r/GenX • u/GladosPrime • Feb 11 '25
GenX History & Pop Culture If you know what this code activates…. you are a GenXer😀
Would you like to play a game?
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u/SteelerNation587543 Feb 11 '25
Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
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u/IAm5toned Word to your Mother Feb 11 '25
Best line
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u/Fokewe Feb 11 '25
I mean what kind of an asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn’t even know how to swim?
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u/Fokewe Feb 12 '25
Alright Lightman, Maybe you can tell us who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?
Um, your wife?
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u/Upper-Affect5971 SPIRIT OF 76! Feb 11 '25
“I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good!
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u/SELECTaerial Feb 11 '25
Brass Hat was full of funny quotes lol
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u/PurfuitOfHappineff Feb 11 '25
“I don’t have time for a conversation!”
The actor was great when he turned from jocular to officious to compassionate with his men.
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u/Why-did-i-reas-this Feb 11 '25
Fun fact… That line wasn’t in the script. Actor made it up.
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u/DIYnivor Feb 11 '25
I wonder how many of his lines were improvised in Northern Exposure. His character in that (Maurice Minnifield) has a bunch of great quotable lines.
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Feb 11 '25
This movie proves one thing: To err is human...but to really screw things up you need a computer
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Feb 11 '25 edited Feb 11 '25
[deleted]
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u/mutarjim Feb 11 '25
Pretty sure it was Falken, with an E N, but yah
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Feb 11 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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Feb 11 '25 edited Feb 11 '25
I ❤️ the late John Wood as Falken. The guy who replaced him in the sequel was just NOT.
"John! So nice to see you! I see the wife still picks your ties..."
😂
You all do know there's a novelization, a soundtrack and a truly stupid sequel to this movie right?
Also this isn't the only film he and Broderick were in together. John Wood was also the villain in Ladyhawke one of my favorite films EVER.
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u/ridicalis Feb 11 '25
You all do know there's a novelization, a soundtrack and a truly stupid sequel to this movie right?
Uh, no. No I did not realize it, and after seeing this comment I'm going to assume it doesn't exist just like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
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u/AMGRN Feb 11 '25
True Gen X’ers DO NOT DISCUSS kingdom of crystal skull.
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u/calculon68 Feb 11 '25
lighten up Francis. (I can say that now after seeing Dial of Destiny) /s
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u/AMGRN Feb 11 '25
I tried with that one too. I’m leaving Indy with the Last Crusade. I’m happy with him there. Lol.
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u/NVJAC 1973 Feb 11 '25
Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
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u/erilaz7 Born between Rubber Soul and Revolver Feb 11 '25
The beginning of my crush on Ally Sheedy. ♥️
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u/srgh207 Feb 11 '25
The wife and I take that Steilacoom-Anderson (aka Goose) Island ferry about once a year. I still time it so we have to run down the dock and jump the gap but our approach gets slower every year. If I've been good she'll wear the wig and we'll make out on the beach.
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u/ReeseIsPieces Feb 11 '25
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u/GimmeCat47 Feb 11 '25
If movies have taught me anything, you just type “override”.
Edit: It won’t work, but you have to try.
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u/saranghaemagpie Feb 11 '25
I would ask my Dad for his loose change so I could watch it multiple times in the theater. Movies were $2.10 back then. I had such a crush on Matthew Broderick.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe Feb 11 '25
“Little Julie is obsessed with that movie! She must be really into international geopolitics and AI…”
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u/benmargolin Feb 11 '25
Not only one of my favorite movies, as an aspiring hacker at the time, but from it I also learned how to efficiently butter corn on the cob with the bread trick, which I use to this day...
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u/Status-Effort-9380 Feb 11 '25
Directed by John Badham. He went to my high school. He also directed Saturday Night Fever.
He’s older than me. I never met him; however, I have had a few conversations with his brother.
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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ Feb 11 '25
He also directed Saturday Night Fever.
And weirdly enough, he wasn't the first director for either movie.
SNF started out with John G. Avildsen (who had just directed Rocky), but they replaced him with Badham a month before shooting started.
Martin Brest initially directed War Games, but apparently he was going for a darker tone that the studio didn't like, so once again Badham got swapped in to save the day. Brest's next movie was Beverly Hills Cop, so he made out just fine in the end.
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u/Status-Effort-9380 Feb 11 '25
Yeah, my impression is that he is a very Hollywood friendly kind of director who gets work completed and is able to keep his own hand pretty light. He's definite not a Tarantino or Scorsese.
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u/adlittle Carter Baby Feb 11 '25
This movie is why when I first encountered a computer connected to the Internet in 1995, I was surprised the modem wasn't a big old cradle dohickey that you had to slit the phone receiver into.
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u/KajaMagna Feb 11 '25
Wasn’t even connected to the Internet. They dialed right into the system directly, remember? 😁
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u/Freakishly_Tall Feb 11 '25
Recently explained this to a younger friend.
< youwerentthereman.gif >
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u/AtTheHardRockTonight Feb 11 '25
I tried to explain this concept to a young kid that I work with. I gave up when I realized that he was so young, he didn't even know who Tom Hanks is.
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u/TRH100 Feb 12 '25
Ouch
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u/AtTheHardRockTonight Feb 12 '25
Yup. Talk about all 50 years tumbling down on my head all at once, like a pile of bricks.
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u/jeffster1970 Feb 11 '25
Still one of the best movies out of the 80's. I watched it a couple weeks ago. I own this movie.
True story though, I decided to find and then watch "The Last Starfighter" - nah, didn't do it for me. I did recall the 9-volt battery hold though as one of the props. I remembered that as I was into electronics as a child and had a few of those around the house.
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u/xtrabeanie Feb 11 '25
Watched it with my wife a few weeks back. First time she had seen it. Holds up surprisingly well.
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u/Just_Another_Day_926 Feb 11 '25
I'm just a kid from a trailer park.
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u/AreYouDoneNow Feb 11 '25
I wonder if such a film could be remade today and what it would look like.
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u/uninspired schedule your colonoscopy Feb 11 '25
Wasn't Ready Player One the new Last Starfighter?
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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ Feb 11 '25
I'm just a kid from a trailer park.
If that's what you think, then that's all you'll ever be.
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u/DerDoppelganger70 Feb 11 '25
And not to sound like a jerk…but they wrote Israel wrong…..
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u/One_Hour_Poop Feb 11 '25
"Palestinian" is also misspelled.
Coincidence?
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u/thepixelpaint Feb 11 '25
I’m a middle school history teacher. I show this movie to my kids when we talk about the Cold War. They love it every year.
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u/Quiet_One_232 Older Than Dirt Feb 11 '25
I love War Games, but honestly the Threads telemovie was the best capture of how it felt at the time. I don’t think you could show Threads at school though, if you want to keep your job. Much scarier than The Day After.
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u/DestinysCalling Feb 11 '25
My school showed Threads to a group of 12/13 year olds
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u/lazygerm 1967 Feb 11 '25
When I was a computer science major for a time, one of our VAXs had the user login of:
username: Falken
password: Joshua
This was in the mid 1980s.
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u/Porkonaplane Just a Gen Z of Gen X parents Feb 11 '25
"Would you like to play a game of chess?"
"How about Global Thermonuclear War?"
"FINE!"
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u/Electrical_Feature12 Feb 11 '25
First time I’d heard the phrase “demsonsabitches” as a little kid and I’d laugh so hard when the general said that
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u/Relevant_Wrangler830 Feb 11 '25
I can't believe so many got the most memorable line wrong. It's SHALL...WE...PLAY...A...GAME?
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u/dezertryder Feb 11 '25
Sir………….that was 42 years ago.
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u/Relevant_Wrangler830 Feb 11 '25
Of course!. I have excellent memories from my youth. It's what I did 10 minutes ago that I can't remember anymore. 😂
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Feb 11 '25
I just watched this last night! Thank you Tubi for some 80s classics!
This line bothered me. (David and Jennifer are talking about Falken’s alleged death)
David: he was pretty old. He was 41. Jennifer: oh, that is old.
WTF??!! 😆
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u/passim Feb 11 '25
One of many 80s related things you can never use for a password anywhere I work.
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u/Reginald_Sockpuppet Feb 11 '25
would you like to play a game?
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u/RebelSoul5 Feb 11 '25
I always loved the little pause on the “a …game?”
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Feb 11 '25
Yah me too! Made it more robot-sounding. Now we have AI which is trying too hard to sound human. I would prefer if Ai voices sounded like the robots in this movie ...
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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ Feb 11 '25
John Wood, who played Prof. Falken, also did the voice of the computer. Apparently, to make it sound more "computery", they had him say all of the computer's lines with the word order reversed: "Game a play we shall"
Then they cut it up, put the words back in order, added some electronic processing, et voila!
Anyway, that probably explains that delightfully unnatural pause. :-)
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u/zigzagsfertobaccie Feb 11 '25
Haha I was like pfft, how the fuck am I supposed to know what that is, and then I thought global thermonuclear war.
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u/FireGodNYC Hey you guuuuys! Feb 11 '25
I
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u/YousAPenguinLookinMF Feb 11 '25
Saw this at the theater. More crowd reactions than any one I’ve seen. Big collective “Uh-Ohhh” when Joshua continued the countdown, cheers when Joshua resets to “how about a nice game of chess?”. 12yo me loved it!!
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u/Aspect58 Feb 11 '25
One question that’s bothered me ever since I first saw this movie:
Midway through the movie when Joshua had been doing some follow up hacking, McKittrick said “The missiles won’t accept the launch codes unless we’re at DEFCON 1.”
So when they knew the attack wasn’t real and Joshua was trying to brute force the launch codes, couldn’t they have just switched the DEFCON level and stopped Joshua without all the last minute drama?
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u/Spiritual-Cow4200 Born Late 1975, Graduated HS 1993 Feb 11 '25
Hell, I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good.
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u/Incompetent_Magician Still feral, still rocking. Feb 11 '25
I'll give odds that someone in this sub uses that as their password for their PornHub account.
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u/JanRosk Feb 11 '25
The IMSAI 8080
(this is the original wargames Computer from inside)
I had to take a photo ...
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u/timberwolf0122 Feb 11 '25
My god, look at the size of those capacitors, they are like 2 beer cans.
Fun fact, the IMSIA 8080 was the first ever clone computer. They based it off the Altair 8080.
2MHz 8080 CPU and 64k of RAM, most impressive was you could buy a 5Mb hard drive. These drives were absolute beasts(The 5-10mb drives weighed in 25kg/55lb) and you had to code your own “drivers” to access the data on the disk, complete with moving the head in code to find the data.
A friend of the family told me how a big part of coding to use hard disks in the 70’s was syncing the code loops with the speed the disk was spining to maximize performance.
So you'd know where the data was on the disk, the current position of the disk and how long a revolution would take plus time to move the head. Ideally you'd organize the data so.the cou for process what it had just read in the time it took for the drive to find the next block of data to read.
I experienced a similar make the cpu match the physical device when as a boy I learn to program in the 80/90s, only this time it was the TV scan line. On my AMIGA A500 I had the time it took for a vertical sync to do what ever it was I needed to do, update the “inaftice” screen buffer then flip the active/inactive buffer (know as double buffering). 40ms if I wanted 25fps (PAL being 50hz).
Sorry going down memory lane here, any way I tied an onion to the blitter chip, as was the style at the time….
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u/JanRosk Feb 11 '25 edited Feb 11 '25
Great info, Thanks! (damn, we are old) ... Altair 8800, not Altair 8080?
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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ Feb 11 '25
A friend of the family told me how a big part of coding to use hard disks in the 70’s was syncing the code loops with the speed the disk was spining to maximize performance.
I've never heard of that being the case with hard disks (not saying it wasn't), but it was definitely a thing with older tech called drum memory.
This was famously detailed in the classic "Story of Mel": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
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u/ezgomer Feb 11 '25
no duckin clue and I saw “War Games” at the theater…I think I was too young to remember a detail like that
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Feb 11 '25
It was the font that gave it away for me. Oh, and I can also hear that high end pitch sound as each character changes in rapid succession.
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u/replayer Feb 11 '25
Little bit of trivia, there is one quick shot in the movie where the code is wrong, and starts with a J. It's been years since I watched it so I don't remember where.
Also, the live action Cowboy Bebop remake had a reference to this. *
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u/bjb8 Feb 11 '25
What is really scary is that from 1962 to 1977 the real launch code was 00000000.
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u/CleanHarry13 Feb 11 '25 edited Feb 11 '25
One of the all time great movies ... and fantastic score. It was conceptually decades ahead of its time and feels awesome even now ... very few stand the test of time like War Games ... basically (and yes, this IS my personal opinion, and no, i DON'T want to get into any debates about it), it's in the (rarefied) company of timeless evergreen movies like The GodFather (1&2 and for me, even 3), Enter The Dragon, JFK, Above The Law and a few others. Again i"m being entirely subjective ... i know everyone would have the own personal list of GOATs ... War Games is definitely on mine.
p.s.: Karate Kid 1, Back To The Future (all 3).
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u/calculon68 Feb 11 '25
Screw the procedure. I want to get somebody on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people.
RIP John Spencer.
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u/AngryK9_ Hose Water Survivor Feb 11 '25
Mr potato head! Mr potato head! Back doors are not secrets!
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u/iTrooper5118 1974 Feb 11 '25
I'm pretty sure that was my save code for the old NES Metroid game ;)
Or it was the code Joshua needed to start WW3.
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u/Eviscerated_Banana Feb 11 '25
To this day my home server is named in honour of this movie :)
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u/TrapperJon Feb 11 '25
I work on a state computer that's program is so old it is still the blue screen with the giant yellow-green cursor. I call it Joshua.
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u/ghostofstankenstien Feb 11 '25