A portentous reunion | The Observation Deck

I just attended my thirtieth college reunion, and there were some clear trends<br>among my mid-life peers. First among them: grave concern for what AI means<br>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<br>undergraduate years with a mix of nostalgia for the past and apprehension for<br>the future, so it’s hard to know if 2026 is truly exceptional in this regard.<br>And certainly, you can’t argue that today’s anxiety for the future is<br>unrivaled: my mother graduated in 1968, and is quick to remind that many of<br>her classmates faced a loss of their college deferments and (depending on<br>their lottery number) being drafted to fight in an unpopular war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the time the course’s famous demo day arrived at the end of the semester,<br>the re-imagined BattleTris was pretty polished — and it brought the house<br>down: after our demo, it seemed as if everyone was playing the game that we<br>had created. (This long pre-dates digital photography, but an image that is<br>seared into my mind’s eye is walking into the back of<br>the Sunlab that<br>night — and seeing every computer playing BattleTris.) That was the good<br>news; the bad news was that it may have been relatively polished, but it was<br>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<br>allowed (and played plenty of it). BattleTris saw some of my own<br>undergraduate milestones: when my 21st birthday rolled around, my housemates<br>and I snuck a case of beers into one of the systems labs and turned BattleTris<br>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<br>much functional and intact. And indeed, a new generation of computer science<br>students behind us discovered and enjoyed the game.

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

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

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

Adam

I didn’t know this Adam character, but I sure<br>liked<br>the cut of his jib! (Yes, this is that...