A History of Programming Games 1961-1989

There's a neat Reddit sub that is fairly new, if you want to have a look at people coding for "retro" consoles and computers, but in the modern day[0]. It's quite awesome.

Slightly off topic: it's not retro, but I have written and am currently playing with again writing homebrew for the GameCube, which is awesome fun :)

[0]: http://www.reddit.com/r/retrogamedev

We used to have Core War tournaments in college. It was first an assignment (write the VM) and at the end all the students warriors would compete vs each other and we watched the finals in the big amphi. One of the students even wrote an opengl visualization. Great memories!

The Byte article on Robotwar can be be found here: http://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-12/1981_12_BYTE...

It's still cool to read.

Moreover, Robotwar inspired a forth-like clone called Grobots: http://grobots.sourceforge.net/

I'm pretty sure it's after 1989 but another good one is Robocode: http://robocode.sourceforge.net

Another after 1989 is Carnage Heart for PS1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_Heart

The complexity of it was mind-boggling, especially for a console game. The instruction manual was hundreds of pages.

I remember playing Core Wars on the BBC Micro, good times.