A strange little side quest
Cinema Panic may feel immediate, but the ideas around simulation games have been evolving for a very long time. M.U.L.E. arrived in 1983 with multiplayer competition built around gathering resources and keeping a colony alive, an early example of resource-driven strategy play. The same trail leads to another fact: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. That gives Cinema Panic a little more company than it first appears to have.
