Core Wars was great! I spent a good amount of time in the late 90s writing little bots for a similar game, AT-Robots, where you write an assembly type language

Core Wars was great! I spent a good amount of time in the late 90s writing little bots for a similar game, AT-Robots, where you write an assembly type language to program a little laser-shooting robot that could drive around, scan for enemies, etc. http://necrobones.com/atrobots/ http://necrobones.com/atrobots/ And my best robot: http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 http://necrobones.com/pub/atrobots/robots/unlocked/mj6.at2 Anyway, I loved this kind of thing as a teenager. I felt it really helped me to fall in love with programming and the ability to make things happen by writing code.