I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means for our future and for the future of our (broadly young adult) kids.

Now, surely many generations have looked back at the three decades since their undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.

Still, 2026 does feel singular: every conversation that I had with my fellow '96ers seemingly circled back to the effects that LLMs are having on knowledge work — and the anxiety felt for the future.

Beyond LLMs, there was another topic that came up quite a few times (albeit among an admittedly small and self-selecting demographic). This was a very specific kind of nostalgia for the three-decades-old past, and explaining it necessitates a bit of backstory…​

In my first year of college in 1992, my friends and I loved to play the terrific Wesleyan Tetris by Randall Cook, the so-called "asshole tetris" that would make your game difficult (by inserting squares or taking them away or similar mischief) — and then make fun of you for it.

I thought it would be neat to make a two-player Tetris with similar inspiration — but instead of the computer making your life difficult, it would be your networked opponent. In the summer of 1993, I resolved to write a version of what I had in mind: two players duel in Tetris, accumulating money (by getting dice in cleared lines), and then using that money to buy weapons to screw up the opponent’s game (flipping their board upside down, making the pieces spin out of control, giving them oddly shaped pieces, etc). Local area networking was not found much outside of commercial and university settings, so I instead connected two PCs with a null-modem cable. Over that summer, I also had the blessing of a willing play tester in my younger sister (thank you, Libby!): she and I spent much of that summer in our mom’s basement in Colorado, listening to U2’s Zooropa, and playing early versions of what I had dubbed BattleTris.

When I returned to Providence in the fall, I showed the game to my suitemates. The game was an immediate hit (if a hyperlocal one!), and we resolved to build a proper version from scratch for the group final project for our software engineering class in the spring.

We started the course early in 1994, knowing exactly what we wanted to do (and having already built it once and having an idea where some of the design challenges were), we got to work, working on the final project long before it was formally assigned.

By the time the course’s famous demo day arrived at the end of the semester, the re-imagined BattleTris was pretty polished — and it brought the house down: after our demo, it seemed as if everyone was playing the game that we had created. (This long pre-dates digital photography, but an image that is seared into my mind’s eye is walking into the back of the Sunlab that night — and seeing every computer playing BattleTris.) That was the good news; the bad news was that it may have been relatively polished, but it was by no means bulletproof — and the three of us scrambled to fix bugs.

Over the next two years, we continued to work on BattleTris as our time allowed (and played plenty of it). BattleTris saw some of my own undergraduate milestones: when my 21st birthday rolled around, my housemates and I snuck a case of beers into one of the systems labs and turned BattleTris into a drinking game (one that I was designed to lose — and very much did).

I graduated, and went to work for Sun. BattleTris was left behind, but very much functional and intact. And indeed, a new generation of computer science students behind us discovered and enjoyed the game.

Nearly three years after I graduated, I received an e-mail from a student several years behind me:

From ahl@cs.brown.edu  Fri Mar 12 16:45:31 1999
From: Adam Leventhal <ahl@cs.brown.edu>
To: Bryan.Cantrill@Eng.Sun.COM, Michael.Shapiro@Eng.Sun.COM
Subject: BattleTris

I am organizing a BattleTris tournament here at Brown. The first round is
going be open with a $5 entry fee. The money goes to the top finishers.
After that, the first 16 or 32 people will advance to the BattleTris
Invitational. I was wondering if either of you might be interested in
attending the invitational and competing. If so, is there a time when you
might be near by and a one day stop at Brown wouldn't be inconvenient?
We'd love to have you. Thanks, and thanks for making BattleTris.

--
Adam

I couldn’t make the tournament that Adam organized, but I was fortunate enough to convince him to join us as an intern at Sun the next summer — and then full-time after he graduated in 2001.

In that fall of 2001, Adam was settling in in California, but found that he missed BattleTris; could we resurrect it at Sun? Now the better part of a decade old, there were some burrs that needed to be sanded off on the game, but with more of us working together we got the game working on Solaris x86 (in addition to Solaris SPARC) and with (relatively) modern X/Windows. Newly within the walls of Sun, BattleTris found a warm reception: beyond Sun’s Brown grads who had fond memories of duels in the CIT, new players discovered the game.

Among these new players was a notable one outside of Sun: my girlfriend, procrastinating on her PhD, started to play the game quite a bit. She was…​ (phrasing this delicately!) not the best BattleTris player. But she was dogged, and slowly improved. She would play anyone at Sun who was up for a game, and in particular, played several (very!) long, meandering games against Matt Ahrens, who himself was procrastinating in the green field of what was then known as Pacific (but would later become ZFS). She and I played against one another often — and (unsurprisingly) I always won.

Well, nearly always. Sometime in the late fall of 2001, after she launched an admittedly devastating weapons combination at me (for the record: Four By Four, Broken Record, and Slide Denied), I…​ died. In the other room, she exclaimed, "Hey, the game crashed." I was (as one might imagine!), crestfallen — and silent.

She bounded into the room in which my laptop was connected via a long ethernet cable (pre-WiFi!): "Hey, did you hear me? I said the game crashed."

"The game didn’t crash," I responded, "you…​ won."

"I…​ won?!" she said, seemingly tearing up with joy. What followed remains a blur, but I seem to recall a parade of sorts through the apartment, as if a great tyrant had been finally toppled.

Later that evening, I caught up with Adam. "She took a game off me," I said, glumly.

"She…​ WHAT?!"

I could see that words of solace would not be forthcoming.

I tried to explain, but Adam cut me off: "You know what this means, right? It means that she’s the one — you need to marry that girl." And while I would like to believe that it’s unrelated to that game, the fact is that I proposed to Brigid in the summer of 2002 — and she and I now have over two decades of marriage (and three kids!) together.

BattleTris, meanwhile, fell into disuse. We were hot on the path of DTrace — and the work would become all-consuming over the next few years. Life itself was becoming more complicated too, as we all entered new phases of life that carried with them new responsibilities.

More years passed. We missed BattleTris, but getting it working again was increasingly a serious project — and after we left Sun in 2010, a daunting one: the crufty old game would need to be ported to new operating systems (Linux and the Mac) and into modernity.

Speaking personally, as my kids grew into teenagers, I found myself pining for BattleTris, if only play it with my kids (and, um, beat them at it). But again, there was much elsewhere to do (starting a company!) — and BattleTris felt hopelessly overgrown.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Adam and I were reminiscing about BattleTris on Oxide and Friends, retelling some old tales. Adam and I share a reunion year, and our college reunions were coming up. Could we somehow…​ get it working?

Sometime last week, Adam unleashed Claude on the task, and within a shockingly small amount of time, the BattleTris splashscreen was working. Claude had knocked down all sorts of gnarly issues, and the progress was promising, but it wasn’t done. I picked it up, and tasked Claude to port it to Linux. Another bevy of tedious issues (including debugging what turned out to be a stowaway setting in my .Xresources file!), but Claude and I got it working. Now we were cooking: I had it working on Linux — and had every reason to believe that the game itself would work as soon as I could scare up a second player.

Meanwhile, back at my reunion, that nostalgic topic that was frequently coming up may now not be surprising, as several of my CS classmates approached me with different variants of the same question: "whatever happened to BattleTris?" The thrill when I showed them a photo that I had taken of the splashscreen on my laptop was not unlike seeing a classmate for the first time in decades, bringing a rush of memories back. The reactions were not uniformly positive, though: when I told two dear friends about it — a couple that had been happily together since the earliest days of their first year and having now raised two kids into adulthood — the reaction was decidedly split. His reaction: "God, I loved that game." Hers: "Right, that’s the game we almost broke up over." (!)

Still, we hadn’t had an opportunity to actually play the thing, but thanks to some crappy weather in Providence yesterday, we had our shot, and it didn’t take long: Adam and I found ourselves playing the first BattleTris game in two decades.

Our frenetic combat lasted several minutes, but had an ignominious end as the first BattleTris game in two decades ended in the first BattleTris crash in two decades:

*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated
Aborted (core dumped)

The message about a core being dumped was — it turns out — a bit of a fib: no core was to be found, and there was little to go on other than the fact that Adam and I had both unleashed our full respective arsenals the moment it crashed.

Lacking a better idea, I tasked Claude on this, and — stunningly — it found a bug:

Wow! Code inspection revealed that this was a definite bug, but might not have been the one that we had seen: Adam had told me what weapons he had used on me, and it didn’t include any of the weapons that would induce the bug (namely, the spying weapons that allow you to watch your opponent’s game).

I told Adam what Claude had found — that it had found a bug, but probably not the bug? — and Adam replied that he had, in fact, also deployed a spying weapon: the bug that Claude found looked likely to be what we hit!

We quickly verified that the spying weapons did indeed induce the failure, and then applied the fix, rebuilt, and played our game anew.

This time, the game was complete. (It would be indecent to say who won that first game, but let’s just say that Adam later settled the score.)

Meanwhile, fellow Brown CS alum (and BattleTris aficionado) Matt Amdur had returned from errands to the beachhouse where we were staying together. More BattleTris was played, drinks were opened, a requisite selfie was taken:

We played BattleTris deep into the night. It was a perfect reunion: fun as hell, with so many fond memories coming back to us.

It is no exaggeration to say that this was brought to us by Claude. Yes, we of course could have gotten BattleTris working without Claude’s help (but the preceding two decades tells us pretty clearly that we wouldn’t have!). The reasons that we wouldn’t have done it (didn’t do it!) on our own are myriad: yes, the work involved is tedious (and time-consuming), but also because it is so indeterminate as to be speculative: when porting something (which is what this amounted to, even if porting into modernity and with as light a touch as possible), it is very difficult to have forward visibility as to progress. That is, you can feel deceptively close to your goal (only to discover some major piece that needs to be rethought) — and you can also be deceptively far (what feels like smoldering wreckage is sometimes but a single fix away from functional software).

So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.

Where does that juxtaposition leave us? As I have outlined in Oxide RFD 576, I believe that LLMs are but a tool, albeit an exceedingly powerful one. When we cease to believe this — when we think of it not as a tool, but as dehumanizing mechanistic overlord — we subject ourselves unnecessarily to it. Yes, LLMs mean a lot of changes to domains that may be unaccustomed to technological change, and yes, some of those changes will leave us wistful for a bygone era — but I also believe that there will be many more BattleTris-like experiences in our collective future: delightfully human moments that remind us why we build stuff in the first place.

As for BattleTris itself, yes, we know — and yes, stay tuned!