Review of WarGames (1983) by Tero L — 25 Dec 2009

One of 'the original hacker-films'. When the hardware was low-tech and analog, inventive little freeloaders could do wonders with just a tape recorder and a payphone. Security was a joke to anyone with more than a typewriters knowledge of the machinery and internet was a thing to come. The golden age, when PC was taking the first steps into the public access, anyone could stumble upon a system and log in without getting even caught.

War Games tells about a boy, who does just that, and gets a war-simulation going in the Pentagon computers. The whole defence network is going apeshit when russian subs and mobilization news are starting to flood their screens and all the intel from outside is telling a whole different story. This is a story of trying to track down the creator and stopping the military from destroying the whole nation.

From a modern perspective, old hacking movies are fun to watch. There is always a seed of truth to the methods they used if you can filter out the bullshit. Old-school systems warm the heart with your dialtones and analog modems, with only a parser to use as a user interface instead of 3D flying worlds like the more recent 'hacking'-movies. We've come a long way. Like any old movie, there are long strips of boring footage with not so much as a background music playing that could've been cut out without the movie even suffering from it, but other than these little annoyances that plague every old flick, the movie is as good as it gets. For a fan of such.