Well ... it seems, Donald Davies was a little bit late on his work. According to Prof. Leonard Kleinrock (http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/), he had actually filed his Phd Thesis at MIT in 1961 creating the underpinnings for packet switching. (Kleinrock, L., "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1961). About 7 years before Davies' talk. Although, they could have worked simultaneously on the same thing, it took years at that time to get something published distributed widely. Nowadays, we have slashdot!

I don't know about this game, but some FPS games that I've played sometimes give a strategic advantage after death. The user is teleported to another room where he can start fresh and rethink his errors.