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:Incomplete

[Mashiki]

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

Well you're in luck! Cities: Skylines added that in with their first expansion(after dark). Now the only thing that the game is missing is disasters.

Re:Incomplete

[JaredOfEuropa]

I vaguely remember a game on the Amiga that had some interesting political aspects. It put you in charge of the Soviet Union, letting you run the economy, set policies, and decide what kind of leader you;d want to be. Perhaps you got glowing economical reports and all your ministers declaring that things are great. But at some point, you get a postcard from your dear old mum asking why the shops are bare and the people hungry, revealing the fact that due to your leadership style, no one dared to report any bad news anymore.

remember playing this

[murdocj]

Wow... I had forgotten about this game. As I recall each turn you'd make a decision about allocation of resources (buying land, planting seed, and feeding) and then see the results, with an occasional disaster thrown in. For a simple game it was remarkably fun. And it beat doing whatever I was supposed to be doing on the computer at the time.

Re:remember playing this

[Sique]

I remember playing Hamurabi on the C64, and trying to build my own economic simulation game, which never went past much after the startup screen.

Re:remember playing this

[Black Parrot]

As I recall it, Hamurabi was as entertaining as any computer game today, but didn't hold your attention very long.

Re:remember playing this

[delt0r]

There was a very similar one for the BBC micro we had at school, the yellow river kingdom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Being the clever guy in the class, i modified the basic it was written in to be quite "boyish". Instead of wheat and stuff, it was sperm for the prostitutes. I forget the exact changes. Anyhow the girls in the class loved it (why i did it in the first place) and they played it with the teacher in the room and where in hysterics. So the teacher watched....

Well so much for being the smart kid. I was the only one that could code, so despite the girls pleading the 5th or whatever you do when your 12 in NZ, i was busted. Fortunately i had also just got into a lot of trouble with current crush of the month (she was tall and had amazing boobs in catholic uniform! ) by trying to hit on her with fancy things. Stolen things. Her dad was the local police constable. It did not end well. My parents didn't know what to do. So they did nothing!

Re:remember playing this

[uncle slacky]

Another BBC micro game along similar lines was called (IRC) "Great Britain plc" which was fiendishly difficult, requiring you to figure out (among other things) what interest rates to set to avoid mass unemployment, rioting in the streets etc.

Re:remember playing this

[AmiMoJo]

We had one that simulated the stock market during the Great Depression in the US. I learned a lot from that game. The largest 32 bit int number you can use is 2^31-1, but you need to go well below that because if you hack the code to put that much in your bank account it tends to overflow and you end up trillions in the red.

Re:remember playing this

[Gr8Apes]

I would have stated Hamurabi as the first. Interesting it was a repackaging of The Sumer.

Play emulated version

[CaptQuark]

If you wish to play the original text version, there is an emulated version of the Basic game at http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...

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Re:Arguable

[Xtifr]

I agree. Heck, Sumer wasn't a city; it was a coalition of city-states. And the game focused primarily on the "state" part, rather than the city. You are the emperor. You're ruling your people. Whether those people were all gathered together into one city, or spread across a wider region wasn't really relevant to the game. You could just as easily have been, say, a count in medieval times, ruling your county. In fact, one of the main elements of the game was deciding how much of your grain to plant, which isn't exactly an activity associated with cities.

I'd say that this game was closer to being the origin of empire-building games like Civ than to city-building games like Sim City.

Basic version == Spaghetti

[CaptainOfSpray]

Over the years, I have had several goes at rewriting Ham(m)urabi, in an attempt to make it comprehensible. I just wanted to be able to tweak it, and it has defeated me (got bored and gave up) every time.
The BASIC code is the most appalling spaghetti, and would make an excellent illustration for any CS student of How Not To Code.

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.

Re:Arguable

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're nasty or rude to people, don't expect them to be any nicer to you. Not too long ago, you posted, "fuck you and your whole country too," which is part of a long line of uncivil posts.

The OP and the reply to him make valid points. Part of Simcity is managing how resources (e.g., fire departments, police stations, hospitals, schools) are distributed to maximize their value to your city. It's also important to manage traffic to keep property values high. That's absent from other games that focus on building empires, where the focus is on distribution of resources and other relevant tactics to maximize empire growth. They're related, sure, but there's still a pretty big difference between Civilitation and Simcity. It's not being pedantic; it's a valid point!

Re:Arguable

[Osgeld]

yea nitpicky things like "THE HISTORY OF CITY BUILDING GAMES" then states "You couldn't build anything, but you could ..."

Jeezus

Heres my history of FPS games, "Tennis for Two", while not first person ...

Summary fail

[drinkypoo]

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.

Uh no. "An anonymous reader" just failed at reading comprehension. That didn't stop the submission from hitting the front page, though. Hopefully this shitty summary is the result of "editing" and not the AC's incompetence. As the article says, Simcity was the first real city-building game, because in the other games you did not build a city. You managed a city, or a civilization.

SimCity was the first city-building game. It was not the first city-managing game, but who cares about that? None of the games which preceded SimCity were anything like it.

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Crush, Crumble, and Chomp

[T.E.D.]

Don't forget Epix's Crush, Crumble, and Chomp from 1981. It was essentially a city-building game in reverse.