A strange little side quest
Trash Master may feel immediate, but the ideas around simulation games have been evolving for a very long time. 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. And the history keeps stacking up: Midway's Gun Fight from 1975 was the first arcade video game to use a microprocessor. The details change, but the appeal of learning a system and trying again is remarkably persistent.