What is "hamurabi"

Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management first developed by Doug Dyment in 1968. It was developed by Dyment at Digital Equipment Corporation as The Sumer Game before the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early history of video games as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language. The game consists of ten rounds wherein the player, as the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, manages how much of their grain to spend on crops for the next round, feeding their people, and purchasing additional land, while dealing with random variations in crop yields and plagues. The Sumer Game was possibly inspired by the 1966 The Sumerian Game, a much more in-depth text-based economic simulation intended for children.

Multiple versions of the game were created for the FOCAL and FOCAL-69 languages, but in 1973 David H. Ahl released BASIC Computer Games, a book of games written in the BASIC programming language and the first million-selling computer book, which included his version of The Sumer Game. This expanded version of the game, titled Hamurabi, quickly became the more prominent version due to the popularity of both the book and the programming language. Hamurabi influenced many later strategy and simulation games and is also an antecedent to the city-building genre.