I remember the days of Shadowrun that got me excited about hacking. There is CodeWar and LightBot which are both fun (though CoreWar is a little dated). What other games are there involving coding that are fun and challenging that can be used to get someone excited about coding or flex their chops or even learn the basics?
How about RoboCode
You code your tank in Java and let it loose in the 'ring' with other coded tanks. People got pretty into coding strategy, targeting, etc. IBM sponsored it and came up with some nice introductory programming tutorials to get you started.
Here's a great article to get the feel for it:
(source: sourceforge.net)