The Sumerian Game: A Playable Reconstruction

The Sumerian Game is one of the earliest known computer games built around a narrative. Designed in 1964 by Mabel Addis, a fourth-grade teacher in New York, with programmer William McKay, it was played by sixth-graders as a classroom lesson in resource management. The original code is lost.

This is a browser-playable reconstruction of Segment I (the resource-management phase), rebuilt from the surviving record: the game's design documentation, the 1967 final report (Wing et al., ERIC ED014227), and later descriptions. You rule Lagash: sow, harvest, feed your people, and survive flood, fire, and drought across ten years.

Not the original program, and not claimed to be. A faithful attempt at what the surviving documents describe. MIT-licensed; source ships in the bundle.