Scram (Atari 400/800)

Scram is certainly an interesting game. Or simulation. I can't speak to the accuracy of the sim personally but supposedly it used differential equations in modeling. So what is being simulated? Glad you asked... Scram is a simulation of a nuclear power plant.

Of course, if this was just a simulation of a nuclear power plant then it would be pretty boring. To make things more interesting, there is the occasional earthquake that will do damage to the plant. Various difficulty settings change how obvious this damage is to the player. At harder difficulty levels, the player will have to do more investigation to figure out what exactly is damaged.

The main display screen depicts a schematic of a nuclear reactor. You can control various parts of the reactor such as the control rods, cooling pumps and various valves. Whenever there is an earthquake, the screen will shake and breaking sounds will be heard if there is damage. Then, various things may start to go wrong and you must figure out where to dispatch repair crews, how to reroute cooling, and so on.

Scram was written by Chris Crawford in Atari BASIC for the Atari 400/800 in 1980. Chris Crawford went on to write a number of other games including Eastern Front and Balance of Power. If you want to give this one a try, you'll have to find an original and play int on an original Atari 8-bit computer or otherwise settle for emulation.

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