A strange little side quest
Happy Room may feel immediate, but the ideas around action games have been evolving for a very long time. Doom changed game design and distribution in 1993 by separating its engine from content and spreading widely through shareware. And then there is this: 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. Grombi files that under: small game, surprisingly large backstory.
