NA NA NA NA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

It pains me to report that there is a WarGames sequel film of sorts unleashed upon the defenseless viewing public in 2008, called WarGames: The Dead Code, released direct-to-DVD for reasons that become all too obvious about 5 minutes into viewing. It is directed by Stuart Gillard, who can claim such other crowning achievements as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III and the Harland Williams vehicle Rocketman on his CV. I subjected myself to watching this atrocity for the purposes of this article; you can find my email address on the home page to arrange a PayPal donation to fund the psychiatric sessions I will need for the rest of my days to try and erase it from my memory. The film features Matt Lanter as Will Farmer, a young hot-shot hacker who becomes targeted for elimination by an all-encompassing government computer named R.I.P.L.E.Y., because he wins at an online video game? The movie really doesn’t make much sense, and even the appearance of Colm Feore as project director Hassert doesn’t help things much. There’s cute-as-a-button Amanda Walsh as Farmer’s plucky love-interest Annie, but she is negated by Farmer’s annoying best friend Dennis, played by Nicolas Wright. While Dennis is around for “comic” relief, R.I.P.L.E.Y. herself might induce the most laughs of the film, being a random assortment of motherboards connected by IDE cables, encased in a glass room filled with smoke and strobe lights.

There are some nice throws to the original, such as when Will and Dennis are going down the list of games R.I.P.L.E.Y. has available online; when they get to Global Thermonuclear War they look at each other, shake their heads and say “Nah”. There are a couple of other links to the original, not only infuriating the viewer as the film proceeds to piss all over these great aspects of the first movie, they also serve as a stark reminder that you should really just be watching that one instead. This entire travesty will simply be another cinematic lurking horror behind the three-foot-thick Cheyenne Mountain NORAD-type blast door in my mind where I shove these movies and then refuse to compute that they ever existed, to sully the good name of their forerunner films, i.e. there were only two Alien films, Jaws was a one-off, and there HASN’T BEEN A SEQUEL TO WARGAMES! In other words, The Dead Code is dead to me.

Nothing to see here. This image is broken. Please move on. Please.

Defense Play, 1988. This cover looks familiar….

Oh, right…..

The original WarGames gets a re-release, showing for a short run at 317 theatres for its 25th anniversary in 2008. Positive sequel outlook comes with rumors kicking around since 2009 that video game aficionado and Hollywood power-player Leonardo DiCaprio is investigating the possibility of making a reboot of WarGames, through his Appian Way production company. While this fails to pan out, MGM puts into development a true WarGames sequel, for release in 2013. At the helm is Seth Baker, a director who’s resume might at first glance seem a bit lean, but it has it where it counts: he is the writer, editor, and director of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a wonderful documentary about one man’s quest to wrest the Donkey Kong all-time score record from the flamboyant Billy Mitchell. Considering Baker’s obvious affection for classic video games, one hoped MGM has found the man for the job in putting a faithful sequel of WarGames together. Unfortunately as of my writing of this bit (2023), this project has yet to appear.

MGM and experimental media company Interlude (now known as Eko) manage to create an interactive limited web series based on WarGames titled #WarGames. Sam Barlow, creator of the critically acclaimed video game Her Story, is tagged as the creative lead of the project which is published in 2018. The series, following the online exploits of a group of young hacktivists, allows viewers to choose which member of the group’s monitor screen and webcam to view, as well as read social media posts and other methods of advancing the narrative. While these choices affect somewhat how the material is presented, they don’t alter the ultimate outcome of the story.

Joshua sums it all up

Dr. Strangelove for the Pac-Man Generation

Thankfully, the original WarGames remains a wonderfully entertaining film, a kind of Dr. Strangelove for the Pac-Man generation that I love to watch over and over again. One profound impact of the movie is its anti-nuclear weapons stance, pointedly saying about nuclear war “The only winning move is not to play.” During previews of the movie leading up to its release,  a screening is held in Washington, D.C. for the Washington press and government dignitaries, along with anti-nuke activists like Dr. Helen Caldicott, who’s devastating lecture on the probable environmental impacts of nuclear war was featured in the 1982 Academy Award-winning NFB documentary short If You Love This Planet. After the screening, Dr. Caldicott is effusive in her praise to director Badham over WarGame‘s ability to deliver a solid message about the dangers posed by the nuclear arms race in such a palatable and entertaining fashion. The movie would also influence Ben Rhodes, after watching it on VHS tape as a youth and serving as his first exposure to the concept of nuclear weapons. Rhodes would grow up to join the U.S. Presidential campaign of Barack Obama as a foreign policy advisor, and would write Obama’s first overseas speech, to be delivered in Prague in 2008, a speech of which the focus would be the proliferation, management and potential drawdown of the global stockpile of nuclear weapons. In the following October after delivering Rhodes’ speech, Barack Obama would be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition mostly of his aspirations for a world devoid of the nuclear menace.

Another big fan of the movie was Ronald Reagan. After seeing a special screening of the film at Camp David (arranged by Lawrence Lasker, a family friend to the Reagans) during the movie’s opening weekend, U.S. President Reagan derails a meeting about missile programs to discuss the film, the possibility of its events actually happening and its ramifications with members of congress. In the wake of the release of WarGames, six various anti-hacking bills are introduced into Congress, and scenes of David Lightman using brute-force techniques to break into computer systems are shown to congresspeople during hearings on the matter. Laws already on the books, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, originally meant to handle bank frauds and defense systems intrusions, would be expanded in 1986 after the kerfuffle over the movie in order to catch any unauthorized hacker access into any computer system, corralling people like Kevin Mitnick and Aaron Swartz, with Swartz committing suicide in 2011 while facing a felony conviction and possibly 35 years in prison after breaking into a computer on the MIT network in order to disseminate textbooks to those who couldn’t afford them.

Aaron Swartz, hacktivist and victim of suicide

Ironically, while influencing governments to wake up to the possibilities of computer hacking and pass laws to deter such activity, WarGames would directly spur on an entire generation of hackers, including Erik Bloodaxe (Chris Goggans), a founding member of the hacking group Legion of Doom. Further fallout from the movie comes in the form of the 414s,  a group of computer hackers from Milwaukee inspired by WarGames, who’s online exploits include breaking into hospitals, banks and even the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the location of the development of the first atomic bomb. The Los Alamos break-in is referenced by media at the time as “the WarGames case”, a reference to the movie which had opened earlier in the year. 17-year-old 414s member Neal Patrick becomes the public face of the group, perhaps because he seems so much like a David Lightman prototype.

Neal Patrick, spokesperson for the 414s hacking group, and his trusty TRS-80 Model III computer, 1984

Never before or even since, has there been a more realistic portrayal of computer hacking put on the screen. The careful consultation that writers Lasker and Parkes did with various hackers, including Captain Crunch, shows: Lightman uses a brute-force phone number scanning technique that is a proven real-life tool of hackers, and its movie appearance inspires the creation of even more and better scanners in the wake of WarGames, a genre of computer hacking programs which takes the name of the movie to become known as wardialers. Chris Lamprecht, aka Minor Threat, is another kid influenced by the chicanery David Lightman gets up to in the movie, and in 1991 creates ToneLoc (Tone Locator), one of more popular wardialers around. An Internet-era cousin of the process, driving around neighborhoods in vehicles looking for unsecured wireless access points to hi-jack, becomes known as wardriving. These techniques are generally text-based affairs, as opposed to the typical Hollywood MO of flashy, graphically intense portrayals of hackers swooping through systems represented as garish 3D hallways, with suddenly a giant vault door slamming shut in front of them flashing “ACCESS DENIED” in a giant, blocky red font as they type furiously away on their keyboard. You know, like the kind of flashy graphics and swooping colorful text that they reverted to in the hacking scenes in that sequel they made of WarGames; called The Deeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrppppppppppppppppppppp
HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?