Because 90% of HN wasn't born until 16 years after the first release?

Core War got boring because there were known good bots that always won.

And, well, Iiiii'm surprised no one mentioned RobotWar which predated Core War, but wasn't as complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar

;-)

Reminds me of Tierra[1], the "virtual life" simulator.

Haven't read the history of Tierra but wouldn't surprise me if he was inspired by Core War when creating it.

[1]: https://tomray.me/pubs/doc/index.html

CoreWar is definitely one of ideal programming games (since I like assembly coding). Not many games like it these days, unfortunately, perhaps the closest one is Zachtronics' TIS-100.

Good game by the way!

CoreWar is a great game!

But I am not sure its very similar, I got a lot of inspiration from the WarGames (1983) movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

The whole project started as an attempt just to teach assembler, and the game was actually zero choice game like Snakes And Ladders, you have 5 instructions per turn, but on certain places you have to roll a dice and follow the branch: https://punkx.org/overflow/build/snakes-and-ladders.pdf

But then after watching WarGames I thought I can make something where you can just write on top of your opponent's memory.

CoreWar has very different dynamics and I think anyone who has not tried it is missing out.

At some point I thought to actually make the game real-time, as in you can move as your opponent moves, (SMP instead of time sharing like it is now, where you get context switched out in 10 moves), but it was too chaotic. Maybe with the esp32 helper it can be done and be fun.

What part of WarGames inspired you? The hacking basically involved war dialing and password research, no stack overflows! :)

... wait a second are you really punkx?

> What part of WarGames inspired you

The part where they made it play tictactoe :)

> wait a second are you really punkx

Not sure what you mean, its just a name I picked to mean 'punk for X' where X is whatever you want.