 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 . 
