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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."
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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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.
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!
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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 ...