Wargames, the “classic” 1983 video game movie about hacking and the military, is getting a remake. In the director’s chair is Seth Gordon, the man behind documentary King of Kong. [Deadline]
Wired has put together a retrospective on the silver anniversary of WarGames, which if it isn’t the first movie premised on PC gaming, is certainly the most notable. The film came out in 1983, the summer of Return of the Jedi. And as I recall it at the time, WarGames was well overshadowed in hype even next to movies like Krull (and Scarface, or Flashdance, but my parents probably weren’t gonna let me see those.) But it came away with three Academy Award nominations and taught my generation some powerful lessons: No one can win a nuclear war, and you can get free calls from a payphone using a soft drink can tab.
The United States’ nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos will soon be monitored by a powerful computer made out of parts you might have in your living room – the PlayStation 3′s Cell processor. Nicknamed the Roadrunner, the IBM-built supercomputer is comprised completely of off-the-shelf components, including nearly 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors. The machine can process more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the world’s current fastest computer, IBM’s Blue Gene.
If only we had had access to this sort of technology back in 1983. The movie WarGames would have been so much better. “Would you like to play a game? How about Resistance: Fall of Man?”
IBM unveils fast new computer for US Energy Dept. [Newsday.com]
