A strange little side quest
Santa's Toy Workshop may feel immediate, but the ideas around simulation games have been evolving for a very long time. The Oregon Trail mixed travel, supplies, risk and survival decisions decades before resource-management systems became common in mainstream games. That is only half the story. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. The details change, but the appeal of learning a system and trying again is remarkably persistent.
