Losers Don’t Play Videogames. . . Heroes Do: The Remediation of Videogames in 1980s Science Fiction Films

• Main Author: Dawn Stobbart
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lancaster University 2015-07-01
• Series: The Luminary
• Subjects: science fiction; cinema; videogames; adaptation
• Online Access: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary/issue6/issue6article7.htm

A decade before the first adaptation of a videogame to film (Super Mario Brothers, 1993), computer and arcade videogames were incorporated as subject matter in mainstream Hollywood films such as War Games (1983), The Terminator (1984), and The Last Starfighter (1984), presenting the new medium through a science fictional lens. While these films aired widespread anxieties about the ability of computers and videogames to start global wars and override human social structures and agency, at the same time, they offered a counterpoint to the traditional masculine hero, which this article will explore, situating the adolescent within the historical context of the 1980s, film, and videogames. The article will also consider the rhetorical questions raised by these films: the protagonist of War Games both inadvertently sets off and stops a chain of events that would lead to World War III. He does more than save the world from his own error, however: he teaches the government’s military computer to think and humanises the machine, rendering it less dangerous. When the protagonist of The Last Starfighter beats the arcade game for which the film is named, he is visited by aliens, who inform him that they planted the game in hope of finding a hero with shooting skills that can save the galaxy from its enemies. They transport him to fight that war, and he emerges a victorious hero. All of these films reinvent the adolescent as a hero, and at the same time, question the role of technology as a growing part of 1980s culture.