Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio
Today I want to show you the very first computer game I ever played. The year was 1978, and one of my best friends’ dad had bought a TRS-80 Model I computer, and along with it a cassette tape with the game “Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio”. In some sense, this game is part of an earlier continuation of mainframe-based text games from the mid 1960s, but in another sense, this game might be the grand-daddy of later strategy games like Civilization and, dare I say it, Europa Universalis.
Santa Paravia is clearly directly inspired by “Hamurabi” (sic), itself inspired by the Sumerian Game, which was made for the IBM 7090 mainframe in 1964. A full deep dive into the mainframe versions of this game is beyond this video, but if you’re interested in it check out Sean Haas’s podcast ‘Advent of Computing’, episode 57, where he goes deep into the lineage of the Sumerian game.
For our purposes, it’s enough to say that Hamurabi made its way to microcomputers and the BASIC language in the early 1970s, by way of seminal publisher Dave Ahl. Santa Paravia takes Hamurabi’s somewhat drab presentation and brings some more depth to it, as well as some very flashy - for 1978 - graphics.
Made by the Reverend George Blank from Leechburg, PA - I’d love to know more about his story, he also made a game about clipper ships called “‘Round the Horn”- The game was first published - for free! - as a magazine listing in SoftSide magazine. So if you want to, you can actually type his original listing itself. One of the nicest things about this listing is it is extensively documented in a way that many, if not most, magazine programs were not. So you get some insight into how George Blank came up with his implementation.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the game itself. We’ll be looking at the Apple II port, instead of the TRS-80 version.
Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio
Today I want to show you the very first computer game I ever played. The year was 1978, and one of my best friends’ dad had bought a TRS-80 Model I computer, and along with it a cassette tape with the game “Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio”. In some sense, this game is part of an earlier continuation of mainframe-based text games from the mid 1960s, but in another sense, this game might be the grand-daddy of later strategy games like Civilization and, dare I say it, Europa Universalis.
Santa Paravia is clearly directly inspired by “Hamurabi” (sic), itself inspired by the Sumerian Game, which was made for the IBM 7090 mainframe in 1964. A full deep dive into the mainframe versions of this game is beyond this video, but if you’re interested in it check out Sean Haas’s podcast ‘Advent of Computing’, episode 57, where he goes deep into the lineage of the Sumerian game.
For our purposes, it’s enough to say that Hamurabi made its way to microcomputers and the BASIC language in the early 1970s, by way of seminal publisher Dave Ahl. Santa Paravia takes Hamurabi’s somewhat drab presentation and brings some more depth to it, as well as some very flashy - for 1978 - graphics.
Made by the Reverend George Blank from Leechburg, PA - I’d love to know more about his story, he also made a game about clipper ships called “‘Round the Horn”- The game was first published - for free! - as a magazine listing in SoftSide magazine. So if you want to, you can actually type his original listing itself. One of the nicest things about this listing is it is extensively documented in a way that many, if not most, magazine programs were not. So you get some insight into how George Blank came up with his implementation.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the game itself. We’ll be looking at the Apple II port, instead of the TRS-80 version.
