Balance of the Planet, written during the late 1980s by Chris Crawford, sees player balance global economic and ecological forces through taxation and expenditure, with each policy change having a runoff effect to other areas. For instance, clearing forests changes the level of CO2 in the air, which affects global warming. The game utilizes a procedural system with limited user interaction. Crawford notesMoran, Tom (November 1990). ´Balance of the Planet 1.0 Review´. Macworld. Mac Publishing. p. 227–229. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9011_November_1990. that it was designed to be difficult to “win” due to the state the planet is already in.
Chris Crawford was approached in early 1989 by Epyx’s Joe Miller about working on an environmental game to coincide with the film Voice of the Planet to be released for Earth Day in 1990. While wary of licensed games, he developed a design concept that explored the intricate connections between ecological and economic factors. He created a hypertext system to house his game. In order to place values into the game (e.g. whether the economic value of a factory is worth the deaths from air pollution), Crawford was forced to place a value on human life; he spent a lot of time contemplating this problem before conceding that no matter what value-based decisions he made he would be accused of bias. The games was explicitly designed to be a serious game, i.e. very educational but not necessarily a lot of fun.