until they feature reserved bike lanes.

Re:Incomplete

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Actually, these games need to include the political disaster where you get stuck with a crack-smoking mayor, yelling: "Bitch set me up ... goddamn bitch!"

Marion Barry and Rob Ford would be perfect role models!

Re:Basic version == Spaghetti

[Megane]

A few years back I re-coded the Star Trek game in C. Its lack of structure was not easy to convert, as it liked to do GOTO GAMEOVER type of stuff all over the place. It had to be changed to have a few global variables for the game state, and an outer loop to do one command/turn at a time. And then another outer loop to play the game multiple times.

BASIC's input and output was pretty free-form too, not just the control flow. I needed routines to input one or two integers or a float (sscanf just doesn't work as well as INPUT), and to print floats without those damn trailing zeros. And those line numbers everywhere, I had to create a version of the original code with all unused line numbers blanked out to see the control flow. And then there were those wonderfully descriptive two-character variable names, which I avoided changing when possible.

I should try doing more of those, and Hammurabi sounds like a nice challenge.