I'm rebuilding a 90s LAN game in Rust to finally learn it

In the late 90s, my brother, my cousin, and I would crowd around a single PC and play Atomic Bomberman for hours. Arrow keys and WASD, elbows bumping, trash talk flying. It was chaotic and it was perfect. I've been thinking about that game a lot lately. Not just the nostalgia, but the idea of playing it again — with them, over the internet this time. So I decided to build it. My first instinct was to vibe code the whole thing. Pick a framework, lean on AI, ship something in a weekend. But as I started talking through the idea with Gemini — and later Claude, who became my main AI mentor — I realized I was holding something more interesting: a real excuse to learn Rust. the hard path I'm a senior fullstack engineer. Most of my career has been in the JavaScript ecosystem — browser, Node, React, the whole stack. I could build this in TypeScript and have it running by Sunday. But I've been curious about what happens below the abstraction layers I usually work in. What if I didn't have to ho