It was developed as part of a joint research project between the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York and IBM in 1964–1966 for investigation of the use of computer-based simulations in schools.

It was designed by Mabel Addis, then a fourth-grade teacher, and programmed by William McKay for the IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer.

The game is composed of three segments, representing the reigns of three successive rulers of the city of Lagash in Sumer around 3500 BC.

The game, set around 3500 BC, has players act as three successive rulers of the city of Lagash in Sumer—Luduga I, II, and III—over three segments of increasingly complex economic simulation.

Two versions of the game were created, both intended for play by a classroom of students with a single person inputting commands into a teleprinter, which would output responses from the mainframe computer.

Several of these innovations require the player to have first "exhibited some good judgement", such as by adequately feeding their population for multiple rounds.

In the second segment, the player can also apply workers towards the development of several crafts—which in turn can result in innovations—while the third increases the complexity of the simulation by adding trade and expansion choices.

[2] The BOCES system had been established in New York to help rural school districts pool resources, and the Westchester BOCES Superintendent Dr. Noble Gividen believed that computers, along with computer simulation games like the Carnagie Tech Management Game being used in colleges, could be used to improve educational outcomes at small districts in Westchester.

The Westchester County BOCES and IBM held a joint workshop, led by Bruse Moncreiff and James Dinneen of IBM along with Dr. Richard Wing, curriculum research coordinator for BOCES, in June 1962, involving ten teachers from the area to discuss ways of using simulations in classroom curricula.

[3][4] Based on the result of the workshop, BOCES applied for a US$96,000 (equivalent to $967,000 in 2023) grant from the U.S. Office of Education that December to continue to study the concept for 18 months as a joint project between IBM and the New York State Education Department, receiving almost US$104,000 (equivalent to $1,048,000 in 2023) instead for "Cooperative Research Project 1948".

[5] Moncreiff had been inspired by prior research, especially the paper "Teaching through Participation in Micro-simulations of Social Organization" by Richard Meier, and by the board game Monopoly, and wanted to use the ancient Sumerian civilization as the setting to counter what he saw as a trend in school curriculum to ignore pre-Greek civilizations, despite evidence of their importance to early history.

[1][6] The game was developed at BOCES in Yorktown Heights, New York with the file name "suilxr"; simultaneously, IBM developed a different, shorter version that included only the first segment with the file name "sum9rx" at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights.

[7] The researchers conducted a playtest of the new version of The Sumerian Game with another 30 sixth-grade students the following school year, and produced a report in 1967.

To this end, following the creation of the second version of the game, the first segment was reprogrammed by Jimmer Leonard, a graduate student in Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University, for the IBM 1401, to be used at demonstrations at the BOCES Research Center.

[12] Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl wrote a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language.

[17][18] Other derivations include Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio (1978) by George Blank; Santa Paravia added the concept of city building management to the basic structure of Hamurabi, making The Sumerian Game an antecedent to the city-building genre as well as an early strategy game.