80s super Computer movies

I caught the classic movie WarGames on TV over the weekend. There was a scene where Matthew Broderick’s character decides to check out the latest games from a company called ProtoVision, based out of Sunnyvale, CA. I was probably 6 or 7 when I first saw that movie as a kid, and I couldn’t have imagined ever ending up in the middle of a world that so many of my favorite, ‘super’ computer movies were all about. I began to wonder if my current career was seeded in the over ellaborate plots of those movies. Here’s a list of my favorite and potentially most influentia films of that classic genrel:


 		 1. D.A.R.Y.L    

One of my favorite bits of movie trivia, the main character’s name is an achronymn for Data Analysis Robot Youth Lifeform. As a military project gone human, DARYL was a master of Pole Position, was a ‘natural’ baseball player, and didn’t know why he preferred choclate to vanillia. He escapes the government and prevents them from building future robot boy-soliders, thus saving the world.

 		 2. Cloak & Dagger    

This movie had the best use of walkie-talkies by far! Secret government plans were hidden inside a video game. Two crusty old spies were out to steal the game, with only Eliott from E.T. and his imaginary role model (which ended up being his dad) there to save the world.

 		 3. Real Genius    

Val Kilmer and a few actors you never heard from before represent the smartest students of all time at Pacific Tech. They build a super powerful laser only to realize, as smart students would, that is going to be used as a deadly government weapon. A bearded dude that lives in the dorm room closet, Lazlo, helps save the world.
4. WarGames    

Did you know computers used to talk over the phone to each other? Did you know that if you memorized the weekly school computer password, you could change not only your grade but that of your love interest’s. When the government makes the mistake of entrusting the nation’s war response (W.O.P.R = War Operations Programmed Response) to a computer, it takes a whiz kid hacker to challenge it to a game of checkers. The computer teaches itself it cannot win, and saves the world.

Did I miss your favorite 80’s super computer movie?

* Images from imdb.com. Movie plots proudly recalled from my own memory.

5 thoughts on “80s super Computer movies”

  2. Good choices on the movies. I would respectfully enter the following film Backdraft as an Honorable Mention.

    (DeNiro): It’s a living thing, Brian. It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling, not because of the physics of flammable liquids, but because it wants to. Some guys on this job, the fire owns them, makes ’em fight it on it’s level, but the only way to truly kill it is to love it a little. Just like Ronald.

  3. I once asked him about The Blues Brothers.

    I don’t think he is much of a fan. Out of the 200+ DVDs he owns, I believe you won’t find that classied in his collection.

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