Game theory, it may reasonably be claimed, has proved to be one of the more significant scientific contributions of the twentieth century. Albeit haltingly and unevenly, and in a manner quite unforeseeable in 1944 when the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was published, it has affected not only economics and political science but also evolutionary biology, ethics, and philosophy proper. Within economics, particular areas such as microeconomic theory, industrial organisation, international trade, and experimental economics have all been reshaped under the theory's influence. Although game theory initially came from outside as a critical contribution, it has now been completely embraced by the economics discipline, as indicated by the awarding of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics to John Nash, John Harsányi, and Reinhard Selten in 1994, and to Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling in 2005.

Various aspects of this development have received the attention of historians of economics and others. In 1992, under the editorship of Roy Weintraub, an exploratory set of essays titled Towards a History of Game Theory featured both historical accounts and reminiscences. Building upon their contribution to that volume, a 1996 book by Robert Dimand and MaryAnn Dimand provided a historical survey of the various game-theoretic contributions in the first half of the century. In his 2003 monograph on the evolution of economic rationality, Nicola Giocoli devotes considerable attention to game theory, particularly as it affected the neoclassical conception of the economic agent. A similar theme, treated differently, is central to Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams of 2002, which casts the history of game theory as part of the rise of “cyborg” thinking, linked in an essential manner to von Neumann's work on computing and automata.