A strange little side quest
Even a quick game like Doctor Hero sits on top of decades — and sometimes centuries — of ideas. The Oregon Trail mixed travel, supplies, risk and survival decisions decades before resource-management systems became common in mainstream games. And the history keeps stacking up: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. That long chain of experiments is part of why simulation games still feels fresh when a game finds the right twist.