FIEA programming graduate students spend 2 semesters making a game engine. In the first semester, they create the architectural infrastructure, including an event system, networking, a language and a virtual machine. (They add graphics, physics, AI and animation in the second semester.) At the end of the first semester, they have to make a simple multiplayer networked text-based game, just to exercise the engine. This video shows what cohort 5 made in Spring of 2009:
