Kate Willaert's site covers video game history, with interviews and research on early games like Moonlander and The Sumerian Game.
HN commenters praise her research and link her pieces on Moonlander, the Sumerian Game, and the earliest software Easter egg for historical context.
Hamurabi is a text-based strategy video game of land and resource management. It was first developed under the name King of Sumeria or The Sumer Game by Doug Dyment in 1968 at Digital Equipment Corporation as a computer game for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)
Ahl, David (November 1978). BASIC Computer Games (2nd ed.). Workman Publishing. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-0-89480-052-8. (archive)
https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomputer_Edition_1978_Creative_Computing/page/n91/mode/2up
Hamurabi - (1978) - Apple II - WIN! HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIbiqMO0EY4
Long before Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego or The Oregon Trail, there was The Sumerian Game.
https://www.acriticalhit.com/sumerian-game-most-important-video-game-youve-never-heard/
Game Mechanics That Are Older Than You Think
Our mythbusting run that reveals the true pioneers behind physics, first-person shooting, and light-guns (not Half-Life 2, Doom, and Duck Hunt respectively).
City Simulation - Credited to: SimCity (1989) - Beaten by 24 years
https://web.archive.org/web/20160207152548/http://www.1up.com/features/game-mechanics-older
Sad.
They (THEY(TM)) also took away typing "man" at 00:01 (or later 00:30) would print "gimme gimme gimme"
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030
And they took away the "MAKE LOVE" (returns "NOT WAR?") easter egg in MIT's TECO editor on the PDP-6
https://www.acriticalhit.com/make-love-not-war-first-software-easter-egg/
I was confused for a minute because I remember playing Spacewar on a PDP-1 in the 1960s and mis-remembered there also being a lander game. But there wasn't, Storer was the first. There is an interesting history here:
https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-game-design/
I would like to think the very first strategy home computer game was about Hammurabi, Hamurabi.bas, https://www.acriticalhit.com/sumerian-game-most-important-video-game-youve-never-heard/
It also mentions Jack Burness, the author of MOONLANDER.
Here's an article that interviewed him last year:
https://www.acriticalhit.com/moonlander-one-giant-leap-for-game-design/
Kate Willært does great research. I highly recommend checking out the video essays:
https://www.acriticalhit.com/category/video-essays/