Crobots

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CROBOTS is a programming game released for the first time by Tom Poindexter in December, 1985. The robots are controlled by a program written in C. The robot's mission is to seek out and destroy other robots, each running different programs. The robots can be controlled in order to move around the battlefield, they can scan the environment to find enemies and they can fire at enemies using a cannon.

There are many Crobots clones in the world but only some of them are compiler and virtual machines at the same time; for example there are Java clones that use JVM and C++ clones that use a standard Microsoft compiler.

The most recent clone is Crobots64 by Marco Zora that is a C++ subset compiler and a virtual machine with a nice graphic interface. The intrinsic functions are the same of the original Tom Poindexter version. The importance of this clone is based on the new cooperation capabilities between Crobots of the same species, the unlimited number of concurrent crobots, the floating point math functions and the speed of virtual CPU.

The earliest version of a game based on the concept used in Crobots and its descendants was a commercial game named RoboWars that ran on the original Apple II computer. Robots were programmed in a proprietary programming language that was interpreted and included a real-time view of the game as it was played.