WarGames 'Shall we play a game?' computer for sale; credit cards at DEFCON 1 (video)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted April 13th 2010 4:43AM
posted April 13th 2010 4:43AM
You know what sells? Nostalgia. And while you might be from the Kin generation, you have undoubtedly heard the W.O.P.R. supercomputer utter the text-to-speech phrase, "Shall we play a game?" from the speaker resting atop David Lightman's IMSAI 8080. The 1983 film WarGames is the stuff of nerd legend, of geek folklore; a 1200 baud, acoustically-coupled, wardialing catalyst in a Hollywood blockbuster that gave phreakers mainstream cred and a real chance at Ally Sheedy. Appraised at $25,000, the perfectly preserved IMSAI 8080 and its associated peripherals will go sale to the general public soon. So embrace it, buy it, and then hand over your icon of computing to the Smithsonian where it can be admired for generations. See the 8080 after the break with a gratuitous WarGames trailer tossed in just for fun.
That movie is great, I wanna watch it now.
@Albot WarGames 2 sucked hard! Don't waste your time if you come across it! The original is by far the best, and definitely a classic!
@Albot
I am from the Kin generation (or as microsoft put it, "generation upload"...) - altough I would never buy one, I might add - and have never heard or seen that.
Having watched the trailer above, I have just added it to my LoveFilm queue. Looks fantastic, in fact, I'm bumping it up to "high" priority as we speak.
Engadget - do recommend films more often!
@Khris They made a 2nd one? What year did that come out and who was in it?
@FORDY ...do recommend movies...
Slap Shot (the original). Low tech. Low budget... You know. Sort of like PALM.
@RandallLind Came out in 2008.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/
Deep saw guy voice: "Yes, I would like to play a game."
ahhh the memories, the memories.
If it plays Global Thermonuclear War, I'm in.
@gFiz
Just give in to the nerd in you and go play Defcon already!
http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/about/screenshots.html
@trankzen And...if you really want to nerd it up for nostalgia, add my WOPR mod: http://bit.ly/protovision
My recolection od acoustic coupler modems is that they were 300 buad each way and highly unreliable.
Great movie though. I watched it a few weeks back. What was nice was there were no real bad guys. Everyone was doing what they thought was right. There was no anal heavy security either. They just locked him in the infirmary.
@rederikus My first modem which I constructed from a kit could do 300 baud bidirectionally or 1200/75 which is 1200 baud download and 75 baud upload. I certainly couldn't type faster than 8 chars a second (back then).
http://www.imsai.net/Movies/WarGames.htm
This states the modem is a camouflaged Cermetek 212A
The Bell 212A or V.22 could do 1200, see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths
Reliability back then had a LOT to do with the quality of the phone lines.
My exchange was still electro mechanical switching, noisy as hell. There wasn't much to connect to anyway (In NZ 1985) . I think I used that modem a total of about 5 times and gave up. More fun to build than to use.
@rederikus Only because the waterboarding scene was pulled in order to obtain its PG-13 rating
@rederikus
That was my friend's accoustic coupler modem. He and I and a few others did the original technical work on the movie. We had to reset the dot clock on a godbout s-100 computer to run at 24 frames per second so we could sync with the camera and the process projectors on the back wall, all running at 24 fps. Then we had to build a box to shift phase so our rock solid sync was a full frame of picture. No one had ever done that before. I was told it couldn't be done. Now Panavision sells a box that does that. We had fun making it.
Lots of politics though. HUGE studio politics. Fired directors, new directors. Quitting producers marrying fired directors. Local # 44 employees getting caught stealing. All very stimulating at the time, now just a footnote in history. I always thought that was my IMSAI, and said so on a web site somewhere and some guy got very upset at that notion claiming the box was his. Who knows? But 25K? I probably paid 2K for it back in the day which was hugely expensive then. Now, with the limited capabilities, it's worth more as nostalgia than for its inherent functionality.
@TC
I worked on that picture. The word waterboarding was not in the vocabulary when we made it. There was no wb scene.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?"
Classic.
Nerds, pee your pants
I wish I could play DEFCON on it... :p
A gen x film to be sure. Bound up in our daily wait for missile rain and the glow of a thousand suns..
Better than being a Y I suppose, they are struck down with the OC delusion.
@Cy Starkman So true...
@Cy Starkman So true...
Watch that flick with a generation Y'ling and pay attention to their reactions. Hilarious!
@Cy Starkman
OC delusion? Wuzzat?
@Cy Starkman
Yep. If you look closely at the background wall and the 24 process projectors, you can see a moment where Khadaffi's country invades Chad, Russia responds, the US responds, GTNW ensues. We just made all that stuff up. But then that one story actually happened, minuse US/Russia involvement and GTNW.
What is doing homeland security about this sale ?
ROTFL
I had just gone in the USAF as a computer programmer right before that movie came out and it changed the way others looked at us-We were no longer 'parent's basement-dwelling dorks' anymore. :-P Even though that movies is very antiquated by today's standard, I still watch it from time to time. :-)
I AM A PC!!
@Wesscoast And I nearly destroyed Earth.
I AM A PC!!!
I am amazed and delighted that this movie has not been remade : )
@iknowaeiou
It was somewhat remade. War game 2 was released (check Netflix streaming). They tried to preserve the memory of not saying it was a remake. But it didn't continue the story line at all from the first one. And yes. War games 2 was a horrible horrible movie.
@Captain Caveman "War games 2 was a horrible horrible movie."
RLY? I loved War Games 2.
See it as a movie on it's own, not as the 2nd part of War Games.
I love how movie trailers used to show you basically the whole movie LOL... I'm surprised it didn't show the 'Can I get you a soda?' scene?
And I love the guy ripping into his teacher like that. LOL
Best watch this movie with your kids or generally a teenager and watch out for their reactions. Hilarious!
ahh that movie rocks, the girl is hot. Shame shes probably the same age as my ma now though :(
test
@Justin Time.
I expected to see the WOPR for sale. Not the cruddy desktop that Matthew Broderick used.
"Appraised" at $25000? I would like to find out how much the obsolete stack of used computer junk that I have would be appraised at.
There is a IMSAI 8080 for sale on ebay right now for $3200. You could buy that and just claim it was the one used in the movie. No one would know the difference... and nobody would care.
I wonder if they will sell you the office chair taht Ally Sheedy was sitting on in that clip for a few additional thousand dollars?
The WPOR would be worth $25k.........
@tmarks11
The WOPR was something the Production Designer built after I showed him the MGM Payrol computer which was old, old IBM EAM equipment (Punch Cards). The rounded corners and grey crinkle surface of the metal was astonishingly old school for a major motion picture studio to collect their time & attendence data on, but studios weren't very computer savvy back then. A famous Apple fellow complimented us on the accuracy of equipment that dated for the military. That's how the military rolled then: they kept old tech FOREVER.
When we went to a few places to ask for large display screens for the back wall, no one had that tech in '81. Now it's all over Vegas and the world. At the time, we decided on Process as the only viable alternative. (Process = a projecter BEHIND the screen projecting images, in sync with the camera. This is how you see moving backgrounds in old movies through the back window of the car they're 'riding' in.) The image guys who all had Gov't contracts joked that a General somewhere would see our picture and want that same tech for real, not realizing that we built all the images (plates in movie parlance) using an HP3000 computer that ran color basic. It took FIVE MINUTES to render a single frame. So 2 hrs. for 1 second of finished film. We ran the whole thing in a small closet near MGM. And every so often, someone would go in and change film mags, and then let the apparatus run unattended. Caveman by today's standards, but that's what we had in '81. Nice to know so many still like and remember that picture.
@WOPR Guy - thanks for the trivia. it was a great film at the start of the PC revolution and will always be remembered.
The movie was a little before my time, but its still a great movie. I just always wished to know why you would pick "Global Thermonuclear War" first? why not start off with a nice game of "Connect Four"?
This is truly the movie that started my lifelong love affair with building my own computers and led me down the dark path of my computer career. Of course there were things before this, but this movie really gave every kid in America with the skills the idea that he too could hack a Government super computer with his 300 Baud modem.
I just wish that computers actually made the noises that the one in the film does. Every word that appears on the screen is accompanied by this oh so cool sound effect. I need to digitize it and find a way to make my iMac do when I type or at least create a screen saver that does it, maybe one that does the voice and sound effects of some of the computer phrases from the movie.
Man I love this film and need to buy it on Blu-Ray, it's one of those movies I try to watch every few years.
Where's the monitor man? That is one of the most important pieces.
Nostalgia ruling Engadget these days: first the article about Commodore and now this :)
Sure was a great movie ,still is .
If this thing auctions for under $100k then it either shens or not a verifiable authentic from the actual movie. That is the most famous computer ever.
$1
Can it run crysis ! Please someone answer i am serious :P
Pair that up with the Roland Emulator II from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and make yourself some real auction cash.
"you have undoubtedly heard the W.O.P.R. supercomputer utter the text-to-speech phrase, "Shall we play a game?" from the speaker resting atop David Lightman's IMSAI 8080."
Nope. -1 mindreading score, Engadget!
First Buellers car now his computer. Matthew Broderick is rolling over in his grave!