Scram is certainly an interesting game. Or simulation. Really, it's more of a simulation than a game. 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 similar in design to the one at Three Mile Island.
Of course, if this was just a simulation of a nuclear power plant then it would be pretty boring. It might be anyway depending on your tastes. Anyway, 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. Probably more like real life.
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. You can even simulate a meltdown by removing the control rods. 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 (e.g. temperatures start to rise) 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. This game wasn't exactly the kind of material the led to it being a well known game.
Check out some of my other recent retrogaming and retrocomputing posts!
Electronic Games (November 1992)
@darth-azrael/electronic-games-november-1992
Your 64 (August 1985)
@darth-azrael/your-64-august-1985
The Movie Monster Game (Commodore 64)
@darth-azrael/the-movie-monster-game-commodore-64
DC-UK (October 1999)
@darth-azrael/dc-uk-october-1999
