Real Hackers Tell Us Why They Love the Movie 'Hackers'
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Reasons why I love this movie:
- Has the best costumes: Leather, Spandex, cheetah print, that fluffy cat tshirt Phreak wears in one scene. They contribute to a colorful portrayal of a 90's New York overrun by Club Kids, which no other movie except Party Monster really touches. It reminds me a lot of the Fifth Element in some ways.
- Has the most memorable characters and talent. Acid Burn, Zero Cool, The Phreak, Cereal Killer, and Joey, not to mention Agent Gills, Razor and Blade, and of course still-dressing-in-the-dark Eugene (Don't call me Eugene)
- Has the best soundtrack: Massive Attack, Prodigy, Underworld, Stereo MC's, and more. This movie served as a gateway to high-school-aged me to a whole world of 90's trip-hop and electronica that I still enjoy.
- No other hackers movie can claim to have a "Hack the Gibson" level influence for its one-liners and references, except maybe War Games.
- Hilariously corny lines and delivery. Perfectly toes the line between being funny-bad and just bad-bad. No matter how many times I see this movie I die every time Gills says "You are floating, and I'm about to flush yo ass!"
You can probably tell I've seen this movie way too many times, but I'll never get tired of watching it.
I also remember reading the detonate.net parody of Hackers at the time, and thinking it was one of the most hilarious things ever.
I can't compare the two because I've never seen Hackers. It struck me as pure Hollywood nonsense, and because it bombed, I haven't even run across it flipping channels. I'll have to track it down now and watch it.
I was about ten years old when WarGames came out, and I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas that year. About a year later, I got a modem, and about a year after that I started "wardialing" my entire local calling area (and also accidentally some non-local calling areas; I spent the whole summer mowing laws to pay my parents for the giant phone bill that resulted).
War dialing led to random "login" prompts, which led to me teaching myself Unix, VMS, and PrimeOS. It led to Tymnet and Telenet (X.25 packet switching networks). That eventually got me, through many complicated jumps, to MIT's free Unix systems (anyone who could access it could get an account).
Between MIT's free Unix systems, and a lot of commercial systems that I--ahem--borrowed access to, by the time I was 15 years old, I was already a Unix, C, and Internet expert, years before Linux and even years before any local ISPs existed. When my friend's dad, who worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, found out that I was hacking into systems just to teach myself Unix, he gave me surplus AT&T 3b1 and 3b2 Unix machines.
By the time I got to college in 1990, I already knew more about Unix than any of the professors. While that led to me abandoning my courses, it also led to a full-time sysadmin job at the college, and when the Internet exploded a few years later, I was already a decade ahead of my peers, and my career took off from there.
So I have WarGames to thank for all of it. I'm sure glad I never got caught hacking into anything; even though I was at worst a grey hat, I had friends who were criminally prosecuted. I was in the same systems that Kevin Mitnick went to jail for five years for accessing.