A strange little side quest
There is a neat bit of history hiding behind the kind of play you find in These Heavenly Bodies. By 1987, fantasy role-playing had become a major computer-game direction, with Zelda, licensed Dungeons & Dragons games and other story-led adventures expanding the form. 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. The details change, but the appeal of learning a system and trying again is remarkably persistent.
