Wired Magazine Salutes WarGames

Read Wired’s article online.

Wired Magazine issue 16.08 (August 2008) will feature a salute to the movie WarGames, featuring responses from the screenwriters, technical and military consultants, and a couple of the actors (Ally Sheedy in a sidebar on the third page. No Mathew Broderick, though).

Before WarGames became WarGames. It should come as no surprise to learn that the WarGames we know and love actually started with a different concept:

In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he’d developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who’s too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later.

Then a quick trip to a computer company called SRI and a conversation with a futurist/consultant would trigger the rewriting of the script with new concepts, a shift in the central character focus, more consultants for the new concepts, …

And the rest became cinematic history.