I played this in the early nineties.

I played this in the early nineties.

Originally shared by Ed S

Corewar, the program-survival game introduced by A. K. Dewdney in a 1984 Scientific American article, and still going strong with a semi-regular tournaments, has a bit of a backstory.  Here we have Creeper & Reaper, a pair of autonomous replicants from 1971, which inspired Dewdney to his invention, and nearby we find Darwin from 1961 which has many similarities to Corewar.  The two games are compared in this note from 1998:
http://corewar.co.uk/darwin/kline73.txt
For more on Darwin, including pointers to the last version, for a Z80 CP/M system, from 1985, see
http://corewar.co.uk/darwin.htm
The SciAm articles have been transcribed at
http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/
http://corewar.co.uk/creeper.htm