It is with great joy that we point out the upcoming release of The Sumerian Game on Steam. It is one of the first known video games, designed to teach mathematics, history and economics to children. It was developed between 1963 and 1965 as a research project. The objective was to evaluate the educational potential of new technological tools. The result was a forerunner of strategic management games, in which the player had to manage the production and conservation of a city’s grain for ten years, to grow the population and avoid famine in the event of natural disasters.
It was he who took care of the restoration and republication video game historian Andrea Contatowho is personally editing the new version.
A truly ancient game
The Sumerian Game is a text-based strategy game developed for the IBM 7090, a second-generation mainframe computer. It was written by what is considered to be the first game designer in the history of video games, Mabel Addis. It was programmed by William McKay. The research project saw collaboration at the time between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County and IBM. As mentioned, it was aimed at students and for years it was thought to be lost forever. Instead here it is, to the delight of lovers of the history of video games. In short, it is an object that has been buried under the sand of information technology for about 60 years.
Andrea Contato is a video game historian to whom we owe the two volumes that make up the work: “Through the Moongate: the story of Richard Garriott, Origin Systems Inc and Ultima”, in which he tells the story of Origin Systems and Richard Garriott, as well to the Video-Games encyclopedic projectin which the history of our medium is reconstructed.
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