In honor of War Games turning 40 along with how well the artist combined the artwork from all those awesome Atari 2600 game boxes…I wanted this! I was never wild about the movie when it was in theaters and I didn’t get to see it until the following year when it was played to death on HBO. Actually, I hated the movie throughout the Eighties. It wasn’t the acting, it wasn’t the cast, it wasn’t the plot holes (more on this later); it just heightened my anxiety and fear of dying in a nuclear war because I saw it after seeing The Day After, which will be turning 40 this Fall. Had I seen this in 1983 like the general public, maybe I would’ve seen the danger as more existential and not something keeping me from going to sleep, worrying if crazy Reagan was going to launch a pre-emptive strike so we’d all meet his Jesus.
My father also ruined the movie (the plot holes, remember?) thanks to his career in data processing, the forerunner of today’s coders. He said there was no way Matthew Broderick could keep plugging away at a government mainframe in 1983 with a modem until he gave the correct password, especially if it was a backdoor into a military system. He would get at best, a few tries before the computer monitoring the connection locked him out and then if he was lucky, he’d receive a message saying “see your system admin for a password reset.” Afterwards, these attempts would receive attention from a human who would at worst, just cut off the backdoor forever all the way to what does happen, the government traces where the intrusion originated from figuring it was espionage. They’d just do it way sooner, thus never giving the hero a chance to research the life of Dr. Falken, leading him to deduce a very lazy password.