News By Graham Templeton Dec. 22, 2013 11:01 am
Internet madman Michael Walden has finally done it. No, he hasn’t cracked cold fusion or identified Jack the Ripper, but he has solved a mystery just as grand, vexing, and, frankly, important, as any other in human history: after 30 years of intensive research, Walden has finally shown the world what magazine Matthew Broderick read from when he discovered the “Protovision” ad in 1983′s hacker classic, WarGames.
Now, I know what you’re saying: “But I’ve already tried that for decades! How has this Walden fellow succeeded where so many brilliant, driven professionals have failed?” Well, he’s spend decades on it, as well. Upon seeing the movie when it was first released, Walden correctly assumed that the magazine was a real computer mag dressed up with a few fake pages. So he asked himself: what magazine would the makers of WarGames put in the hand of their young, ambitious hacker character?
If you’re actually interested in the answer (and why wouldn’t you be fellow geeks?) it’s an issue of the magazine Creative Computing. Volume 8, Issue #9 to be exact. If that seems somehow anticlimactic, don’t worry. By far the best part of this story is not what magazine he found, but how he found the magazine at all.
For 30 years (presumably on-and-off), Walden has wondered and studied literally every frame of WarGames in which the magazine appears. He collected the attributes of its front and back covers, its page count, and even a bit of its real content. When flipping pages, Broderick reveals the magazine’s original stories between the made-up AI advertisements. Even with all that work, though, he had little to go on besides a color scheme, a few words, a blurry line drawing, an ad for Elephant Memory Systems (which never forget!), and a page number.
The page on the left is from the real magazine, and helped Walden pin down its identity.
Only through being a long-term nerd did Walden manage to identify the mag. An iconic red stripe at the top right of the front cover was the first indication, and further details helped to narrow the possibilities down to one particular issue. It was finally the name of tech writer Robert Lawler that led Walden to the Internet Archive, which had just uploaded scans of the old computer mag. All that was left to do was scroll through some scans — and scroll he did.
I really can’t imagine the satisfaction that came with knowing this irrelevant factoid, after all this time. Even the time between the genesis of an idea and the loading of its Wikipedia entry can be enough to build up some anticipation for an answer. This is one killer piece of movie trivia, but for Walden it seems to have been something a little more personal.
Now read: Concept art revealed for the BioShock movie that will never happen
More...
Now, I know what you’re saying: “But I’ve already tried that for decades! How has this Walden fellow succeeded where so many brilliant, driven professionals have failed?” Well, he’s spend decades on it, as well. Upon seeing the movie when it was first released, Walden correctly assumed that the magazine was a real computer mag dressed up with a few fake pages. So he asked himself: what magazine would the makers of WarGames put in the hand of their young, ambitious hacker character?
If you’re actually interested in the answer (and why wouldn’t you be fellow geeks?) it’s an issue of the magazine Creative Computing. Volume 8, Issue #9 to be exact. If that seems somehow anticlimactic, don’t worry. By far the best part of this story is not what magazine he found, but how he found the magazine at all.For 30 years (presumably on-and-off), Walden has wondered and studied literally every frame of WarGames in which the magazine appears. He collected the attributes of its front and back covers, its page count, and even a bit of its real content. When flipping pages, Broderick reveals the magazine’s original stories between the made-up AI advertisements. Even with all that work, though, he had little to go on besides a color scheme, a few words, a blurry line drawing, an ad for Elephant Memory Systems (which never forget!), and a page number.
The page on the left is from the real magazine, and helped Walden pin down its identity.Only through being a long-term nerd did Walden manage to identify the mag. An iconic red stripe at the top right of the front cover was the first indication, and further details helped to narrow the possibilities down to one particular issue. It was finally the name of tech writer Robert Lawler that led Walden to the Internet Archive, which had just uploaded scans of the old computer mag. All that was left to do was scroll through some scans — and scroll he did.
I really can’t imagine the satisfaction that came with knowing this irrelevant factoid, after all this time. Even the time between the genesis of an idea and the loading of its Wikipedia entry can be enough to build up some anticipation for an answer. This is one killer piece of movie trivia, but for Walden it seems to have been something a little more personal.
Now read: Concept art revealed for the BioShock movie that will never happen
More...
