Interview with Nepos Games about their game Nebuchadnezzar
Introduction
When we started looking into gamification of the ancient Near East, we wanted to talk to so-called stakeholders and Nepos Games, the creators of Nebuchadnezzar, were first on that list. Since there are only two people behind the game, both of them are well versed with its development. This gives us the unique opportunity to understand all the steps that go into researching and building such a game.
Gustav was lucky enough to sit down with Joseph, one of the programmers of the Nebuchadnezzar game. Together with his colleague in Nepos Games, they developed a city builder game based on ancient Mesopotamia. The interview will give you the chance to look behind the curtain through small snippets of videos with commentary and gameplay, to help you better visualize what is going on.
The game was published in February 2021 on Steam and currently has one DLC (downloadable content) called the “The Adventures of Sargon.” Our two game-makers met at a company working on Truck simulators, which is exactly what it sounds like: a simulator of driving a long-haul truck. Nebuchadnezzar is different; it is a city builder game where the player must construct a functional city and complete a number of missions tailored to the period of Mesopotamian history they represent.
The Game
Your main goal is to create a thriving city and economy. There are three basic resources: workforce, goods and money. As they are dependent on each other, the gameplay revolves around a feedback loop between the three. When you build a house, you can accommodate a workforce that creates goods. The goods you accumulate can be used to sustain a bigger population and for the money you earn on trading and taxes you can buy more houses. In conjunction, you need to link the resources with a well-planned infrastructure. This is a city planner game in its simplicity, but it includes features that make it distinctively a city builder game of an ancient Near Eastern city.
You play as the omnipotent ruler, seeing everyone running around doing your bidding! Maybe a slight exaggeration, but you assign the workers and basically define every part of their life. Yet you still have to adhere to an underlying hierarchy imposed by the social structure. There are the low-level workers that can create food and make pottery. They are your worker ants that provide the bare necessities, which is enough for your city to grow in number, not in complexity. For that you need specialized workers. People who can write tablets, be priests or jewelers. It’s a good facsimile of the co-dependency there must have existed between social layers in the ancient Near East.
Once you have a few workers to begin with, you better start feeding them, cloth them, and sweeten their life in general. That might be baking bread or milking cattle, but of course this also includes providing the mandatory staple of beer! And you need a diversified economy–bread and butter might be enough for some, but you cannot maintain a thriving community of scribes without clay, or entertain priests without idols of the gods.
Trading with other cities was essential for Mesopotamia to flourish, since the area was rather poor in a number of natural resources. In the game you have to source such things like copper from abroad and then you can make that into jewelry that can be traded away. Interestingly, money in itself is not enough to open up new trading routes. You have to practically gain the respect of prospect partners, like we see in the Amarna letters where international power players discuss with each other who is worthy of a certain status.
We really like the effort they put into working on the pantheons in the game. You have a city god per mission who is determined by historical evidence, and then a group of other deities from the same pantheon that you can choose from. Once you open up trading routes to a city from a different pantheon, that city god also becomes available to you. It’s truly a polytheistic society. You can worship your deities by throwing more or less lavish festivals or ultimately by building a temple in their name. The more you honour them, the better the in-game bonuses they give you.
For many people, simply hearing the word infrastructure makes them slightly nod off. But don’t! Stay with us, please. It was as essential back then as it is today. Even though they are misconceptions, the idea that the Romans invented roads and aqueducts is something most men think about on a daily basis apparently. In the game we have to draw water from the rivers via irrigation systems and construct roads that makes the re-distribution of wealth possible. Funnily, you also have to create fire stations.
The new DLC introduces some interesting aspects into a city builder game–mainly warfare. It’s a heavy industry, as it needs materials, food and a workforce. And that’s of course not really different from anything else in the game. So, economically it requires the same considerations as the other parts of the game, but actually invading another city is a whole different ball game.
The Inspiration
Without fail, every time an assyriologist meets a new human being, any human being, they fear to be greeted with: “Oh I think I’ve heard about what you study, it’s something to do with the pyramids, right?” And for that reason, it slightly hurt when Joseph told Gustav that a large inspiration for the game was “Pharaoh”, a city builder game set in Egypt. But he then followed that by explaining that the best inspiration for a civilisation based game is the world’s first. As he would say it himself: ‘we demolished the mainstream pyramids and built the hanging gardens’, so now all is good.
It was clear when talking with Joseph that he is fascinated by the ancient Near East and the more details we went into the more excited he seemed to get. His attention to the great structures that were first implemented in the fertile crescent showed, together with the digital art, that he and his co-developer didn’t just consider Mesopotamia through the glasses of exotic otherness. They were trying to showcase the monumentality hidden under the surface in Iraq.
They also put a lot of effort into explanatory content. Before every mission, the player is met by an introduction text to the period it’s in. Not surprisingly, the sources for those explanations were Wikipedia and similar sites. Even though Joseph tried to contact a specialist, it was to no avail. This tells us how important it is to help keep those generally available resources up to date.
We really like the artwork as well, which they put some effort into. Instead of mainly taking visual inspiration from existing and oftentimes morally loaded ideas of how the ancient Near East looked like, they did their best to base it on their research and work.
Conclusion
Nebuchadnezzar is not a game that is meant to teach you about the ancient Near East, but one really feels it is based on knowledge of the ancient Near East, and players might accidentally learn something new. What surprised us the most was the ability such a game can have on a more holistic understanding of our field. It helped Gustav to visualise larger Mesopotamian social structures when playing it. Even though it’s not a fully accurate picture of the social structures as he understands them, it can spur ideas of how to potentially model these structures, which elements are important in the social structures, and what happens when you change something specific. McCall in his book from 2023 Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History, uses this game as an example of how to critically discuss the agency of individuals in an ancient society (pp. 12–15). In the digital age, a game like Nebuchadnezzar can play a role in how we teach and comprehend the ancient Near East, so we definitely encourage the readers to try it out!