David Lightman just wants to play Duke Nukem Forever, and after reading about its pending release date on an Internet forum, decides to try to break into the 3D Realms website to play it. While war driving, he stumbles upon an interesting computer system and plays a game of “War on Terror” with it, thinking that it’s a demo release of DNF. Unfortunately, it’s no game, and the budget for the military is automatically increased. He realizes that something is up when he sees a Whitehouse press conference on television that mentions additional troop deployments to the Middle East. But the G-Men are on to him, so he tries to destroy his research notes by overwriting his harddrive seven times. When the FBI picks him up outside a local 7/Eleven, they fail to read him his rights before throwing him in the van. He’s taken deep into Crystal Palace, where he sees the WOPR, which is run in emulation on a Video iPod—the video being used to similate WOPR’s blinkenlights. At this point, we learn that the DEFCON system has been replaced with a series of color-coded warning levels, DEFCON 1 being called “Blackwatch Plaid”. After breaking out of NORAD using a DoS attack against the building’s security system, he rides a tour bus out, avoiding the ID checkpoint and metal detectors. He locates the supposed dead Dr. Falken on an IRC server that is only available during certain hours, and convinces him that he needs to help stop the “game” from being played. Back at NORAD, they teach WOPR that the only way to win is to not play at all by forcing it to play Star Wars Galaxies by itself (”How do you make it play itself?” “Just login.”). While playing and learning from SWG, WOPR tries to buy tracks from the iTMS by brute-force cracking the 2048-bit NORAD keyring that holds all the passwords.
This “updated for our times” remake of War Games would star either Mark-Paul Gosselaar (“Saved by the Bell”, “Hyperion Bay”) or Wil Weaton. Weaton definitely has the real-life and acting nerd background and experience, but Gosselaar has played a semi-technology role before on that WB Turd Ferguson Award Winner “Hyperion Bay”, and I think he’d play the necessary arrogantness better. Also, I bet Gosselaar could use the work.
The David Lightman character could be a script-kiddie so they could keep the flunking-out-of-school-but-tries-to-game-the-system stereotype, or they could make him the modern stereotype of a nerd (smart, sucessful) rather than the 80s stereotype (smart loner loser). Lame Hollywood style technology references like using war driving would seem more modern while keeping the Hollywood impracticability at a sufficiently high level (accessing WOPR in Colorado from Seattle through an unsecured wireless connection today seems just as plausible and yet unrealistic as WOPR having a direct modem connection in the 80s). Or maybe he could try ssh attacks against a domain list downloaded from a warez site. There’d be a number of DDoS attacks thrown in for good measure, maybe a closeup of a screen (scroll all the way down) showing an ssh exploit being used. No line printers with fan-fold paper, no green screen terminals (rather, 24″ LCD monitors), no 1200 baud acoustic coupler modems (left over piles of free-with-signup DSL hardware instead), no ASCII art representations of geography (they’d use Google Maps), and no 8″ floppies (USB keys instead).