It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick (character name: David Lightman) answered back: “How about ‘GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR’?”… unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.

OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!

Okay, so ordinary people didn’t scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online… except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman’s hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections and extremely large floppy disks.

Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that Fall after the summer movie Geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake and logged in.

The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.

Worried? Yes. What if it didn’t hold up after all these years? I really hadn’t seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could—you know—be called a little… old. I mean, the first Mac didn’t even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, Backgammon and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you’re reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.

So how did this seminal and award-winning film hold up after all these years? Astoundingly well—and definitely worth a shout-out on its Silver Anniversary.

To celebrate the landmark, MGM Studios teamed up with Fathom Events to create a satellite broadcast airing Thursday, July 24 at 7:30 pm local time in select theaters nationwide. The theater selection, though, was fairly broad—at least in major markets. Virtually all of the multiplexes on the Virginia side of the Washington DC Metro Area offered tickets, including my local theater, where I had just seen this summer’s blockbuster, Dark Knight, a few days before.

The short feature preceding the main event contained standard made-for-DVD feature fare (film footage, on-the-set stills, interviews with major cast and crew) plus a look inside the real NORAD (the military command center featured in the film).

Did you ever see that Star Trek documentary in which LeVar Burton got folks at NASA and the scientific community to talk about the aspirational impact Star Trek had on their professional lives? That’s what the interviews with NORAD personnel were like. The interviewees adored WarGames, but were quick to point out the fantasy elements of the film in light of NORAD realities. For example, they didn’t even have full-color displays back in 1983. WarGames gave the folks at NORAD technology they could aspire to—though not (and never!) technology that could go around crucial human decision making.

After the short documentary (which I will just bet is on the 25th Anniversary DVD!), they rolled out the trailer for War Games: The Dead Code, set for straight-to-DVD release on Tuesday, July 29. The new movie does not continue the adventures of David Lightman (though the character list does include a “Dr. Stephen Falken,” the scientist who programmed the WOPR computer that wanted Lightman to play a game). Rather, the film is a cyberterror update, featuring a new fresh face wanting to play games with a seemingly benign piece of particularly pernicious code.

The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn’t always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:

• Getting a quick look inside the Minuteman Missile silos. I didn’t know it until about a decade after my dad retired from his top secret job negotiating contracts for the Air Force, but those silos put food on my table when I was a kid. By the time I got to college, I’d concluded that dad had bought Minuteman nukes for a living, but he corrected me when asked, saying: “No. I bought the silos.” WarGames gave me at least a fictionalized look into what my dad had wrought.
• The film score and sound design. I never knew just how far I could wax nostalgic over sounds from the video arcade! Using a combination of military-style march music and 1980s computer bloops and bleeps, the film score struck a perfect balance between the worlds of NORAD and David Lightman. Not surprisingly, “Sound” was one of three categories for which the film received an Oscar nomination. Alas, “Soundtrack” was not another.
• The intelligent and nuanced nature of the script—another category for which the film got nominated. The screenplay for WarGames could have gone for any number of clichés. For example (skip ahead of you don’t want spoilers!):
  1. The commanding general could have been a bloodthirsty redneck warmonger.
  2. The resolution could have used a classic deus ex machina straight out of Star Trek to disable the computer.
  3. The script could have given us dialog making a direct comparison between young Lightman’s skills and Falken’s long-dead hopes for his now-deceased son.

  Instead:

  1. Colorful as he is, the general is the voice of reason, arguing with government civilians that humans, not computers, should control the warheads.
  2. The tic-tac-toe game does not halt the launch of WWIII by blowing the computer’s circuits in grand Star Trek: TOS style, but rather helps the artificially intelligent computer to reach its own conclusion that mutually assured destruction is a pointless gaming strategy.
  3. We can read the excitement and pride in Falken’s face as Lightman finds the solution, but the script never bashes us over the head by making explicit comparisons with Joshua.

Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD’s WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who’s read his bio could hack. It’s easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn’t precede them.

One other point of amusement: all those great shifting lights on the WOPR computer? Those were controlled by a guy sitting inside the box, hooked up to the interface with an Apple II (that’s pre-Mac, for you young folks!).

All in all, the WarGames 25th Anniversary Event was well-executed and a great deal of fun. Too bad it wasn’t better advertised.

And just remember the next time you see some cinematic hacker unleash a bit of cyber-havoc… David Lightman may not have been the first-ever hacker on screen, but WarGames‘ breakout success did make “the hacker” a standard movie character type.