Financial energy is channeled into Big M’s infrastructure and in developing Mars as a whole, gradually expanding to corporations outside MarsCo and the Big Three. A golden age of colonization and exploration.
The Big Three and many smaller corporations are flush with resources after the creation of the Ledger, and seek out new homelands. The Vale is staked out by the rich, richer, and obscenely rich. The few non-Marsco Corpornations are established. Monsters are (allegedly) discovered in the tunnels left by terraforming. Good times! This period is sometimes called the Great Expansion, with some of the nostalgia of Terra’s Wild West period.
Mars briefly dallies with the Free Market system during this time, and a freewheeling period of jolly corporate malfeasance expands as well, many new corporations springing up, flush with cash. This age is often called Corporate Boom, and was quite, quite lawless, though Genotype’s dalliance with slavery was likely the worst of its crimes. During this epoch several non-Marsco megacorps find their beginnings: Spyglass and Progenitus begin their stories, TTI may be on the rise in this period, and two unknown Felidae corps wage snarky war over the not-yet-dead body of Genotype. Corporate Boom period fizzles at the same time as Spyglass expands, which isn’t a coincidence, and the moral lapses of the Corporate Boom period figure heavily into IRPF and Progenitus’s charters. It’s generally agreed that The Great Expansion ended with the turn of the century and the collapse (or mass execution) of Genotype, a loss of innocence that took some of the charm off the era.
There’s no clear line between these two periods, but it’s a romanticized age of exploration and excess, and many absolutely obscene murals around the Vale date from and highlight this era.
Reference: Suggested by a long period of financial want on a new world and notes that the Ledger creates financial opportunity, and some interviews with the game author.
Date Notes: Immediately after Ledger