A strange little side quest
Zoom out from Swat vs Terrorists 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. 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. That long chain of experiments is part of why strategy games still feels fresh when a game finds the right twist.
