They envisioned him as a dying genius still holding on to a few secrets, and even wrote the character as using a motorized wheelchair. Stephen Falken character would be based heavily on Stephen Hawking. FALKEN WAS BASED ON STEPHEN HAWKING, AND WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYED BY JOHN LENNON.Įven as the story evolved from a film about an older genius passing his wisdom on to a young protégé into a film about a teen hacker accidentally playing Global Thermonuclear War, Lasker and Parkes held on to the idea that the Dr. Lasker and Parkes poured the tricks they learned from these hackers-including the idea at the end of the film to set the number of players in Joshua’s tic-tac-toe game to “zero”-into the film, thus forming David Lightman.
The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, ‘Joshua,’ is clearly a reference to many of my antics.” I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. "There were few if any security measures. “Hacking was easy back then," Lewis said.
These included John “Captain Crunch” Draper, who discovered that a whistle given away as a prize in a cereal box could be used to activate a phone line, thus giving him free phone calls, and David Scott Lewis, who spent his days finding ways around then-primitive computer security measures.
REAL EARLY HACKERS SERVED AS MODELS FOR DAVID LIGHTMAN.Īfter they became convinced that the world of computers and hacking would be a great way to get their young genius into the kind of trouble that would drive a movie, Lasker and Parkes began researching the world of hacking and phone phreaks, and ultimately consulted with real-life hackers on the film. After a few different permutations, the story that ultimately became WarGames was born. That led Lasker and Parkes down a new research road that ultimately also included the rise of home computers. After hearing the story idea, Schwartz made a connection between brilliant young kids playing computer games and experimenting with hacking, and bright adults working in environments like NORAD, looking at radar screens and missile targeting displays. With the blessing of executive producer Leonard Goldberg, who was intrigued by the idea, Lasker and Parkes embarked on a period of research in 1979 that eventually led them to futurist Peter Schwartz at the Stanford Research Institute. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there.” And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. "So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. “I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating-that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS," Lasker told WIRED. Lasker saw an opportunity for a story that would pair a Hawking-like older genius, in a wheelchair, with a precocious teenage genius still looking for his place in the world, and took that idea to Walter F. Lasker became fascinated by the idea that Hawking’s work could lead him to essentially solve all the mysteries of the universe, but his ALS might prevent him from even being able to share that knowledge.
It began when co-writer Lawrence Lasker saw a TV documentary that featured Stephen Hawking. THE ORIGINAL IDEA WASN’T ABOUT COMPUTERS OR HACKING.īefore it became a story that blended the rise of hackers and personal computing with the ongoing threats of the Cold War, WarGames was an idea called The Genius.
So, to celebrate its 35th birthday, who are 15 things you might not know about WarGames. Ultimately, though, a talented cast and crew-including breakout stars Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy-produced a hit thriller that remains both beloved and influential more than a quarter century after its release. After the initial idea took a while to evolve into what the final film became, the production faced studio executives who just didn’t understand what they were trying to do, worries over an implausible plot, fired and rehired writers, and a director change just days into filming. Though it remains a classic 35 years after its original 1983 release, the road to the big screen was a hard one for WarGames.
That new world, coupled with the original idea, became WarGames. That led them to the burgeoning new world of personal computing and hacking in the midst of Cold War America. In the late 1970s, two screenwriters had an idea about a precocious young genius and an older genius who would serve as his mentor, and decided to do some research to turn it into a story.