I thought this would be more like MARS, but turns out to be bare-metal MARS where I'm the scheduler. I'm not saying it a terrible experience, but I am grateful that my day job in IT is more higher-level.

What's MARS? I couldn't find any reference that seemed to match due to... well, the ambiguitiy of the name :D

Oups, I misremembered: the game is called "Core War". In it, MARS ("Memory Array Redcode Simulator") is the name of a virtual machine that executes Redcode instructions. As a player, you write small programs ("warriors") to be loaded on the virtual machine where they try to prevail while klling off (overwriting) opponent programs.