I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
Hackers inspired me to start digging around on my FreeBSD laptop and learn how to setup a bitmap image as boot splash, just like the kids in the movie all had their own custom boot image.
Just a few years later I dropped out of school and started my career, haven't looked back since.
My first boss who gave me my first chance, and my 2nd job through referral, he dropped out of 7th grade to start his own business. He was once interrogated by police, and they had brought in some experts from a big ISP, and these "experts" had no idea what he was talking about. :D
I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers, Silicon Valley, Office Space and War Games. Maybe it's also why coder movies like The Social Network and Ex Machina don't resonate as community favourites because they don't bring an inclusive experience.
The ad campaign was super campy, there were print ads in comic books, I remember making fun of it before the movie came out - this can’t be any good, they are going to misrepresent computer geeks, it’s going to be stupid. Of course as a teen I didn’t think it was authentic enough but over time I look at it with more respect. I showed it to my 10 year old not too long ago (forgot that there was a little nudity, oh well) and I was proud of claiming the culture it represented. The thirst for knowledge, the irreverence for authority, all of the different kinds of people making a community based on shared interest and respect, all night hackathons, the adults who just don’t get it - and yeah, the music and the fashion. That’s the stuff that matters, not a hacker using a Mac or goofy technical gibberish, and that’s the stuff they got right. It was a special moment in time, and I’m glad the movie is around to encapsulate it.
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
The use of the soda can pull tab to ground the receiver to get a dial tone was my moment as I was a noob phreaker well before being a hacker. How many kids watching that movie would even know what was happening today? Would they even know what he picks up off the ground let alone the actual phreaking
Man, I didn't see hackers for the first time until probably 5 years after I wrote my first line of code. I still watch it to this day but I got started when I saw "wavy colored text" in an AOL chat room. Yup, colored sup and sub text. Fascinated me as an 11/12 year old and I picked up Visual Basic 5. Good times
Yeah, me too.
And I gobbled up the Phreak culture from my danish small town life, dreaming of late eighties AT&T escapades with my crew of cool street kids… RISC is good.
Hack the planet.
This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.
I took my kid to Def Con. We were walking up to the convention center and there were a few hundred people milling around out front. To embarrass my kid, I shouted "hack the planet!" loudly toward the crowd. Probably a good 50% of the bystanders shouted it back at me.
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
I adore it. And some of the representations are the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids exploring for the fun of exploring, not to hurt anyone but just to learn? The clock whirling at 4AM while someone hyperfocuses on code? The way they tease each other but genuinely respect their abilities? It’s beautiful.
There are some niche 3D file system browsers/shells out there, but none as captivating as what's shown in the movie (or the linked "animated experience") that I can find.
Not quite filesystem navigation, but SGI IRIX's Performance CoPilot software had an IrixGL (OpenGL's precursor) UI for monitoring things like memory state, CPU/storage loads, etc.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
PCP is still in active development. It's very cool, but probably made obsolete by otel and others. I used it on servers and services regularly until a few years ago. Very lightweight, robust and powerful.
I remember being at Summercon before this movie opened and Ericb addressing hotel conference room we were seated in talking about how Iain Softley had directed Backbeat and how happy he was that he was doing this movie and that you had to get in the right headspace to understand what it was going for.
(I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
> I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
I love it, but I know it's bad, but I also think it was intentionally what it is, which makes it good or even great.
If you can unlock that teenage feeling of wonder at the potential size and scope of the world and, at the right age at the right time, feeling like that world is your oyster, that's the feeling in which to watch this movie.
I refuse, however, to get into that feeling-zone for other 'high school' movies; they're stupid...
Hackers is weird in that the tech part of it is so obviously fake, but then you have the hacker culture part that goes to the point of actually quoting a large part of the "Hacker's Manifesto" in the movie.
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
(1) I read the book. it was awesome. If the movie fails to deliver that awesomeness then it's really upsetting as it's ruining something great for everyone that didn't read the book / see the original. They're unlikely to go check the original. They're more likely to just think "That was dumb".
(2) When they change things so much that they arguably should not have used the name.
Why choose some existing fictional world/characters just to shit on them and make it something else? If you wanted to make something else, then pick a new name, make your own IP.
I actually really liked the live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, and was disappointed at it's cancellation.
Unpopular opinion amongst those who grew up on the anime, but I was late to the anime so my childhood-integrity isn't dependent upon requiring a faithful one to one retelling (or whatever would satisfy those folks - possibly nothing).
I enjoyed the "Hollywood" Ghost in the Shell as a stand-alone 'thing', unrelated to the manga / anime. The ending is quite on the nose; ultra-formulaic where formulaic has no place.
I’ve said this before on hating news but the best movie that stands up is sneakers.
Just imagine somebody has invented a quantum computer with a production process that has a very high error rate so a second one can’t be easily produced.
There are 3 'official' soundtracks with various tracks from the movie and some inspired by. BUT on the 2020 double disk reissue, the second disk carries may of Pratt's tracks, including Combination..
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I first heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
This is exemplified in Wayne's World product scene. I later found out none of the companies shown in the scene had paid for their products to be in the scene. Its also one of the most iconic scenes from the movie.
This is insightful. But I'm not sure it's completely true, I think people just have shifted their perception of what selling out means.
Content creators on YouTube, for example, get criticized when they literally sell their brand to a larger conglomerate. It seems people do not complain if they do sponsorizations tho.
I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).
To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-)
I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
I agree with you and I find the term "creating content" awful, even though I'm forced to use it because it's something people immediately understand.
"Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
It is what's happening in some cases, not all. Also, language shapes thought, so we encourage this to happen if we frame it as "content creation". It's something to push against.
Note it's not even relevant whether something is commercial. Art can be commercial and not be just "content". A musician is not a "content creator" which happens to create content in the shape of music. "Content" implies it doesn't really matters, what matters is engagement and the platform (and advertisers, etc). It's not healthy to think of hobbies, art, and entertainment as exclusively about this. Imagine if Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Alan Moore, etc had been thought of merely as "content creators".
This is not a new idea. Stallman was already pushing back against this "content" term decades ago.
Can recommend such a mix, too. Gather select works of The Chemical Brothers, The Dust Brothers, Bassbin Twins, Crystal Method, DJ Krush, Dub Pistols, Lunatic Calm, Meat Katie... and you're Somewhen Else during it. Works for commutes/trips, too.
> The Chemical Brothers (a), The Dust Brothers (b)
I had a couple of Dust Brothers (a) cassettes before they changed their name after getting a call from the other Dust Brothers (b).
Still can't believe they knowingly copied another band's name "because it sounded cool". Isn't coming up with a shit name half the fun? "I need a handle man".
I have this OST and the Mortal Kombat one as well on CD (mentioned together since they both have the same song, "Halcyon + On + On" on them!). When I went to a 2600 meetings in Seattle in 1999, I listened to the Hacker's soundtrack in my car on the way, of course. I gave one of the people I met there a ride and we had a laugh when he saw the case in my car. (I feel like I have a story for every song. Thanks for indulging me.)
Mortal Kombat ost had a ridiculous influence on my childhood music tastes, another absolutely amazing sound track is The Saint, check out the artists involved.
Interesting, I wouldn’t have thought of that one since I remember not being impressed by the movie at the time. On Wikipedia, a quote from a review said “on the whole, it's one of the few soundtracks that works better as an album than as a movie.” That tracks!
Awhh, I love the movie also. Could be a nostalgia thing but it's just fun. Val kilmer is basically always great and it's a nice mix of sort of spy movie tropes while having fun with it.
Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
Lost a lot of my people to drugs and jail
And suicide cause we do or die
Thats the way this thing goes with my crew and i
But i guess that we all keep it moving right
Terminal eternally but you know that i ain't sick
Out here idling on my nick
While i go ahead and do another magic trick
I'm sorry for your loss. I've lost many to all of these. The worst is someone I was in federal prison with and would hang out with daily. He got out and got on Fentanyl and was so messed up he literally burned alive after his house caught on fire. Rest in piece Daniel.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Thank you. And you know, it's those quotes and concepts that really stuck me with, about how we were all in it together. And not to get off topic, but i'm so sad and disheartened to see what tech has become since those days.
I love the ethos of this movie. That it was about hacking and building things for fun, not for money and profit. This to me is what hacking and programming has always been about. It's too bad that overinflated salaries and the hype that if you go into software you will make a lot of money has watered down the culture to an extent. And now, with the advent of AI and vibe coding, it's been increasingly difficult (for me) to maintain that sense of newness and enjoyment in the craft when I see million line AI diffs.
Along the lines of ethos, there's also the narrative of freedom of information and anti big money corporation (the plague). I hope that this energy to fight the system and tyranny of control the system represents never dies. Particularly as we watch the darkness of a tyrannical government continue to unfold here in the U.S.
This is so lovely! If the original author is here in the comments, some feature requests that would absolutely make my day, presumably from easiest to hardest :)
I love this so much, thank you for sharing!
* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film
* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.
* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel
* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc
* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.
I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)
I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt
> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.
> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features
> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input
No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.
Hi guys! Original creator here. I had no idea this was trending here until some people on LinkedIn wrote to me!!! I will try to make the garbage files hunt easter egg. This was an idea that started all of this but I couldn't get it to work nicely and I definitely didn't expect this much traction!
You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&o...). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in Phrack (issue #7, released 1986-09-25) ;-)
The movie is obviously technical garbage but one thing it did well was capture that early hacker counterculture spirit. I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
It's not really even technical garbage. From many throwaway lines it's clear that the writers actually knew their stuff. They just chose to not make a hacking movie based on realism (because boring) but based on the zeitgeist, the computer tropes of the 80s and early 90s, and the concept of "cyberspace" as envisioned by Gibson and made its way to the collective consciousness. In a time when virtual reality and 3D graphics were at peak cool, yet most people had no experience with computer networks, or even computers at all.
"Cyberspace […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." – Neuromancer
Good point. By 'technical garbage' I largely meant the dated visualizations it associated with all the hacking scenes (the rapid hacking speed I can forgive for the sake of story) but TBH I never fully made the connection between 'the gibson' and william gibson -- I kind of like the idea of the hacking scenes as an exploration to gibson's ideas around cyberspace.
It's surprisingly accurate in terms of how weird and cringy the 90s / early 00s hacker culture was, I too was obsessed with the movie and it led me to obscure irc channels, e-zines and eventually a whole career in tech
I find this and Starship Troopers to fit in a similar niche for me. When I first saw them I found them very cringey, horrible, couldn't stand it. Hackers for the reasons being discussed here. ST because of how bastardized it was from the source material.
But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particular ethos in a cheesy & over the top way. And both of them I think hit their mark well in that regard.
What is it with people feeling compelled to talk about starship troopers movie being different (lesser) than the book?
Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)
None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
Most people don’t want to admit that the author of the book wants you to take the book and movie at face value and thus the film/book are unironically right wing coded.
A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.
Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
Bastardized? It's satire and not at all subtle about it. You can of course argue that it's poorly executed satire, but judging it based on how faithful it is to the source material is rather missing the point.
I think you're the one who missed the point, as in you missed *my* point.
When I first saw Starship Troopers, I disliked it because it wasn't faithful to the book. Over time I came to appreciate it for what it actually was, and now think it is fantastic.
Likewise, with Hackers I initially disliked it due to how inaccurate and unrealistic it was. I came to appreciate it for what it actually was over time, and now think it is fantastic.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Is Explorers the one with the Rollscanhardly joke?
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
I think it’s also important to remember that there are tons of terrible practicals out there, we just don’t think of them because they were bad and forgettable. Lots of great CG too that you likely never recognized as CG. Sicario is littered with examples. You’d be hard pressed to call out even most of them.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
True, but it really does hold up better than CGI. For example, a Dalek isn't really fooling anybody, but it's still far better than a CGI Scorpion King. I think it's easier for the brain to accept something as a representation of something it isn't when it's farther outside of the uncanny valley
You’re not comparing the worst practicals to what is considered one of the single worst CG renderings of all time though. There is also a camp culture that the Daleks fit in to - they weren’t trying to sell it as “very real” even at the time, that was “the look” and the budget. CG in live action is generally either shooting for 100% realism or is for comedic purposes intentionally absolutely awful. There’s a lot less in between than with practicals.
I went to see hackers in 35MM at the Academy Museum and the director said when he saw the script his immediate thought was, computers are going to be the new electric guitars. He framed the whole movie around the crew as sort of a punk band where computers were their instrument and tool of creative expression and fun, and I thought that was awesome. Also btw, all of the visualizations of the gibson were practical effects. they actually built stacks of glass towers and projected the light on them and had a camera track flying through it in a warehouse.
> FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
Cereal leaves the room. He’s gone for like 15 seconds. Mom pops her head in:
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Cereal has.”
That always cracks me up. Like he had to have walked out of the room, spun on his heel, and marched straight into the kitchen and raided the fridge. He couldn’t have taken more than 5 breaths after leaving before he was eating something.
Awesome! Brings me back into my teenage years when I was rewatching the movie on VHS hundreds of times, especially the cyberspace surfing sequences - all covered by the epic soundtrack. Orbital still sounds fresh in my ears after all these years.
I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:
Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.
Last month they had a rerun of the movie at the cinema in Dublin (IE) and went to see it with a friend. It was such a surreal experience because after watching it on my laptop so many times I could hear the laughter and the jokes of the audience on the cheesy hacking scenes, it was like watching the movie in 4D, I enjoyed it a lot!
I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me
Watching with a big public group of people you mostly don't know but maybe should is a special experience. This may depend on region, but in the US there used to be frequent midnight openings for superfans like myself. People dress up in costumes, local shops hand out prizes and it's an event. Saw Phantom Menace this way, LOTR, Watchmen, and maybe others, but I haven't seen a midnight opening offered in years. Maybe the theater managers are swimming in the pool on the roof.
Only thing I can remember is a blue 3½ floppy with "trek4" handwritten on it so it must have been "found" by my relative that owned the st at the time.
Love it, what a great throwback, especially with the OST.
In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?
Found that this is a Firefox setting, maybe it's not (no longer) defaulted to on.
"Search for text when you start typing"
I have to say, I do like this setting enabled, but can see how it conflicts with the page. And let's be fair, how much time and I saving over having to press Ctrl+F when I want to search a page?
I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.
The proper experience is to copy it onto an old VHS, worn out and a bit stretched in places. Play it for the umpteenth time on a 1980s VCR feeding a fuzzy old tv in the basement for background noise (and a killer sound track) as you beat your head against a crt monitor wondering why your code won't compile.
Bonus points if you pause to watch the movie and wonder "how have I seen this movie countless times and only just now noticed there's a 6th hacker in the 'main' crew?".
This is awesome, and remimds of my favourite fact which is that the jurrasic park unix system was actually a real unix system running a real file browser. File browsers ended up converging om a more useful, but way less cool design[0].
A silly movie but I love it so much. Such nostalgia too.
In the spirit of hackers I have to share this - I just asked Claude 4.6 to make a file system browser that works kinda like this, and it took 5 minutes to make something that actually works. Directories as skyscrapers with files as text on the side, moving around by wasd.
It uses three.js and a browser so it's just a toy of course but still, I can navigate my filesystem like they do in Hackers (1995) and it was a 5 minute interaction with a computer, using natural language. Another few hours and I'm sure I can copy garbage files too.
I've never felt more obsolete but still had to laugh. What a time to be alive!
I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.
Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.
Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:
- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.
- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.
So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.
And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).
The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.
Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.
Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).
LoD and MoD's heydays were more in the 1980s. By the first year or two of the 1990s, both were pretty much defunct, if my memory serves.
I was acquainted with several members of both groups, and I don't remember them really resembling the Hackers movies in appearance or personality. But I lost touch with them in about 1989-1990 or so, due to the next phase of my life kicking off.
In July 1992 five MoD members were charged with hacking, and they were basically defunct as an active hacking group after that. LoD was mostly defunct even before that, although the movie used the Mentor's manifesto. New York LoD members, or those affiliated with them, had been busted in July 1987. So yes, a lot of the 1995 movie was covering stuff that had happened from the 1980s up until mid-1992. When the movie was released, some of the MoD members were on probation and not allowed to associate with one another until probation ended. The busts, trials, prison terms, and probations were all happening around the time the movie was being written, filmed and released.
I was a 90’s hacker (teenager in the early 90’s deep into “hacking”). “Hackers” was clearly a movie for teenagers and released in the 90s, so it stands to reason that it captured some of that cultural moment. I did love it.
However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.
In Australia that was titled 'Hackers 2' and was very disappointing - until I learned the backstory and have since read Ghost in the Wires. It's still a totally different thing to Hackers, but it's a good addition to the zeitgeist.
> I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
I really like Halt And Catch Fire but it doesn’t count since it also depicts the 80s. So, since Mr. Robot already got its mention, how about Silicon Valley? ;-)
When I interviewed at Okta (May 2016), I created users Dade Murphy and Kate Libby and then hit the docs to check something.. and the docs included Dade Murhpy already.
Once I joined, I had theories on who wrote it and got it on my first try. :)
This movie changed my life. Saw it when I was probably 7-8 years old for the first time and been watching and rewatching it ever since. The actors, the soundtrack, the costumes, everything is perfect in this film. Huge inspiration.
Rollerblade technology has come a long way since then! Modern skates are much more comfortable and often use bigger wheels that make it easier to roll over rougher terrain and go fast. I get around Chicago almost exclusively through a combination of inline skates & trains (it's easy to wear skates on the trains here).
I've been inline skating ten years now, and the last three years been doing long outdoor skates, 43km a couple of weeks ago.
It is the ideal move of transport! (if cars were less common and hills less steep).
I've got weak ankles from rolling them regularly playing other sports, but the inline boots strap em in nice and tight.
If you need some motivation, or just like to watch some decent skating, check out The Stuttering Skater on YouTube. I'm nowhere near even thinking about being that good, but he's great to watch weaving through NYC traffic.
I never saw this movie back in the day, but now I want to.
Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.
I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.
Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.
I wish there was a way to straighten myself out after I drag with the mouse or use the A/D keys to move left or right. I was expecting to be able to turn left or right, and weave through the servers (or whatever they are), as opposed to drifting left/right and eventually getting stuck.
“Do you remember where I put that thing that one time” is a line that pops up in my head so often.
I don’t remember the last time I saw this film and this is the 2nd time that it’s popped back up into my life recently, so it’s a sign that I need to watch it.
I like Wargames much more. Still, people is right that we should take the 'hacking' (cracking) scenes artistically, as a metaphor on what's happening inside the mind of a cracker.
Indeed; music wise for actual hacking (old meaning) it would be some 9front setup (either themeless defaults or something bland with yellow background for terminal windows, as if they were mundane sticky notes) and Muzak; for cracking either industrial metal or some progresive Jazz which would still sound cool and elegant in some parts. For really odd hacks and cracks the music from Twin Peaks wuold be ideal.
For the cool stuff, well, the Demoscene it's like that. Or stuff from https://t3x.org, or the small tools from gopher://hoi.st and tons of weird 9front new tools such as the GeFS filesystem, the future gpufs, using remote devices as if they were the local ones in the computer and whatnot.
Ditto with Subleq and EForth which is perfect foror something like Jarre.
The most interesting thing to show in film would be social engineering aspects. The actual hacking of spending time on the computer is always going to be boring command line stuff. At least Mr. Robot used real commands.
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."
My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
I realized the other day that Hackers doesn't really have a depiction of the social milieu of the elite hacker—the BBS. But The Net kinda does. So, point to The Net.
I remember writing to the govt (DoD maybe? I don't remember exactly) asking for a copy of the rainbow books and getting a surprise a few months later when a heavy box showed up at my parents' door! I no longer have them, but have fond memories of poring over orange, green, teal, and a few others.
This brings back _memories_! I think I won't even stand out from the crowd here mentioning me and the gang watched the hell out of the VHS back when, in our circle it was a different world than I suppose even for people in the West who loved it. We're so far removed this became a cult classic long before it became cult classic everywhere else. Needless to say, Angelina Jolie's character made quite an impression on this young mind :-) Damn, quotes from this movie live rent-free in my head. I was already quite a fan of Orbital when I saw Hackers for the first time. It was also at the end of "Mortal Kombat", by the way -- but Hackers used it marginally better still IMO.
Hacker had HEART, man. It was cheesy but the feeling it left in an entire sub-culture of a generation, cannot be underestimated. I am reading some of the other stories here, and it brings smile to my face knowing me and my gang weren't the only ones the movie imprinted on.
A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
Easily the most quoted part of the film, aside from “Hack the planet!!!!” … but also an amazing prediction! All the devices in our pockets are RISC machines. That did change everything.
Ironically aestheticically wise the best hackers (as in the original sense) would just depict a half busy and utterly boring plan9/9front desktop and tons of physical (and digital books). Forget about ricing (except for constrast and readability, such as using Zukitre instead of Adwaita for GTK). Usability first.
It was an MTV move made for teenagers. People thought it was silly and had dumb technobabble when it was released. "RISC is good."
If you objected to the premise or technical content of the movie, you weren't the intended audience.
Hollywood tried to make a bunch of computer movies at the time and had to figure out how to make things on a computer seem exciting, even though in reality, it's just someone sitting and typing for long periods. The producers decided on 3D mainframes and artistically rendered hacker tools (some macintosh progz at the time were not too far off).
At least at the time, they were up to the task of using some creativity to address the challenges of making a compelling, at least visually if not intellectually, movie set in a place and time with technology that effectively shrinks time and space. Now they simply set all their movies before smartphones existed.
Fun fact: "right here, right now" sample in eponymous Fatboy Slim song is Angela Basset trying to make Ralph Fiennes come to his senses and forget Juliette Lewis.
This is good progress but the 1995 movie is still superior.
There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.
I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
Hack the planet <3
You’re in the butter zone now, baby!
Hackers inspired me to start digging around on my FreeBSD laptop and learn how to setup a bitmap image as boot splash, just like the kids in the movie all had their own custom boot image.
Just a few years later I dropped out of school and started my career, haven't looked back since.
My first boss who gave me my first chance, and my 2nd job through referral, he dropped out of 7th grade to start his own business. He was once interrogated by police, and they had brought in some experts from a big ISP, and these "experts" had no idea what he was talking about. :D
Wild years...
> crush as a young teenager was Burn
Who hadn't?
I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers, Silicon Valley, Office Space and War Games. Maybe it's also why coder movies like The Social Network and Ex Machina don't resonate as community favourites because they don't bring an inclusive experience.
The ad campaign was super campy, there were print ads in comic books, I remember making fun of it before the movie came out - this can’t be any good, they are going to misrepresent computer geeks, it’s going to be stupid. Of course as a teen I didn’t think it was authentic enough but over time I look at it with more respect. I showed it to my 10 year old not too long ago (forgot that there was a little nudity, oh well) and I was proud of claiming the culture it represented. The thirst for knowledge, the irreverence for authority, all of the different kinds of people making a community based on shared interest and respect, all night hackathons, the adults who just don’t get it - and yeah, the music and the fashion. That’s the stuff that matters, not a hacker using a Mac or goofy technical gibberish, and that’s the stuff they got right. It was a special moment in time, and I’m glad the movie is around to encapsulate it.
> You’re in the butter zone now, baby!
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
For me that was War Games that got me into this world and career. Always felt like I owe Broderick a Raspberry Pie or something
The use of the soda can pull tab to ground the receiver to get a dial tone was my moment as I was a noob phreaker well before being a hacker. How many kids watching that movie would even know what was happening today? Would they even know what he picks up off the ground let alone the actual phreaking
Let alone the receiver. Or the concept of the pay phone as a whole.
And that actual "dial" on the phone...
I've never seen Hackers. It was War Games for me, too.
I love them both but they are entirely different. War Games was going for a degree of verisimilitude. Hackers is extremely stylized.
War games was an excellent film. Hackers was a terrible film. Not sure why people are celebrating such a cheesy film.
Also no one remembers cloak and dagger.
Because War Games didn't have Jolie in it. Maybe that? It was rather awful. A one-watcher.
I listen to the hackers soundtrack regularly when coding. It’s ideal.
Absolute classic, especially Halcyon
The combo of the visuals and Halcyon is exquisite.
Man, I didn't see hackers for the first time until probably 5 years after I wrote my first line of code. I still watch it to this day but I got started when I saw "wavy colored text" in an AOL chat room. Yup, colored sup and sub text. Fascinated me as an 11/12 year old and I picked up Visual Basic 5. Good times
Yeah, me too. And I gobbled up the Phreak culture from my danish small town life, dreaming of late eighties AT&T escapades with my crew of cool street kids… RISC is good.
Hack the planet! <3
- I'm Crash Override. - You're the moron that's been invading my turf?!
Not sure why, but my favorite is:
- I thought you was black, man. YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
We would have been good friends then. My and my friend group watched it so many times.
"Check this out guys, this is insanely great, it's got a 28.8 BPS modem!"
Trust your technolust!
Joey! One more 'dude' and I'll slap the %#!% out of you!
"im a real wild child i'm a wild one, im a wild one!!"
aaaah! joey! joey! thank you everybody!
"I'm not an addict. Can I get some more coffee?"
Hack the planet. This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.
I took my kid to Def Con. We were walking up to the convention center and there were a few hundred people milling around out front. To embarrass my kid, I shouted "hack the planet!" loudly toward the crowd. Probably a good 50% of the bystanders shouted it back at me.
My people.
Sounds like something I would do too. Awesomeness
I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it. One could argue that I loved it all along given that I watched it so many times... but there was a distinct moment where I let go and that's when I was able to see just how wonderful this movie really is.
I adore it. And some of the representations are the best I’ve seen anywhere. Kids exploring for the fun of exploring, not to hurt anyone but just to learn? The clock whirling at 4AM while someone hyperfocuses on code? The way they tease each other but genuinely respect their abilities? It’s beautiful.
There are some niche 3D file system browsers/shells out there, but none as captivating as what's shown in the movie (or the linked "animated experience") that I can find.
Nice little blog post that looks at these interfaces in the movie:
https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/12/11/hackers/
Not quite filesystem navigation, but SGI IRIX's Performance CoPilot software had an IrixGL (OpenGL's precursor) UI for monitoring things like memory state, CPU/storage loads, etc.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
PCP is still in active development. It's very cool, but probably made obsolete by otel and others. I used it on servers and services regularly until a few years ago. Very lightweight, robust and powerful.
https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp
I remember being at Summercon before this movie opened and Ericb addressing hotel conference room we were seated in talking about how Iain Softley had directed Backbeat and how happy he was that he was doing this movie and that you had to get in the right headspace to understand what it was going for.
(I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)
It’s not a story driven movie, it’s a movie about a stylized subculture and youth. Compare it to Dazed & Confused instead of Chinatown.
The point is to make you want to hang out with those people on those days and it does that tremendously well.
If you disagree your a flake.
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
Did Lawnmower Man document Bunks early career at the fbi which he had to resign in scandal before joining the Baltimore police?
I didn’t think so.
:thinking-emoji:
> "tfile kids"
Not familiar with that term, and my googling has failed. What does it refer to?
http://textfiles.com/
people familiar with the culture
> I hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
I love it, but I know it's bad, but I also think it was intentionally what it is, which makes it good or even great.
If you can unlock that teenage feeling of wonder at the potential size and scope of the world and, at the right age at the right time, feeling like that world is your oyster, that's the feeling in which to watch this movie.
I refuse, however, to get into that feeling-zone for other 'high school' movies; they're stupid...
Hackers is weird in that the tech part of it is so obviously fake, but then you have the hacker culture part that goes to the point of actually quoting a large part of the "Hacker's Manifesto" in the movie.
I've flipped that switch for book adaptations.
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
I am mixed on that.
For me there are 2 issues
(1) I read the book. it was awesome. If the movie fails to deliver that awesomeness then it's really upsetting as it's ruining something great for everyone that didn't read the book / see the original. They're unlikely to go check the original. They're more likely to just think "That was dumb".
(2) When they change things so much that they arguably should not have used the name.
Why choose some existing fictional world/characters just to shit on them and make it something else? If you wanted to make something else, then pick a new name, make your own IP.
I actually really liked the live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, and was disappointed at it's cancellation.
Unpopular opinion amongst those who grew up on the anime, but I was late to the anime so my childhood-integrity isn't dependent upon requiring a faithful one to one retelling (or whatever would satisfy those folks - possibly nothing).
I enjoyed the "Hollywood" Ghost in the Shell as a stand-alone 'thing', unrelated to the manga / anime. The ending is quite on the nose; ultra-formulaic where formulaic has no place.
The problem with the live action cowboy bebop was poor casting. Spike shouldn’t look in his 40s, he was 27.
Tried to watch it for the first time recently. Didn’t make it past 20 minutes… feel like I had to be there when it was fresh back in the day.
Try reading Masters of Deception first, to get in the right mood.
Me neither. It's just too weird.
On the other hand, something like blade runner I still think is amazing. Or the matrix (original only)
Let go and embrace the weird.
I’ve said this before on hating news but the best movie that stands up is sneakers.
Just imagine somebody has invented a quantum computer with a production process that has a very high error rate so a second one can’t be easily produced.
"That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists."
The best music, in my opinion, in the movie is not on the soundtrack and it is:
Guy Pratt - Combination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_7N8NsU4jQ
There are 3 'official' soundtracks with various tracks from the movie and some inspired by. BUT on the 2020 double disk reissue, the second disk carries may of Pratt's tracks, including Combination..
They did include this track on the 25th anniversary edition of the soundtrack titled "One Combination"
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I first heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
> sellout trash
A trifle offtopic, but.....
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
This is exemplified in Wayne's World product scene. I later found out none of the companies shown in the scene had paid for their products to be in the scene. Its also one of the most iconic scenes from the movie.
This is insightful. But I'm not sure it's completely true, I think people just have shifted their perception of what selling out means.
Content creators on YouTube, for example, get criticized when they literally sell their brand to a larger conglomerate. It seems people do not complain if they do sponsorizations tho.
> Content creators
I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).
To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-)
I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
I agree with you and I find the term "creating content" awful, even though I'm forced to use it because it's something people immediately understand.
"Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
That is what is happening though. It's an accurate description. These are cases of making content for corporations to sell ads against.
It is what's happening in some cases, not all. Also, language shapes thought, so we encourage this to happen if we frame it as "content creation". It's something to push against.
Note it's not even relevant whether something is commercial. Art can be commercial and not be just "content". A musician is not a "content creator" which happens to create content in the shape of music. "Content" implies it doesn't really matters, what matters is engagement and the platform (and advertisers, etc). It's not healthy to think of hobbies, art, and entertainment as exclusively about this. Imagine if Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Alan Moore, etc had been thought of merely as "content creators".
This is not a new idea. Stallman was already pushing back against this "content" term decades ago.
Content is the filler in the limited space between ads.
Content is an intentionally chosen word in order to make "feeding from the corporate trough" not seem so repulsive.
Imagine Davinci putting ads for the Medici money lending services into his paintings. That's where we're at now.
In a sense, society sold out
Everyone’s got to eat, and it started getting a lot harder after 2000 and especially after 2008. Gen X could afford integrity.
I’m reminded of the scenes in My Fair Lady where Eliza’s father comes in to money, and he’s lamenting that he can afford “middle-class morality.”
I feel that statement is still hedging too much.
Society sold out.
> 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs
Can recommend such a mix, too. Gather select works of The Chemical Brothers, The Dust Brothers, Bassbin Twins, Crystal Method, DJ Krush, Dub Pistols, Lunatic Calm, Meat Katie... and you're Somewhen Else during it. Works for commutes/trips, too.
> The Chemical Brothers (a), The Dust Brothers (b)
I had a couple of Dust Brothers (a) cassettes before they changed their name after getting a call from the other Dust Brothers (b).
Still can't believe they knowingly copied another band's name "because it sounded cool". Isn't coming up with a shit name half the fun? "I need a handle man".
I was never into this kind of music back in the day, but I had heard A LOT of it from PSX games. going back to it as an adult, I freakin' love it
Discovered the Hackers ost on a /mu/ thread. So many bangers.
There's another two soundtracks!
https://www.discogs.com/release/1423591-Various-Hackers%C2%B...
https://www.discogs.com/release/131024-Various-Hackers%C2%B3
Thanks, what a great resource discogs is. Here's the 1st one for completeness:
https://www.discogs.com/release/29127-Various-Hackers-Origin...
It's frustrating that often tracks from soundtracks like this aren't available on Spotify, such as Phoebus Apollo.
I have this OST and the Mortal Kombat one as well on CD (mentioned together since they both have the same song, "Halcyon + On + On" on them!). When I went to a 2600 meetings in Seattle in 1999, I listened to the Hacker's soundtrack in my car on the way, of course. I gave one of the people I met there a ride and we had a laugh when he saw the case in my car. (I feel like I have a story for every song. Thanks for indulging me.)
Mortal Kombat ost had a ridiculous influence on my childhood music tastes, another absolutely amazing sound track is The Saint, check out the artists involved.
Interesting, I wouldn’t have thought of that one since I remember not being impressed by the movie at the time. On Wikipedia, a quote from a review said “on the whole, it's one of the few soundtracks that works better as an album than as a movie.” That tracks!
Awhh, I love the movie also. Could be a nostalgia thing but it's just fun. Val kilmer is basically always great and it's a nice mix of sort of spy movie tropes while having fun with it.
Yea doscovering Halcyon was on Hackers as well was wild for me. I knew that track from MK.
Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
As ytcracker says:
I'm sorry for your loss. I've lost many to all of these. The worst is someone I was in federal prison with and would hang out with daily. He got out and got on Fentanyl and was so messed up he literally burned alive after his house caught on fire. Rest in piece Daniel.ytcracker still the greatest 2/26/2026 NES forever (9'.')9 (9'.')-o
Re%
Sorry for your loss.
"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
after all, we're all alike.
Thank you. And you know, it's those quotes and concepts that really stuck me with, about how we were all in it together. And not to get off topic, but i'm so sad and disheartened to see what tech has become since those days.
i feel you
I love the ethos of this movie. That it was about hacking and building things for fun, not for money and profit. This to me is what hacking and programming has always been about. It's too bad that overinflated salaries and the hype that if you go into software you will make a lot of money has watered down the culture to an extent. And now, with the advent of AI and vibe coding, it's been increasingly difficult (for me) to maintain that sense of newness and enjoyment in the craft when I see million line AI diffs.
Along the lines of ethos, there's also the narrative of freedom of information and anti big money corporation (the plague). I hope that this energy to fight the system and tyranny of control the system represents never dies. Particularly as we watch the darkness of a tyrannical government continue to unfold here in the U.S.
It was right in the tagline: “Their only crime was curiosity.”
Taken straight from The Mentor: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
This is so lovely! If the original author is here in the comments, some feature requests that would absolutely make my day, presumably from easiest to hardest :)
I love this so much, thank you for sharing!
* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film
* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.
* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel
* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc
* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.
I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)
I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt
> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.
> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features
> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input
> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow
> You can probably use three.js for this
Here's the result.
https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW
No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.
Hi guys! Original creator here. I had no idea this was trending here until some people on LinkedIn wrote to me!!! I will try to make the garbage files hunt easter egg. This was an idea that started all of this but I couldn't get it to work nicely and I definitely didn't expect this much traction!
I found an RSA private key while wandering around, hope its not used for anything ;)
I hope not! But if you find any use for it please let me know ;)
͡° ͜ʖ ͡°
Rumor is, it will get you into the pentagon. But you have to guess the ip.
HACK THE PLANET! This is great!
You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&o...). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in Phrack (issue #7, released 1986-09-25) ;-)
``` { "scores": [ { "alias": "\u003Cimg onerror='document.location = `https://phrack.org/issues/7/3#article`' src=a\u003ESHOUTSOUTTOPHRACK\u003C/img\u003E", "time_ms": -1e+129 } ...OTHER ATTEMPTS FOLLOW... ```
Regardless, thanks for sharing! Very cool!
I couldn't find the garbage file. I'm such a failure, now Davinci is going to overturn all the oil tankers
> Okay, okay, we need proof that we were here.
Really missed opportunity to place a garbage file in here somewhere!
Me neither, but there is a suspicious empty space close to one of the corners...
> Uh, the accounting subdirectory in the Gibson is working really hard.
> We got one person online, the workload is enough for like ten users. I think we've got a hacker.
> Never fear, I is here.
> Out of the way you hapless techno weenie.
The little boat tipped over.
It caused a MAjor ECoLOGiCAL disASter?
Lorraine Bracco is great, but her delivery of that line cracks me up. That had to have been overdubbed or something.
This movie had an unreasonable influence on me as a kid...as cheesy as it is, it still holds up as one of my top ten favorite movies.
The movie is obviously technical garbage but one thing it did well was capture that early hacker counterculture spirit. I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
It's not really even technical garbage. From many throwaway lines it's clear that the writers actually knew their stuff. They just chose to not make a hacking movie based on realism (because boring) but based on the zeitgeist, the computer tropes of the 80s and early 90s, and the concept of "cyberspace" as envisioned by Gibson and made its way to the collective consciousness. In a time when virtual reality and 3D graphics were at peak cool, yet most people had no experience with computer networks, or even computers at all.
"Cyberspace […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." – Neuromancer
Good point. By 'technical garbage' I largely meant the dated visualizations it associated with all the hacking scenes (the rapid hacking speed I can forgive for the sake of story) but TBH I never fully made the connection between 'the gibson' and william gibson -- I kind of like the idea of the hacking scenes as an exploration to gibson's ideas around cyberspace.
It's surprisingly accurate in terms of how weird and cringy the 90s / early 00s hacker culture was, I too was obsessed with the movie and it led me to obscure irc channels, e-zines and eventually a whole career in tech
I find this and Starship Troopers to fit in a similar niche for me. When I first saw them I found them very cringey, horrible, couldn't stand it. Hackers for the reasons being discussed here. ST because of how bastardized it was from the source material.
But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particular ethos in a cheesy & over the top way. And both of them I think hit their mark well in that regard.
What is it with people feeling compelled to talk about starship troopers movie being different (lesser) than the book?
Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)
None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
I don’t believe I said the book was better. You misunderstood my point
Most people don’t want to admit that the author of the book wants you to take the book and movie at face value and thus the film/book are unironically right wing coded.
A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.
Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
Heinlein's political views are not exactly a secret among people who care for his books.
Bastardized? It's satire and not at all subtle about it. You can of course argue that it's poorly executed satire, but judging it based on how faithful it is to the source material is rather missing the point.
I think you're the one who missed the point, as in you missed *my* point.
When I first saw Starship Troopers, I disliked it because it wasn't faithful to the book. Over time I came to appreciate it for what it actually was, and now think it is fantastic.
Likewise, with Hackers I initially disliked it due to how inaccurate and unrealistic it was. I came to appreciate it for what it actually was over time, and now think it is fantastic.
Yeah, my bad. For some reason I read your comment really carelessly.
Ha, caught that reference. That brought back memories.
I'm doing my part!
Starship Troopers is actually nothing like Hackers? Verhoeven's Troopers is a straight-up satire of the USA's industrial-military complex.
> I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
This is how I feel about it too. I've watched it a good 8-10 times over the decades and enjoy it every time.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Is Explorers the one with the Rollscanhardly joke?
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
Yep that's Explorers!
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
+1 for explorers
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
> it is immediately assumed as CGI
Remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, watching Indiana Jones being dragged under a lorry by his whip and thinking "wow, that's a brilliant stunt"?
Remember (or did you forget) seeing the latest Indiana Jones film with a CGI motorbike and a CGI Indiana Jones jumping onto a moving train?
One will always be more impressive than the other.
I think it’s also important to remember that there are tons of terrible practicals out there, we just don’t think of them because they were bad and forgettable. Lots of great CG too that you likely never recognized as CG. Sicario is littered with examples. You’d be hard pressed to call out even most of them.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
Isn't the very worst aspect of that very scene, the CGI part rather than the practical effects part?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4OojYGixI
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
It's the guy in the tank that breaks it. Pretty sure it's just a dummy.
The going over the cliff scene is a drop in the bucket to Raiders' melting faces or sticking with Last Crusade's fast aging scene
Even terrible practical effects can be weirdly charming though.
No less immersion breaking though. Highly doubt “weirdly charming” is the objective for most poorly done practicals!
True, but it really does hold up better than CGI. For example, a Dalek isn't really fooling anybody, but it's still far better than a CGI Scorpion King. I think it's easier for the brain to accept something as a representation of something it isn't when it's farther outside of the uncanny valley
You’re not comparing the worst practicals to what is considered one of the single worst CG renderings of all time though. There is also a camp culture that the Daleks fit in to - they weren’t trying to sell it as “very real” even at the time, that was “the look” and the budget. CG in live action is generally either shooting for 100% realism or is for comedic purposes intentionally absolutely awful. There’s a lot less in between than with practicals.
The practical effects are immediately obvious in the 4K remaster, which looks amazing. Still look great though!
I went to see hackers in 35MM at the Academy Museum and the director said when he saw the script his immediate thought was, computers are going to be the new electric guitars. He framed the whole movie around the crew as sort of a punk band where computers were their instrument and tool of creative expression and fun, and I thought that was awesome. Also btw, all of the visualizations of the gibson were practical effects. they actually built stacks of glass towers and projected the light on them and had a camera track flying through it in a warehouse.
> FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
Cereal is my favorite character! Especially the random shouting.
Cereal leaves the room. He’s gone for like 15 seconds. Mom pops her head in:
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Cereal has.”
That always cracks me up. Like he had to have walked out of the room, spun on his heel, and marched straight into the kitchen and raided the fridge. He couldn’t have taken more than 5 breaths after leaving before he was eating something.
Awesome! Brings me back into my teenage years when I was rewatching the movie on VHS hundreds of times, especially the cyberspace surfing sequences - all covered by the epic soundtrack. Orbital still sounds fresh in my ears after all these years.
I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:
https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13
Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.
Sadly, looking through the code, doesn't show up any "GARBAGE" file easter egg to be found.
Amazing stuff, nevertheless!
Awhile I made something really dumb: https://www.warpstream.com/etc/terminal you can enter a 'gibson' command.
Nice touch with the IP :D
Thanks, I've been looking for 5 minutes and was about to rewatch the movie to see where it's supposed to be !
I mean, you should totally go and rewatch it, don't let me stop you from enjoying again the movie!
Last month they had a rerun of the movie at the cinema in Dublin (IE) and went to see it with a friend. It was such a surreal experience because after watching it on my laptop so many times I could hear the laughter and the jokes of the audience on the cheesy hacking scenes, it was like watching the movie in 4D, I enjoyed it a lot!
I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me
Watching with a big public group of people you mostly don't know but maybe should is a special experience. This may depend on region, but in the US there used to be frequent midnight openings for superfans like myself. People dress up in costumes, local shops hand out prizes and it's an event. Saw Phantom Menace this way, LOTR, Watchmen, and maybe others, but I haven't seen a midnight opening offered in years. Maybe the theater managers are swimming in the pool on the roof.
In San Francisco, DNA Lounge has an annual event where they decorate the whole place as Cyberdelia. I never miss it if I can help.
A couple years ago my friend and I dressed as FBI agents. It was great fun.
This is really slow for me on my laptop. Does it need a P6 to run? I heard those have a killer refresh rate.
You need to run it on a RISC architecture, but that would be too much machine for you.
Yeah. RISC is good.
It may or may not change everything.
only if you have a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!
and triple the RAM
OK who is gonna turn this into a functional terminal emulator for me?
Not exactly, but there is cool retro term: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
Claude Code. There are no more software engineers. Apparently...
I want to visualize real data this way for when business users come over to my desk and ask for something.
The Gibson! Very cool. did you make this?
I made a Tron lightcycle game: https://new.af/tron
Now that AI accelerates dev so much, I suspect we'll get to see a lot of cool throwbacks.
> Now that AI accelerates dev so much
Then where's the massive explosion of software?
While we're at it, I remember an atari st game that was like the tron lightcycle as "Trek4".
Did it really exist ?
Was it maybe called Surround? Try looking up Atari catalog # CX2641 and see if it brings back any more memories :)
Hmm I had an ST. I think I vaguely remember this. Was it a PD game or commercial?
Only thing I can remember is a blue 3½ floppy with "trek4" handwritten on it so it must have been "found" by my relative that owned the st at the time.
That runs super smoothly!
Thanks! working on multiplayer now...
Obligatory sshtron reference: https://github.com/zachlatta/sshtron
Love it, what a great throwback, especially with the OST.
In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?
Doesn’t do that for me. Have you got some oddball extension installed or something?
Found that this is a Firefox setting, maybe it's not (no longer) defaulted to on.
"Search for text when you start typing"
I have to say, I do like this setting enabled, but can see how it conflicts with the page. And let's be fair, how much time and I saving over having to press Ctrl+F when I want to search a page?
You can also type / to start searching which is one less keystroke than Command-F
I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.
The proper experience is to copy it onto an old VHS, worn out and a bit stretched in places. Play it for the umpteenth time on a 1980s VCR feeding a fuzzy old tv in the basement for background noise (and a killer sound track) as you beat your head against a crt monitor wondering why your code won't compile.
Bonus points if you pause to watch the movie and wonder "how have I seen this movie countless times and only just now noticed there's a 6th hacker in the 'main' crew?".
Who’s that? The girl laughing as they rack up the score and declare a tie, then we never see her again?
Or how about when you realize you never see Phreak again once he makes his call from the jail?
> The girl laughing as they rack up the score and declare a tie
Yes exactly.
I have a couple copies of the laserdiek variants, always felt like the best tech to show homage.
I didn’t know it was released on laserdisc! Looks like the going rate is around $100 US.
It's fun to live out 90s hacker fantasies.
types furiously
[ACCESS DENIED]
types double furiously
[ACCESS GRANTED]
dramatic turn to camera
"I'm in."
This is awesome, and remimds of my favourite fact which is that the jurrasic park unix system was actually a real unix system running a real file browser. File browsers ended up converging om a more useful, but way less cool design[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
A silly movie but I love it so much. Such nostalgia too.
In the spirit of hackers I have to share this - I just asked Claude 4.6 to make a file system browser that works kinda like this, and it took 5 minutes to make something that actually works. Directories as skyscrapers with files as text on the side, moving around by wasd.
It uses three.js and a browser so it's just a toy of course but still, I can navigate my filesystem like they do in Hackers (1995) and it was a 5 minute interaction with a computer, using natural language. Another few hours and I'm sure I can copy garbage files too.
I've never felt more obsolete but still had to laugh. What a time to be alive!
> You're gonna love New York. It's the city that never sleeps.
It's in the place I put the thing that one time!
They’re trashing our rights!
They're trashing!!
Hack the planet!
We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless.
I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.
Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.
Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:
- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.
- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.
So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.
And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).
The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.
Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.
Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).
Oh man, Limelight!
LoD and MoD's heydays were more in the 1980s. By the first year or two of the 1990s, both were pretty much defunct, if my memory serves.
I was acquainted with several members of both groups, and I don't remember them really resembling the Hackers movies in appearance or personality. But I lost touch with them in about 1989-1990 or so, due to the next phase of my life kicking off.
In July 1992 five MoD members were charged with hacking, and they were basically defunct as an active hacking group after that. LoD was mostly defunct even before that, although the movie used the Mentor's manifesto. New York LoD members, or those affiliated with them, had been busted in July 1987. So yes, a lot of the 1995 movie was covering stuff that had happened from the 1980s up until mid-1992. When the movie was released, some of the MoD members were on probation and not allowed to associate with one another until probation ended. The busts, trials, prison terms, and probations were all happening around the time the movie was being written, filmed and released.
I haven't watched it, but I seem to recall "Mr Robot" was widely praised by techies too.
Yes, I've watched that TV show through twice and will probably do it again.
Great on the technicals and also a complete mind fuck.
Yes! Forgot about Mr Robot, which was absolutely fantastic.
If you like wargames and hackers, you might wanna check out Colossus. There's Halt and Catch Fire too though it's a TV show.
There's a list of similar films at the bottom of https://telehack.com/telehack.html
I was a 90’s hacker (teenager in the early 90’s deep into “hacking”). “Hackers” was clearly a movie for teenagers and released in the 90s, so it stands to reason that it captured some of that cultural moment. I did love it.
However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.
I really loved 'Track Down' (2000), if you want to try. The film depict maybe more 1980-1990 though
In Australia that was titled 'Hackers 2' and was very disappointing - until I learned the backstory and have since read Ghost in the Wires. It's still a totally different thing to Hackers, but it's a good addition to the zeitgeist.
> I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
I really like Halt And Catch Fire but it doesn’t count since it also depicts the 80s. So, since Mr. Robot already got its mention, how about Silicon Valley? ;-)
When I interviewed at Okta (May 2016), I created users Dade Murphy and Kate Libby and then hit the docs to check something.. and the docs included Dade Murhpy already.
Once I joined, I had theories on who wrote it and got it on my first try. :)
Some of you tough tech guys are talking a lot of sh$@ but I bet you couldn’t hack a Gibson.
This movie changed my life. Saw it when I was probably 7-8 years old for the first time and been watching and rewatching it ever since. The actors, the soundtrack, the costumes, everything is perfect in this film. Huge inspiration.
I miss the time when rollerblades seemed like the ideal mode of transport.
My ankles don't.
Rollerblade technology has come a long way since then! Modern skates are much more comfortable and often use bigger wheels that make it easier to roll over rougher terrain and go fast. I get around Chicago almost exclusively through a combination of inline skates & trains (it's easy to wear skates on the trains here).
I've been inline skating ten years now, and the last three years been doing long outdoor skates, 43km a couple of weeks ago.
It is the ideal move of transport! (if cars were less common and hills less steep).
I've got weak ankles from rolling them regularly playing other sports, but the inline boots strap em in nice and tight.
If you need some motivation, or just like to watch some decent skating, check out The Stuttering Skater on YouTube. I'm nowhere near even thinking about being that good, but he's great to watch weaving through NYC traffic.
The addressing on that hex dump is all over the place.. and not even byte-aligned!
Easily my biggest guilty pleasure movie, warts and all, I still love it.
My wife, who isn't into that culture at all, knows how I feel about Hackers.
Every now and then when the opportunistic situation arises, she'll announce at me: "Crash and Burn".
I never saw this movie back in the day, but now I want to.
Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.
I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.
"We have to go back!"
12 year old me watched this movie and immediately went out and bought colored floppy disks so I too could hack the planet. Simpler times.
Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.
I wish there was a way to straighten myself out after I drag with the mouse or use the A/D keys to move left or right. I was expecting to be able to turn left or right, and weave through the servers (or whatever they are), as opposed to drifting left/right and eventually getting stuck.
“Do you remember where I put that thing that one time” is a line that pops up in my head so often.
I don’t remember the last time I saw this film and this is the 2nd time that it’s popped back up into my life recently, so it’s a sign that I need to watch it.
Right in the feels.
I wish I could go back in time to watch the movie for the first time.
I miss this David Gilmour track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-eZSIn9kHA
I highly recommend Hackers Curator for fans of the movie [0] Outstanding interviews with cast and crew, prop projects, etc.
[0] https://hackerscurator.com
I like Wargames much more. Still, people is right that we should take the 'hacking' (cracking) scenes artistically, as a metaphor on what's happening inside the mind of a cracker.
If a movie ever had the balls to show real hacking people would see how utterly f cking boring and uncool it looks.
It’s like prog rock. By and large, hot chicks are interested in bands like Motley Crue and Bon Jovi.
But prog rock never got chicks wet. It was always music by nerds for other nerds.
I think a realistic movie about hacking would be the same. By and large.
Indeed; music wise for actual hacking (old meaning) it would be some 9front setup (either themeless defaults or something bland with yellow background for terminal windows, as if they were mundane sticky notes) and Muzak; for cracking either industrial metal or some progresive Jazz which would still sound cool and elegant in some parts. For really odd hacks and cracks the music from Twin Peaks wuold be ideal.
For the cool stuff, well, the Demoscene it's like that. Or stuff from https://t3x.org, or the small tools from gopher://hoi.st and tons of weird 9front new tools such as the GeFS filesystem, the future gpufs, using remote devices as if they were the local ones in the computer and whatnot. Ditto with Subleq and EForth which is perfect foror something like Jarre.
The most interesting thing to show in film would be social engineering aspects. The actual hacking of spending time on the computer is always going to be boring command line stuff. At least Mr. Robot used real commands.
It was sad to realize that my parents, who are utterly obsessed with rush, were the incels of their generation.
this would be an interesting kubernetes explorer, similiar to the DWM file explorer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer is the source available?
What contemporary films, TV, it books scratch the same itch as "Hackers." Folks are mentioning Mr. Robot. What else?
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."
My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
As far as 90's cyber films go it was probably The Net that had the most realistic vision of the future. Workin from home, ordering pizza.
I realized the other day that Hackers doesn't really have a depiction of the social milieu of the elite hacker—the BBS. But The Net kinda does. So, point to The Net.
The 1990s depiction of a filesystems in movies like Hacker or Disclosure was just weird. Then you had products like Microsoft Bob.
Good job, thanks for sharing! Should I be looking at the code for easter eggs? :)
Cool. The only thing that's missing are keys for turning / rotating.
Would be nice to get one from Johnny Mnemonic too.
Oh dang I made it to the end of the grid/world. Got scared in the darkness and retreated back to the light.
I was so proud of myself in college when I could finally name all those books in the bar scene.
I remember writing to the govt (DoD maybe? I don't remember exactly) asking for a copy of the rainbow books and getting a surprise a few months later when a heavy box showed up at my parents' door! I no longer have them, but have fond memories of poring over orange, green, teal, and a few others.
This absolutely made my week! (I still have the Hackers movie poster framed in my office.)
Anyone else on the fan Facebook group? Ceralkiller is on there.
This is great, is there any way to just have it fly around autonomously?
That could be a fun screen saver
That's delightful - thanks for sharing!
Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.
Can I run this on my new pentium pro laptop, or is it RISC only?
That's so awesome :D thanks for making this. amazing.
Thanks for this gem!
This brings back _memories_! I think I won't even stand out from the crowd here mentioning me and the gang watched the hell out of the VHS back when, in our circle it was a different world than I suppose even for people in the West who loved it. We're so far removed this became a cult classic long before it became cult classic everywhere else. Needless to say, Angelina Jolie's character made quite an impression on this young mind :-) Damn, quotes from this movie live rent-free in my head. I was already quite a fan of Orbital when I saw Hackers for the first time. It was also at the end of "Mortal Kombat", by the way -- but Hackers used it marginally better still IMO.
Hacker had HEART, man. It was cheesy but the feeling it left in an entire sub-culture of a generation, cannot be underestimated. I am reading some of the other stories here, and it brings smile to my face knowing me and my gang weren't the only ones the movie imprinted on.
Woha, this isn't woodshop class?!
HACK THE PLANET! Have to rewatch the movie tonight!
question: does anyone know if there are ueri/bios with sound and animationa AVALIBLE for pc somehow?
As in train station hacking scene
2. Monitor inside the glasses. was it real?
Yes. There were early models available with 320x200 or 640x480 rez.
They didn't have accelerometers, so it was just a dumb screen on your face.
very cool. i made my own version of the final wargames sequence. now, whenever i am in a boring meeting i am adding something to the game mechanics.
This is really cool! Thanks for making and sharing.
Time to re-re-re-re-N-watch this!
Nice!!!
So friggin’ cool. Well done.
A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
"RISC architecture is gonna change everything." :)
Easily the most quoted part of the film, aside from “Hack the planet!!!!” … but also an amazing prediction! All the devices in our pockets are RISC machines. That did change everything.
I was going for the books initially, but isn't as much fun.
Regarding RISC, kind of, there have been compromises in the instruction sets.
For me it's "Never fear. I... is here."
I feel like god!
Me: [thinking about how to get with the hot Romulan looking chick]
Me also: yah RISC is good!
Yeah, that scene is interesting. :)
Crash + Burn <3
Yeah! Hack the Planet :D
YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
Ironically aestheticically wise the best hackers (as in the original sense) would just depict a half busy and utterly boring plan9/9front desktop and tons of physical (and digital books). Forget about ricing (except for constrast and readability, such as using Zukitre instead of Adwaita for GTK). Usability first.
Hack the Planet!
Phenomenal work!
god wouldn't be up this late...
LOVELY :D
Now add a flashing red box with:
/root/.workspace/garbage
(was that it?) and a VJ mode that scrolls around to the beat and you have something for the next party!
You have now become The Plague.
very cool
wonderful
Am I the only one who vehemently despised this movie?
Yes, you are the only one who is wrong ;)
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I love it. Hack the planet. Thank you so much.
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Such a crap, corny movie. Cliché dialogues. Didn't age well, typical 90s techbabblebullshit drivel.
Strange days OTOH...
It was an MTV move made for teenagers. People thought it was silly and had dumb technobabble when it was released. "RISC is good."
If you objected to the premise or technical content of the movie, you weren't the intended audience.
Hollywood tried to make a bunch of computer movies at the time and had to figure out how to make things on a computer seem exciting, even though in reality, it's just someone sitting and typing for long periods. The producers decided on 3D mainframes and artistically rendered hacker tools (some macintosh progz at the time were not too far off).
At least at the time, they were up to the task of using some creativity to address the challenges of making a compelling, at least visually if not intellectually, movie set in a place and time with technology that effectively shrinks time and space. Now they simply set all their movies before smartphones existed.
I see where youre coming from. But oh when you embrace the cliche of it all.. it's amazing
Fun fact: "right here, right now" sample in eponymous Fatboy Slim song is Angela Basset trying to make Ralph Fiennes come to his senses and forget Juliette Lewis.
Disagree on Hackers, agree on Strange Days.
Skunkanansie cameo too.
This is good progress but the 1995 movie is still superior.
There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.
It does perform really good on mobile.
This is a coded scene made by one developer and the other is a multimillion dollar studio project... :D