A portentous reunion

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 itâs hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard. And certainly, you canât argue that todayâs 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 workâââand 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 backstoryâ¦â

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)âââand then make fun of you for it.

I thought it would be neat to make a two-player Tetris with similar inspirationâââbut 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 opponentâs 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 momâs basement in Colorado, listening to U2âs 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 courseâs famous demo day arrived at the end of the semester, the re-imagined BattleTris was pretty polishedâââand 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 mindâs eye is walking into the back of the Sunlab that nightâââand 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 bulletproofâââand 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 loseâââand 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 [email protected] Fri Mar 12 16:45:31 1999
From: Adam Leventhal <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected]
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 couldnât make the tournament that Adam organized, but I was fortunate enough to convince him to join us as an intern at Sun the next summerâââand 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 Sunâs 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 wasâ¦â (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 oftenâââand (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), Iâ¦â died. In the other room, she exclaimed, "Hey, the game crashed." I was (as one might imagine!), crestfallenâââand 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 didnât crash," I responded, "youâ¦â won."

"Iâ¦â 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.

"Sheâ¦â 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 sheâs the oneâââyou need to marry that girl." And while I would like to believe that itâs unrelated to that game, the fact is that I proposed to Brigid in the summer of 2002âââand 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 DTraceâââand 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 projectâââand 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 ki