[zorkian]

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/

And my best robot: 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.

[RHSeeger]

There was a fun PC game called Omega [1] where you earned resources to build a tank and then programmed it to win combat; which earned you more resources. It was a great game. It had it's own programming language, iirc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(video_game)