A strange little side quest
Even a quick game like Financial Run 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. The timeline takes another interesting turn: Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. So a round of Financial Run is not just a quick distraction; it is a tiny stop on a much longer simulation games timeline.
