> Corewars proved itself really, really hard. Learning the assembly commands and how they edited the A and B values of each memory cell, understanding how the processes were executed and how data was stored was incredibly challenging for students to wrap their heads around.

This surprised me. I wrote a Corewars system in compiled Basic for the Sinclair QL when the game became popular. Writing it was not particularly difficult and the toy machine code was very simple. Maybe it was the context: we were used to look at bits and assembly instructions, we're not anymore.