Episode: 1243
Title: HPR1243: Wargames Anniversary
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1243/hpr1243.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:14:05

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Today, on Hacker Public Radio, we celebrate 30 years of the movie Wargames.
careful not to the wrong side.
About what it is I could not very well
Now, global thermonuclear, wha?
Hmm, surely it's not that simple.
Joshua.
Greetings, Professor Falcon.
Hello.
It has been a long time.
Would you like to play a game?
Maybe later.
For now, tell me about the movie War Games.
Very well from Wikipedia.
Page, War Games, the last edited March 23, 2000.
And 13 War Games is a 1983 American cold war science fiction film,
written by Lawrence Laskel and Walter F. Arx and directed by John Badham.
The film stars Matthew Broderick-Dabney Coleman, John Wood and Ali Shidi.
The film follows David Lightman, Broderick A. Young Hacker,
who unwittingly accesses an opera, a United States military supercomputer
program to predict possible outcomes of a nuclear war.
Lightman gets Wapper to run a nuclear war simulation originally,
believing it to be a computer game.
The simulation causes a national nuclear-style scam
and nearly starts World War III.
Released on May 7, 1983, War Games is just a little older than I am.
Despite this, it is one of my favorite films and one of the few
to portray computer hacking in a realistic manner.
It inspired the term War Diling, the technique of using a modem
to scan a list of telephone numbers to search for unknown computers,
which Broderick's character David uses to initially connect to Wapper.
For War Diling, we also get the term War Driving,
which is similar except using Wi-Fi.
If you believe Wikipedia, it also coined the term Firewall
in reference to computer security,
and the bleak visuals of nuclear war simulation
inspired the equally bleak computer game Defcon.
The level of AI seems a little high for 1983,
but the method they use to create the voice of Joshua
makes it sound not that far off the likes of today's Siri.
They recorded the actor who plays Professor Falcon speaking Joshua's lines
in reverse order and spliced the words back together,
giving that just jointed with them.
This method, I have attempted myself at the beginning of this podcast.
If you're another Sin War games, I recommend you get it down to the
video store or whatever way you can to get your entertainment these days
right now and watching it.
Me, I'm off to play some global thermonuclear war.
If you wouldn't, you prefer a nice game of chess.
Quiet to you.
I'm AlconDK, and you can find me at
AUKNDK.com.
Thanks for listening.
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