Inspired by the 1983 movie WarGames starring Matthew Broderick, a movie that was so good at the time it “made” me want to “get into” computers. Childhood memories of trying to “make” games instead of playing them remain.
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Creating a set of words for the full 15 “games” was tedious, however, I wanted to display options which corresponded with the movie.
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The words for each option are themed to the chosen “game” as such, they do not necessarily follow a linear difficulty (but could).
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The font type and colour was also changed to mimic the computer used by the character David in the movie.
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Responses from Joshua/W.O.P.R mimic movie responses also.
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Where responses were needed which researching online and watching the movie didn’t provide answers for, these were styled around the Windows Command Prompt responses/interface and are fairly consistent.
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I didn’t want to create ASCII art for the win scenarios, so instead I;
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made each game a “level” which you progress through, you can, however, choose at which of these you want to start from
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gave the player “lives” which is represented in-game via DEFCON and mimics the DEFCON status from the movie, e.g. as you get an answer wrong the DEFCON status rises until Joshua launches missiles
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win/lose scenarios cycle through a list of either strategic commands/actions or nuclear targets
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there are a couple of Easter Eggs
As a “game” it could do with a bit more work and some tidying up, I tried to remain restricted to the theme/content of this section of the course.
More time was spent on researching the movie, countries of the world, DEFCON and finding a suitable image to use as the reflection of David than any other aspect of this game.
Regarding copyright/permissions of use of Matthew Broderick’s image from 1983, I actually contacted him, he agreed it could be used but in order to have a likeness to that of the movie we also needed to contact Michael J Fox. After a short discussion, thankfully he was onboard with the project concept and we crammed into his DeLorean and travelled back in time to 1983, snapped an image of Matthew (or Matty now, as we are now quite chummy), the 2018 Matty stayed in the DeLorean as we were concerned about affecting the space-time continuum. Thankfully, they didn’t see each other. Something you would have thought that 2018 Matty could have told us in the first place, but there you go.
Or…
I just poached it from Google images and have no permission at all to use it. This will not be a commercial project and is only shown here for your viewing pleasure and educational purposes. Should I hear from Matty, I will, of course, replace the image with something else and apologise profusely.
Side note;
The sequel to WarGames, WarGames : The Dead Code, which I only found out about recently, was “ok”, but if you are a fan of the original (you’d have to be of a certain age), don’t expect the same buzz you may have experienced from the first one.
