"Core War" was inspired by a self-replicating program called Creeper and a subsequent program called Reaper that destroyed copies of Creeper. Creeper was created by Bob Thomas at BBN. Dewdney was not aware of the origin of Creeper and Reaper and refers to them as a rumor originating from Darwin and the worm experiments of Shoch and Hupp. The 1984 "Scientific American" article on "Core War" nevertheless cites the game "Darwin", played by Victor A. Vyssotsky, Robert Morris, and Douglas McIlroy at Bell Labs in 1961. The word "Core" in the name comes from magnetic-core memory, an obsolete random-access memory technology.