A strange little side quest
Zoom out from Staggy the Boy Scout Slayer II for a moment and the timeline gets surprisingly deep. Games resembling checkers were being played thousands of years ago; evidence of related games reaches back to around 1600 BC. There is another connection worth keeping in the same mental pocket: Space Invaders, released in 1978, helped push video games into mainstream popular culture. That history is one reason familiar mechanics can still feel new when they are recombined well.
