1066

A strange little side quest

1066 may feel immediate, but the ideas around strategy games have been evolving for a very long time. The word 'checkmate' is linked to the Persian expression 'shah mat', used when the king was trapped. Another piece of context lands nicely beside it: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. That gives 1066 a little more company than it first appears to have.