Battlecode at 25: how a whimsical idea became an enduring MIT love story
Battlecode reconnects with its founders, evolves with new technologies, and continues to inspire a global community of gamers and coders
In 2001, my junior year at MIT, I embarked on what I now recognize as my first real startup: a programming contest called 6.370, the Battlecode Programming Competition. At the time, there was 6.270, an incredibly popular Independent Activities Period (IAP) Lego robotics class. I was VP of the MIT IEEE-ACM organization, which represents branches of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I found myself seated at an Eta Kappa Nu dinner between Anne Hunter, EECS department secretary and Professor Michael Ernst, my professor from 6.170. Since I was absolutely terrible at hardware design, I casually asked, “Why isn’t there a virtual version of 6.270? Let’s call it 6.370.” Their response: "Why don’t you create it?" And so... the contest was born.
It felt audacious, ambitious, and just within the realm of possibility. But it also completely took over my junior year. I had to navigate uncharted territory — securing a course number, finding a faculty advisor, getting sponsorship from Microsoft and Morgan Stanley, choosing a game, and, most importantly, finding the incredible Paul Pham ’04 who built the entire game engine. The contest ran during IAP, attracting more than 40 teams. A live audience of over 200 people gathered to watch algorithms move white and black pieces around on a screen to play an ancient Hawaiian board game named “konane.” Only at MIT!
At the same time, I was finding my junior year at MIT increasingly difficult. I was an international student far from home. I was experiencing my first real heartbreak. A back injury forced me off the fencing team. Prescribed codeine for the pain, I found myself unable to think clearly enough to perform well in my 6.046 algorithms class. I escaped that class with a C. As an honors student at the start of the year, I felt like I was in personal and academic freefall.
Yet I had stumbled across something special — something that mattered, and had appeal. For the next two years, Paul ran the competition. Along with Hesky Fisher ’02 and GJ Snyder ’02, he rewrote the game format from a Hawaiian board game to today’s beloved format — a real-time strategy game. The 2003 contest winners, Aaron Iba ’05 and Dave Greenspan ’07, started the “giving back” tradition, becoming the next year’s organizers. The reach and popularity of the contest snowballed. Jerry Mao ’23 competed as a high schooler, then came to MIT and ran the contest for two years. Alumni give guest lectures over IAP and are active in the Battlecode Discord community. The contest has outlived many of us at MIT by decades, carried forward by a staggering 25 generations of students.
Incredibly, this year’s students were -5 years old when Battlecode began. A team of over ten student developers came together last March to plan and run this year’s edition. It is now MIT’s longest-running student-run programming competition course and the largest by participation. MIT teams, I was surprised to learn, are no longer the usual winners. Over 400 teams participate from all over the world across four tracks: High school, US College, International College, and MIT Newbie. Finalists are flown to MIT, and students gather every January to watch virtual bots bash each other on screen — just like in 2001.
Back in Boston after many years, I got in touch with the Battlecode community. The current team of developers told me they’d been working to recover the contest’s early history and move the game forward into a world of Python, machine learning, and large-scale AI. They invited me to share a meal to discuss the past and brainstorm the future. How will this pan out exactly, I don’t know, but this is how nerdy love grows and propagates. (If you’d like to get involved in any way, please also email 6370-chair@mit.edu and jump in for 2026!)
Starting 6.370 changed more than just the programming scene at MIT. It changed me. It reshaped my career, skills, and confidence. It gave me the courage to return home to India in 2007 and build two companies there. It forced me to take on things I had no idea how to do — things that nearly broke me, things that ultimately defined me. It has done this not just for me but for thousands of MIT students over the years — the founders of Dropbox, Regression Games, and Amplitude, amongst others. We all learned how to persist through failure, how to be bold, and, most importantly, how to trust in each other as a team and as a community. In the end, no one builds something like this alone.
Consider this: of all the things I did or tried to do as a student in 2001, Battlecode made the least “practical” sense. And yet it is the only thing from my junior year that is still alive in 2025. Why? Because it really wasn’t about me; it was about our puzzle-loving community that has since poured their energy into Battlecode year after year, simply for their love of playing the game. What was a crazy, difficult idea for us has become, through a quarter-century of play and participation, something quite sane and perfectly delightful today.
So maybe that’s the real lesson — do crazy, nerdy stuff if your heart tells you to. Sometimes things will look hard and the future will be unclear. This is just as true today with the AI boom, as it was in 2001 with the dot com bust. But know this: if you can find a way to start your journey with a community that you have genuine love and consideration for, you'll almost always find that you won't be alone 25 years later, because there’s always another exciting chapter to write in a good MIT love story.
Arjun R. Narayanaswamy SB ’02, MEng ’03, was the founding MD of catamaran.in, Co-founder of soroco.com, and is currently working on e6data.com