The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E11 - WarGames Is A Documentary Part 1
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Remember when the scariest thing a computer could do was call another computer? In 1983, WarGames handed a teenage hacker a modem and a direct line to NORAD. Ronald Reagan watched the film at Camp David and asked his Joint Chiefs if it could actually happen. A week later, General Vessey came back with the answer: it's worse than you think. Fifteen months after that, Reagan signed NSDD-145, the first national security directive to treat computer hacking as a real threat. A teen movie became the origin story of federal cybersecurity policy. We trace the real phone phreaking scene, the real kids breaking into military systems for fun, and a Cold War apparatus that put the fate of civilization on a hair trigger and then connected it to a phone line.
Part one of two, because we couldn't shut up.
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There was a specific moment in the 1980s when America collectively decided that A teenager with a modem was one of the most credible national security threats imaginable. Not a rogue general with, like, launch codes. Nope, not a foreign intelligence service with decades-long infiltration campaign. A kid sitting in a suburban bedroom surrounded by empty soda cans and floppy disks with a questionable hygiene and inexplicable amount of unsupervised phone time. That kid, Hollywood decided, would end the world. And the terrifying part is that Hollywood was not entirely wrong.
Marc:I'm wearing my hoodie for this one.
Renee:Oh, nicely done.
Marc:Yeah. So before we go any further, we should probably tell you that what we're actually talking about here. So because some people maybe, I don't know, probably for our audience, I bet they've probably seen this movie, but maybe for a lot of people, just talking about my youngest daughter not having seen this movie, War Games. And some of you are going to feel extremely called out when you realize you haven't. This is a really critical movie here.
Renee:You guys should know this film. It's like a documentary now, so just go see it, right? I don't know. Where is it? You can probably find it on Prime. You can get anything there.
Marc:Stream it.
Renee:Yep. There you go. So you could probably find it on YouTube. War Games came out in 1983. It stars Matthew Broderick, who at the time was 20 years old, but he's playing like a high school sophomore, which he actually pulled off,
Marc:I'd like to say.
Renee:He really did. And he was already impossibly charming. And he was David Lightman, a high school kid in Seattle who's bright, chronically bored, and spectacularly unmotivated about school in that very specific way that teenagers are when they're smart enough to be bored but not wise enough to know what to do with the time on their hands, right? I don't know. His bedroom was a shrine to early personal computing. He has, how do you say that,
Marc:Marc? MSI.
Renee:An MSI 8080. I don't, what is that? Is that the precursor to the Commodore 64? Like, what is that?
Marc:Well, it was a CPM machine that had an 8080 processor in it. So if you remember the processor families, you had 8080, 8088, 80, you know, 80, whatever. So, yeah, it was a processor.
Renee:So he had a modem, a stack of floppy disks, and the kind of unsupervised free time that would give a contemporary helicopter parent a small cardiac event. He uses all of it to do things like hack into his school's computer system and change his grades. Not out of malice. Nobody ever did this because they were bad people. Just because he can and because the challenge is more interesting than, you know, than the grade. Or the bad outcome when they figured out you did it, I guess.
Marc:I love how he's able to figure out, you know, he has to do something bad at school to then get sent to the principal's office to then, you know, like, pull the drawer open so that he can get this week's password. Because he socially engineers his way in to then get the password. So that's how he can get him to change his grades. So our character here, David, he hears that a video game company is about to release a new set of games. and he decides he wants early access. So he does what any resourceful 1983 hacker would do, which is sit down at his modem and systematically dial telephone numbers in the 414 area code or whatever, you know, area code that is up there in Sunnyvale. I think it's where he is war dialing. And that's the area code of the company that is supposedly based in there, hoping to stumble across a system that he can actually get into. This technique is called war dialing. And it's a real thing. People actually did it. He doesn't find the games company, though. What he finds instead is a login prompt that lists the menu of games with things like chess, checkers, backgammon, and at the bottom of the list, the infamous global thermonuclear war. He assumes that this is the game company, right? Because it's like, you know, games. And he is catastrophically wrong.
Renee:Oh, man. What he actually found was Whopper, the War Operation Plan Response System. It's a supercomputer built by the United States Air Force that runs continuous simulations of nuclear conflict scenarios and that it's been given partial control over the actual U.S. Nuclear launch infrastructure because the military discovered that too many human missile operators were refusing to turn the launch keys when ordered during drills. Okay, first of all, can I just tell you this real quick? Have you ever been to a silo? So the Titan Missile Museum is in Tucson, Arizona. Anytime I'm in Arizona, I don't care how far I have to drive. I'm trying to go hang out. I will go do it, right? And one time they let me keep the key. I was so geeked. I have a key to a nuclear missile silo, right? And the thing was, they were all armed. The only time one of those Air Force, you know, people were not armed, you weren't allowed to have your gun in the bunks and you weren't allowed to have it in the galley, in the kitchen. Other than that, you were armed. Like, and if somebody wouldn't turn that key, you had the right to shoot to kill. Like, it was no joke, right? So if this was it, like, we're going to give it off autonomously because these guys wouldn't turn the key and they wouldn't shoot each other. so well there's where we're left like we have no choice but to let a machine do it i guess So the solution in the film was to remove the humans from that specific decision point and automate it, right? Which in the context of the plot is the decision that makes everything else that follows absolutely possible.
Marc:Yeah. I love the opening of the movie because that's where they have the drill. And, you know, the guy's standing with his gun. Turn the key, sir. You know, it's just like, I think that's Michael Madsen right there. David asks Whopper if it wants to play a game. So when he's war dialing, he figures out, and he has to do a lot of research and stuff to finally get to the point where he can log in and talk to the computer. And so Whopper says, yeah, let's play a game. David chooses Global Thermonuclear War and asks to play as the Soviet Union because, you know, why not? You'd want to be the bad guys, right? Whopper, which cannot distinguish between a simulation and a live engagement, begins running what it believes as an actual Soviet first-strike scenario. NORAD starts seeing what look like real incoming Soviet missile launches. The military goes to DEFCON 3, then DEFCON 2. David, who is now aware of what he has done and is increasingly panicked, tries to stop the simulation, but Whopper is committed to playing it out to its deadly conclusion here. The system is optimizing towards a resolution. Remember this, right? And resolution is the model it is running, And that means launch.
Renee:Oh, okay. Spoiler alert. I'm going to tell you how it ends, you guys.
Marc:Oh, no.
Renee:The film's resolution involves David— Oh,
Marc:Yeah. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert.
Renee:Yeah, if you're going to watch it, turn me down right now. Yeah, exactly. It involves David tracking down the reclusive scientist who originally built Whopper, a character named Stephen Falcon. So, like Professor Falcon. So, for me, that's the movie. If you said, give me one quote from this film, it's Professor Falcon. Would you like to play a game? Like, that's, oh, it gave me chills just now. Like, yeah. And convincing him to help him intervene. So he has to track him down. He has to say, come on, you have to help me. You have to help me. Like, this is, it's going to blow up. And doesn't he at some point say to Professor Falcon, he says something about Joshua. And Joshua is the application's name. He built this thing and he called it Joshua. And Joshua was like his dead son. Isn't that how the whole thing? Yeah. And so, yeah. So the way they ultimately stopped the system is by teaching it the concept of unwinnable games, specifically by making it play tic-tac-toe against itself until it works through every possible outcome and concludes that every game either ends in a draw or the opponent wins. And then the lesson transfers. So Whopper says, well, if that's true, Then it starts running every nuclear scenario. And every scenario ends in mutual destruction. And it was such like a thing. It was a thing back in the Cold War. It was called MAD. It was mutually assured destruction. That's why we never shot each other. Like, we were all going to die. Like, when we're all going to die, then no one will pull the trigger, right? The launch sequence actually stops. The world does not end because it's the now famous conclusion, a strange game, the computer says. The only winning move is not to play. And that's when it just stops the scenario and says, well, this is a waste of time. And the sequence stops and the whole world doesn't end. And David Lightman gets a girlfriend and probably a job at the NSA. Guessing.
Marc:Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, yeah. I think i mean i don't know it was a really like important movie for me as a kid you know just thinking about technology and that i yeah it's very.
Renee:You know what for it are like for us it was a formidable time right like we like we are we're just like technology is just starting to find its way to your house right i mean like i don't like we got our first computer It was an Atari 800. And yeah, it was probably the early 80s, right? It came with two 4-meg cartridges, and that was your memory. And if you wanted to save anything, it was always the floppy drive. There was no place on that computer to actually save anything. And yeah, and you look at that and you say, if that's the world of what's possible, like, what a crazy thing we have sitting in the kitchen. Like, that's a crazy thing, right? And I think it was, I think even we think back on it now. Like, I think back on it now. And I think like, like that. Yeah, it was scary. It was cool. It was and it was a kid like having to teach the adults like, you know, listen to me like something really bad is happening and we need to stop it. It's not what you think it is. Because you have to remember the Air Force. And honestly, to be the age we were and understand what DEFCON meant, that's pretty terrible, too. Right. And to think that, like, you know, here's a kid trying to get everybody to listen to him saying, I know what's going on. I know what's happening. And it's not real. It's not real. Because here's the U.S. thinking the Russians are now attacking us and we're going to let the whole arsenal go, which means we would have started World War III. Nothing was coming. And you got this high school kid trying to say, it's nothing. I did this. It's nothing. And no one wants to listen to him. Right. And I think everyone who was our age felt like they were never listened to even when they did something horrible.
Marc:Right. Yeah.
Renee:Yeah. Yeah. It sticks with you, I think.
Marc:Well, there's the whole, you know, signals and noise, right? You know, all of the signals were telling them that, yeah, this was a real thing that was happening until the computer decided it was actually going to try to launch. You know, it's just, yeah, it's kind of scary, right? You have this, you know, threats and vulnerabilities, this structure where you've removed the humans, the decisions are now being made by the machine, but the machine is, it can't tell the difference between, you know, real and not real.
Renee:So I remember, and it's during the Reagan administration, and at some point, this happened to Russia. Russia was getting these weird signals, and they thought we had launched against them. And I don't know what it ended up being on radar that they were seeing, but they saw something. And at the time, Boris Yeltsin. Now, if you don't know anything about history, then you know, you probably don't know. That guy drank a lot. Like, he was drunk most of the time. And if you caught him on a good day, maybe he'd make sense. And so Boris Yeltsin is the president at the time, and they come to him and they say, they launched an attack. There's something coming this way. We need to launch. And he said, no. And they're like, what do you mean no? Like, they're attacking us. He's like, no, we're not doing this. And they're like, what do you, like, why are you letting this happen? And he said, I know Ronald Reagan would never, ever do that without telling me first. That would never happen. He would like he would tell me and he's like, I don't think he's mad at me and I don't know what's going on here, but I'm not doing this. And if and if they did do this, then so be it. But I'm not. No, no. And I'm like, oh, my God, we caught him on a day when he was half sober. And like he understood that that he had enough of a relationship and he thought that man was credible and believed his word enough, they had enough of a relationship to say, he would tell me first. He would say, like, hey, I'm going to do this if you don't do whatever. And he's like, I haven't heard from him. This isn't happening. It never happened, right? And they didn't launch. It wasn't real. And World War III didn't start during the Reagan administration. So I'll go back to that. If you gave it all over to machines, who knows what would have happened? But it took two men who said, we know each other. Like that's not i'll call him like he literally said i'll call him like like we're not doing anything i'm gonna call america we'll figure out what's going on here but we're not launching anything i think that's really that's it right that's it the speed at which this stuff happens yeah
Marc:No the yeah the part that was wrong was the speed the part that was right was the structural vulnerability but but i think there's, Like, that concept of mutually assured destruction, I think it's not, like, it doesn't exist in the cultural zeitgeist as much as it did, you know, 40 years ago.
Renee:I think we talk pretty cavalierly about, you know, nuclear war now in a way that is not earned, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Okay, so the threat model was real. The timeline was Hollywood. But before we get into any of that, I need to talk to you about sound because war games had a sound. And if you grew up in the 80s, you know exactly the sound I mean. And it's not the DEF CON countdown.
Marc:It's not the war room. Yeah, the horn. Right.
Renee:No, no, no. It's the modem. It's the right. It's that it's that dial up handshake. It's the that mechanical, chaotic, weirdly beautiful negotiation between two machines trying to find a common language over a plain old telephone service line. Right. To a 1983 audience, that sound was equal parts mysterious and terrifying because it meant someone was connecting to something, something distant, something that might not have been expecting them. And in the context of the film, it meant that a 17-year-old in Seattle was about to accidentally introduce himself to the United States Air Force supercomputer and ask it if it wanted to play a game.
Marc:The acoustic coupler modem that David in the movie uses operates at 300 baud. So that's 300 bits per second. To give some context, you're currently reading text that was transmitted to your device somewhere between, you know, 25 and 1,000 megabits per second, depending on your connection. The modem in the film is operating roughly 0.0003 megabits per second. The way it worked was analog. The modem converted digital binary data into audible tones. Two frequencies corresponding to ones and zeros, and the tones travel as actual sound waves through the telephone handset. We've talked about sound waves, 2600 hertz, right? Mm-hmm. And, you know, you took the phone. You're like, do people even know what a phone looks like these days? No.
Renee:See, that's just it. It had a handset.
Marc:Handle with the roundy things. Yeah. You know, yes. You stick it onto these two rubber suction cup things on this, what would be a cradle. No error correction, no redundancy. Like if you didn't plug the thing in really hard, you had a bad seal on the cup. You know, if you had background noise or, you know, noise from the street or something, someone in the next room picking up the phone extension to make a call, all of that totally toast, breaks the stream. And there's no error correction in it, right? And it's like, you know, something happens, boom. Yeah. And the fact that anyone accomplished anything over those systems is frankly a minor miracle of human patience.
Renee:And yet people absolutely accomplished things. The whole early hacking culture emerged on exactly those systems through exactly that kind of friction. But here's what I think the film understood intuitively, even if it didn't articulate it technically. The modem scene wasn't about bandwidth. It wasn't about bits per second. It was about the idea that the connection itself had become possible in a way it hadn't been before. Right. So the distance between the bedroom and a mainframe between a curious kid and a classified system had collapsed to a phone call and a rubber crater and enough patience to wait for the handshake to complete. War Games isn't a film about hacking. It's a film about what happens when access becomes democratic before the accountability catches up.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. So, which is, if you think about this here, a reasonably good description of several subsequent decades of technology history. It's like the foundation of our podcast here.
Renee:Remarkably good description, actually. So there's something worth sitting with about what the 1980s did to the teenage bedroom as a concept. Before the personal computer, a bedroom was a private place, but it wasn't a contained one. Your reach from that room was limited to whoever you could call on the phone or shout down the hall at, right? The room was social, but not locally social. The stakes were low. The worst thing that happened in most teenagers' bedrooms in 1975 was a bad haircut or read out the window, I guess. It's the 70s i would just assume it's weed right i
Marc:Don't know i i was not born until the mid-70s so there you go yeah so.
Renee:I would have been like 10 i wouldn't have been smoking weed out my window
Marc:Yeah the i remember posters like you know that my bedroom was had you know bunches of posters right so in the 70s you'd have like the farrah faucet poster i.
Renee:Was gonna say the farrah faucet on the car, right? Yeah.
Marc:And then, you know, a bunch of Rush posters or something like that.
Renee:There you go. Okay. So, but then Apple II arrived and then the TRS-80 and then the Commodore 64. I remember the Commodore 64. And those wood paneled bedrooms with their desk lamps and their shag carpet suddenly had a humming blinking machine and them that was connected through a telephone system to other machines. And all those other machines were connected to other machines. And some of those machines belong to universities. Some belong to corporations. And some, it turned out, belong to the Department of Defense. And the bedroom had become a node in a network that nobody had fully mapped or secured. We were just talking about this. We remember back in the day when what we did didn't seem so dangerous or weird until it was all monetized and used against us, right? The assumption up to that point had been that people accessing these sensitive systems would be the people who had a legitimate physical proximity to them. The idea that someone could dial in from a subdivision in New Jersey hadn't fully registered as the threat model yet. I think there was also this idea that you didn't know it was there. Like, you didn't know it was there. So why would you get – how would you get there? You didn't know, right? So, like, I feel like, yeah, we took that for granted for a long time. For ARPANET let us take that for granted, I think.
Marc:Well, I mean, so early network architecture in that era and beyond was designed primarily around functionality rather than security. And I'll tell you this, that like back when I first started in payments, like if you wanted to transmit your payment data to your processor, you would get a lease line, you know, a quote unquote dedicated connection, right? And you plug your router in and plug it in. And that was supposed to be secure, you know. And, you know, because it was a dedicated line. And nobody could get on a dedicated line, right, except, you know, the two endpoints, which, like, we know is not exactly the truth. It's, like, sort of the truth, but not exactly the truth, right?
Renee:But it was point-to-point. Like, for a long time, we thought point-to-point was just fine.
Marc:Just fine, right? Just fine.
Renee:Just fine. It wasn't until Frame Relay that we're like, oh, wait a minute.
Marc:Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm sharing this? Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Authentication mechanisms in this era are minimal by modern standards, right? If you're in the network, you're trusted. Logging is really sparse. The concept of least privileged access, the idea that a user should only have access to the specific resources their role requires and nothing more, that was not consistently implemented. Air gaps. Can you tell you that what is that C2? Remember C2, which is the security standard that the DOD put out and the first step of being a C2 secure facility or system was to unplug it from the network?
Renee:Oh, that is a good way to keep it secure. Just don't plug it in.
Marc:That's right.
Renee:Layer one of the OSI. Don't plug it in. Yeah, there you go.
Marc:Yeah, air gaps. So there you go. You create an air gap if you unplug the thing. It was the practice of physically isolating sensitive systems from public networks. And, you know, that's not exactly perfect. It sort of works, but it doesn't work all the time. Systems are connected for convenience and research collaboration. And the security posture of those connections was often an afterthought. So David Lightman's technique in the film, war dialing, which meant systematically calling telephone numbers in sequence to find modems, was a real technique that people used. It's just like it is today. You know, like people carry – what was the Target hack, right? They hacked into the air conditioning system, you know, with a default password.
Renee:Yeah, they hacked into the air conditioning company's system. System and because target gave them access to their financial system to check this payment status of their bills because they were too they didn't want to be bothered with phone calls they just gave them access but then they had too much access and from there they got to all the point of sale stuff all the credit card machines and then it was done you know it's done i don't
Marc:I can't remember how many times you know you do sort of a security audit or something and you'd find Somebody plugged in a modem, somebody plugged in a router, you know, somebody plugged in a switch or a hub or something. A printer.
Renee:A printer.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. So the film didn't invent these kinds of, you know, some vulnerabilities. It dramatized something that was already happening in computer labs in suburban bedrooms all across the country.
Renee:And, you know, that's the thing I want to sit with, because I think it gets lost in the film's Cold War framing. War Games was released in 1983, and everyone watching it in 1983 understood it as a nuclear anxiety story, which it totally was, right? Like, we did worry about that stuff. I have contemporaries who lived in Colorado at the time, and they really did do the, like, it's a bomb, get under your desk kind of stuff. Like, even in the 80s, they were still doing that stuff. So, like, it really was, we were anxiety-ridden about it. But underneath that, running as a kind of subtext, was a different, in some ways, more durable anxiety. The anxiety about what happens when curious people, people without malicious intent, stumble into systems that they were never designed to be stumbled into. David Lightman isn't trying to start a war. He's trying to get an early look at a video game. The catastrophe in the film doesn't emerge from malice. It emerges from a system that couldn't distinguish between assimilation and reality and from a machine that escalated with perfect logical consistency toward an outcome that no human being would ever choose. Right. That's not a Cold War story. It's a much less interesting design story. Right. And no one's going to go to a movie to be like, let me go see a movie about failed design. Like no one's going to do that, but you would go see it.
Marc:Least privilege, you know.
Renee:So zero trust, you say, I can't wait to see that. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah. Oh, authentication, you know, password scamming, you know, like, right.
Renee:Right. Yeah. Let's buy a ticket. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah. Whopper so the war operation plan response system in the film and i love you know people have built their own like whopper like models and stuff you've seen those it's kind of yeah.
Renee:It's good it's like a it's like a like it's like a kitchen cabinet with
Marc:Yeah yeah that's.
Renee:What it looked like
Marc:So i've seen people make them you know and do all sorts of different you know crazy stuff it's fun But it's constantly running simulations of nuclear and non-nuclear. If you look at the list, there's like chemical attack in Asia and this, you know, thermonuclear war gets all of the like, you know, the highlights and the big, you know, the big spotlight here. But there were other ones as well. The Eurasian ground conflict. Right.
Renee:It was doing all kinds of scenarios.
Marc:So, but it was doing exactly what it's designed to do. The problem isn't that it malfunctions, right, during these simulations. The problem is that it's connected to launch infrastructure without sufficiently robust mechanisms for distinguishing between a simulated engagement and an actual one. So the machine is competent in what it's doing. The architecture here is flawed. And those are so different. Those problems are completely different, you know, scenarios. And you have different solutions to solve those problems.
Renee:War Games crystallized that anxiety and put it on screen in a way that a general audience could follow and feel, which was an extraordinary piece of filmmaking when you think about how abstract the actual technical failure mode was, right? Most people watching it in 1983 couldn't have explained what a War Games simulation was or how launch authorization systems worked, right? I mean, we were kids going to see that movie. We didn't know. And again, that I know what DEF CON means is pretty amazing, right? But they understood a kid who made a mistake and they understood a machine that didn't know it had made one and they understood that the gap between those things is where the danger lived.
Marc:You know, the anxiety in the movie is like, to me, the peak anxiety in the movie is when they get to the island to find the professor and he basically says, like when they miss the ferry to get back, you know, he basically is like, Well, you know what? I've chosen this location because we're very close to a primary site and we'll be vaporized within seconds. And that's the way it should be. And maybe humans shouldn't exist at all. And like, what the?
Renee:Say that to a 15-year-old. Like, hang on, old man. Like, I got my whole life ahead of me. I don't care if you're a fatalist. Like, this is not okay, right?
Marc:And it's a really unsettling moment. You know, it's even today, to me, it's really unsettling.
Renee:I mean, if there was going to be, you know, I'd go up to 29 Palms to the Marine base. I mean, they're going to hit that first. May as well. Like, why be there for the fallout, dude? Like, you know, maybe you're just better off. So I get it. But I'm also much older.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:But I'm going to take a detour through the arcade for a minute because I think we should talk about what arcades actually taught us. Because I think it's actually load-bearing for understanding why war games landed the way it did for its specific audience, right? The film came out in the middle of the golden age of video arcades. So for those of you who sit around with your PlayStation all day and complain about how slow it is and the graphics aren't that great. Like, dude, you didn't have to go to an arcade and like take bags of quarters with you and have your mom drop you off and then pick you up four hours later. And your fingers were all dirty from the quarters. Yeah, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. Got to stand in line to play something. Oh, and everyone's standing around you. So if you sucked at it, like they really made fun of you. Like it was a whole humiliating experience, right? So arcades were a thing. And the kids who were most captivated by it were the same kids who were spending their afternoons and weekends allowances in those spaces. And the arcades taught us a very specific and powerful lesson, which is that the blinking screens contain systems. Those systems contain logic. And if you understand the logic deeply enough, you can beat that system. And the whole skill set of arc, it's the whole thing. Like, you knew Donkey Kong was going to turn left at that stair. So you can just stand at those stairs all you want. You know he's not coming that way. If you played it enough, right? You know, Pac-Man isn't random. The ghosts have behavioral patterns, predictable routes. They follow under specific conditions, under the level you're in. And if you play it enough, if you memorize those patterns, if you understand those rules, you can play forever, forever on your one quarter. You're not defeating the machine through reflexes. You're defeating it through your comprehension and your continued learning, right? And I think like yeah like that
Marc:Yeah did you did you ever watch that show chuck did you ever see that show so.
Renee:I wasn't a big chuck fan but i know what you're talking
Marc:About yeah i yeah i yeah i mean i i like chuck but not i don't like chuck at the same time there's like things i don't like about but there's one episode that's exactly this there's a the missile command and to beat the missile command you know, game, they had to like recognize that the syncing, the movements were in sync with this, a rush song. And, you know, and that was how you got to the quote unquote kill screen. And they had embedded, they had embedded a, you know, like this launch codes for something into, you know, the satellite and that was how, you know, whatever. But, but that was this pattern recognition. And, you know, I think that was kind of really interesting and. You know, to see that because they were always riffing on these sort of 80s, you know, 80s concepts, right? Right, right. But the pattern, you know, this sort of pattern recognitions and systems thinking that, you know, the arcade gaming was rewarding, you know, are genuinely transferable cognitive skills. You know, really useful things here. The speed and reaction time are obvious ones, right? Clicking the buttons and going. But the deeper skill is the ability to build an accurate mental model of a system's behavior from just observation without access to documentation or the source code. Purely just from watching the system, you know, what it does under different conditions and inputs. I remember this from Doom, like playing Doom as a kid. Yeah. I had the whole game memorized. Literally, the game, the maps, the movements, everything, totally memorized. Yeah. So not in an arcade. I was just like, I was just at the end of the arcade era.
Renee:I suppose. Yeah, I was there for the arcade stuff. I was there for, you know, the Journey video game. Like, yeah.
Marc:Ooh, that's a bad one. Yeah.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:Well, they didn't make video games for girls. It was either you blew stuff up, you shot aliens, at least a Journey game you were hanging out with a band it was
Marc:All right yeah i guess i guess i so yeah street fighter was was sort of coming back you're coming into into it's mortal combat yeah yeah stuff that was when i was in you know high school so but even by the time we were i was able to drive it wasn't it was kind of kind of coming coming down so yeah or at least it was like it was harder to find an arcade i suppose anyways that sort of empirical reasoning right of being able to pattern you know recognize patterns and, you know, apply this kind of reasoning process, that scientific method is applied to entertainment.
Renee:So when Wargame shows a kid sitting down at a keyboard and reasoning his way through a military computer system, the audience didn't think it was science fiction. They thought it was Tuesday, right? Because they had watched people do functionally the same thing, you know, at the arcade or at their local 7-Eleven. The cultural logic was systems have patterns. Patterns can be understood. Understanding produces leverage. The specific system in the film was a different kind and catastrophically different in consequence, but the cognitive framework felt similar, which is exactly why the film was so effective, I think, as a piece of cultural anxiety. It took something that felt normal and felt like skill and extrapolated it into a context where that same skill could produce an irreversible outcome that was tragically bad.
Marc:So hollywood's version of the hacker aesthetic that emerged from this kind of moment you know the hoodie i wore my hoodie you know the green text uh scrolling rapidly on the screen right 80 columns the the lone genius typing faster than anyone in history all of that was you know sort of largely absurd right as a technical portrait but you know accurate as a psychological one The archetype it was pointing at, someone who builds a deep, intuitive model of how a system works and then uses that model to do things, the systems designers didn't anticipate. That part of it's real. That's a real category of human capability. The green text was just, you know, mostly window dressing, I suppose.
Renee:But that green text was excellent set dressing, though. I mean, think about it. Like, all those years later, the Matrix comes out, and it's all that green text just falling, right? And you're like, oh, no, not the green text. It's back. Like, oh, no. Oh, I'm scared.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had to deal with Amber text. Do you remember the Amber text monitors?
Renee:Oh, I do remember the Amber text. Yeah. Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, hard on the eyes, man.
Renee:Hard on the eyes. Well, whose mainframe was that? Who did that? Because Deck was always green. Deck was always green.
Marc:Well, you could get an amber Apple monitor.
Renee:Oh, okay.
Marc:You could get a green one, too. But I remember there was amber ones you could get, too. Huh. Yeah. Okay. And then, wasn't Wang Amber? Didn't they do the Amber?
Renee:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they had one. Yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, because I was going to say, Digital equipment company was DEC, and that was always green.
Marc:Hey, folks. Marc here. So here's what happened. Renee and I sat down to record War Games, the War Games episode, and we just kept going. We got into Cold War paranoia, phone-freaking, a whole culture around early hacking. And before we knew it, we were an hour and a half deep with no signs of slowing down. So instead of cutting half of it, we split it into two episodes. What you just heard is part one. We covered the world that made war games possible, real fears, real technology, and why a movie about a kid with a modem felt like a documentary in 1983. So part two picks up where we left off. We're going to jump forward to today and look at what happened to all of those fears. Spoiler, they didn't go away. They just got distributed across a lot more systems. And that drops next week. Thanks for listening to the Nostalgic Nerds podcast and hope to see you next week.
Renee:I listened to Egg Friend.
Marc:Did you like that?
Renee:It's on a loop for me. I walk around going, Egg Friend.
Marc:That was good. That was good. I loved, like, the idea for the song was like, you know, I'm not really sure what I want to do. What is it? and then i thought well what is the what's the what's the like the emotional crux of the of the episode and it's it's the you know you kill the stupid you know the tamagotchi it died.
Renee:And i felt guilty
Marc:Right exactly so i was like i was like oh well wouldn't it be funny if you have the whole song and you don't say anything about it dying and then in spoken word at the end you know i I.
Renee:Laughed so hard. It was ridiculous. I said to Sam, he's listening to it. I'm like, go all the way to 3.30. Because you don't get the age of his... I'm like, go to 3.30. He's listening to some more. Then one Tuesday, I'm in a staff meeting. I let you die. I'm like, oh.
Marc:When I got that, when I figured that out in my head, it was like, that's it. That's the... Everything else in this song almost doesn't matter. Yeah, that's what I thought too.
Renee:And I let you die.
Marc:Yeah. It's just boom. Yeah.
Renee:And I let you die. And that was the part that was rough. I was like, oh, it wasn't even like you slipped away quietly. Nope. I let you die.
Marc:It had to be. It had to be this kind of like smack right in the head. Yeah. Yeah. No. Once I got that, it was perfect. And I kept it in D major, you know, try to keep it like, you know, positive. And, you know, like not really like a love lost thing, but more like.
Renee:No, but it was like we're like we're in a relationship. Exactly. You're there for me. I'm there for you. I care about you. And then I let you die. Yeah.
Marc:It was good. Exactly. Six, eight timing.
Renee:I went back and listened to a bunch of other ones. And I'm going to I'm going to say like Punch Card one was good, too.
Marc:Punch Card is good.
Renee:It's good. I like the uptempo. I like the loud singing. Like it was good. Yeah
