Posted 09/23/08 at 04:51:30 PM by Will Smith

I just returned from a special theater screening of War Games—quite possibly the only good film Hollywood has ever produced about computers, computer nerds, or hacker culture. Shockingly, the movie, which was first released in 1983, holds up quite well, despite the use of archaic hardware (acoustic couplers and vocoder boxes), a laughable sentient military supercomputer, and an occasional lapse into typical Hollywood lingo.    

The abundance of 8-inch floppy discs also gave people in the theater a laugh, as did the fact that characters were practically chain-smoking throughout the entire movie. But none of the showing’s pervasive air of yestertech could take away from the fact that War Games remains awesome.

More nostalgia after the jump!

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7

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column, will smith, release notes, ed word, columns, hollywood, nerds, war games, geeks

Posted 04/29/08 at 03:23:38 PM by Thomas McDonald

PC Gaming Alliance is long on buzzwords, short on ideas.

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column, game theory, pcga

Posted 05/31/06 at 05:56:29 PM by Tom McDonald

Maybe the PC and its bastard console children aren't so different, after all. Can we all live in harmony?

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column, pc, console, xbox

Posted 03/16/06 at 04:42:25 PM by Will Smith

What happens when you leave a couple of bored PC magazine editors to their own devices? Pure brilliance, plain and simple.

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column, notebook, laptop

Posted 02/17/06 at 03:14:44 PM by Will Smith

Living without broadband is like sitting through a lecture with a hangover. Bad news for everybody.

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Internet, column, broadband