WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars | Hacker News Reader

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars

wired.com

57 pointsatestu19 comments

I remember my mom brought home an Atari 800XL. This was after Wargames was released and my brother and I used to play on it all the time. He did something where a bunch of garbage characters were printed on the screen while I was playing and said "oooo you broke into the pentagon!" I immediately thought of wargames which scared the hell out of me and unplugged the computer. Good times. :)

I owe my programming career to this movie. I saw it when I was young, right after I had started learning BASIC, and immediately decided I wanted to learn everything I could about telephony, networks, and AI.

The whole film is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/andiback#g/u select "date added" and start at the bottom. Great film.

Nerd scene is funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNiiBrEHBWA

The nerd scene is pretty much all of high school for me.

We didn't have a VCR when I grew up, I got my first when I got my own apartment when I was about 20 (in 1998). My mother was a teacher at an adult school, teaching maths and computers. They had WarGames on VHS and they also had something called a MovieBox in Sweden, a VCR made for carrying which video rental stores also used to rent out.

So WarGames was the only movie I watched on VHS. It's just called video in Sweden. Watching video. And I watched WarGames again and again. Every day my mother brought home that MovieBox and WarGames, it was the best day ever.

I owe my life and worldview to this masterpiece.

2 things:

+Hypertext guru Ted Nelson's brother Ralph took all the on-set publicity photos for Wargames

+On the DVD box cover is a photo of Matthew & Ally - unfortunately it's clear that though the reflection is them, they're not the non-reflected selves - it's body doubles.

Full article here:

http://www.wired.com/print/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/...

The movie was made even awesomer (a real word) by the absolute turd of a sequel that was WarGames: The Dead Code.

On second thoughts: what sequel? I do not know of its existence.

That was a fun movie. I was a teenager, a hacker, and was blown away to see my secret society hit the big screen. A friend of mine actually had an Imsai 8080 (David Lightman's computer), so I recognized it immediately. One thing that bothers me in this article: Ally Sheedy's eye-rolling at us in that sidebar. Listen, Ally, no one even knows your name anymore -- and we hackers rule the world. Bite me.

The greatest human disease on the Internet is pride. It infects every corner and can culminate in the decline of great communities. Ally Sheedy can't hear you.

Pride? No. Self-respect? Yes. Ally's dissing us for no good reason, and I'm pointing out that if anyone is to be shrugged off into a corner, it's not us. I'm also being a little hyperbolic for (intended) light comedy.

Even an aged once-cute girl has a much higher status in our society than any geeky engineer and Ally Sheedy knows it.

If that were true, what does that say about our society? I don't agree anyway considering geeky engineers are responsible for a lot of what's changed our society significantly in the last ten years.

I also reacted to this. I think her comments are telling a close minded and anxious worldview. I also think that actors who are suspicious and anxious gets less interesting and lower paying jobs, unless they are in a circle of people who share their worldview.

So if Ally Sheedy had watched WarGames, and been a little more curious, she might not be acting against Meat Loaf in a direct-to-TV movie called "Citizen Jane" today.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1415256/

One more thing that I found strange:

"Parkes: If there's something naive about the movie, it's that we didn't anticipate the power of hackers. For the handful of people who ended up doing things like unleashing viruses, well, most of those guys got arrested and then worked for the computer security business. So I guess it's all worked out."

What does he actually mean? The first sentence, I get. But the thing about virus writers not being a problem, and a handful of people writing viruses... In which world does this guy live?

"Crunchman" Draper, most if not all of the old L0pht crew, Condor, Woz, Dark Dante, etc.

Did Draper and Woz write viruses?

Anyway, that's not what I meant. He seems to suggest that nobody writes viruses anymore, while I seem them running rampant.

Come on now. Ally had nothing to do with WarGames. The script may as well have said <insert random ordinary looking girl>. She was damn near an extra in this film. The plant used to ask the dumb questions in order to fill in the less technically savvy viewers.

I saw the movie when I was nine. I remember being distinctly disappointed that a dumb girl was screwing up a good computer movie.

Hell hath no fury like a Hacker scorned.

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