00000111 Computer Gamer Films / TV Shows / Books

Not the obvious ones, either.

Mar 15, 2025

“Player Two has entered the game”.

“Haven’t you got work today?”

“Player Two has left the game”

There are plenty of tie-in films, books and TV shows set in the world of an existing game. Very few are as good as the games.

These aren’t them.

Wargames (1983) - Dir. John Badham

“I’ll be the Russians.”

Matthew Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who inadvertently comes close to starting World War III while trying to impress his girlfriend Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy).1

Perhaps because of the subject matter this film doesn’t seem to get televised quite as often as it used to, which is a shame, as it’s one of the best 80s films of its type.

There are, however, a few details that are a bit odd for modern viewers.

David hacks in to the computer by correctly guessing the password is the name of its creator’s dead son.

No numbers, special characters, upper case letters, no “are you a human” check, nothing.

This isn’t the hardest thing to believe in the movie, though.

Younger readers may scoff at the USA and Russia being depicted as mortal enemies.

I know, right?

This is still not the hardest thing to believe in the movie, though.

The hardest thing to believe in the movie is a computer nerd with a hot girlfriend.

Hey, anything can happen in movies, right? You have to suspend your disbelief.

Fair play, there probably aren't too many movies that can be said to have actively influenced the government of the day.

But co-writer Laurence Lasker was friends with President Ronald Reagan, who watched the film with advisers and members of Congress.

This led to the first official US Government policy on computer security, eighteen months later.

Thankfully, it is now virtually impossible to hack into the computer systems of large organisations worldwide, which is why you never hear of such things happening today…

Dead Pixels (2019-2021)

“Yeah, but have you ever shit in a bucket?” - Alexa Davis as Meg in ‘Dead Pixels’.

Channel 4’s sitcom Dead Pixels follows gamers Meg, Nicky and Usman who have spent two years immersed in the online multi-player game Kingdom Scrolls, to the point that it has not so much taken over their lives as become their lives.

I’m not a gamer, but the missus is, and I have watched Dead Pixels, so I am familiar with their foibles, and it all seems fundamentally accurate if exaggerated for comic effect.

The missus has asked me to make it clear that unlike Meg, she has never shit in a bucket rather than break off from playing a Game for the time it takes to go and do a poo.

And I, for one, believe her.

Throughout the first, scene-setting episode, we see the three playing the game on their respective consoles, communicating with each other only via their headsets. Right at the end, in a superb reveal gag, you realise Meg and Nicky are in fact flatmates.

All 12 episodes are on Channel 4’s online streaming service, free if you’re in the UK (or presumably if you’re elsewhere but have a VPN, I wouldn’t know anything about That Sort of Thing).

Any gamers out there reading this, if you have shit in a bucket then let me know and a free subscription will be winging its way to you.

There is no need to provide proof. I trust you, you weird human. Now go away, quickly.

Tron (1982) - Dir. Steven Lisberger

Did anyone see the movie "Tron"?

Well, if you haven’t seen it, that’s a shame.

Hardly less of a period piece when it was released than it looks now, the plot juggles industrial espionage with a digitally created world of programs existing as living, thinking beings inside a computer, plus that old standby the God-like entity controlling the system that has turned evil.

The computer-generated special effects were stunning at the time, and have retained a retro-charm to this day. Some good casting decisions mean we get Jeff Bridges and David Warner, plus Cindy Morgan and Babylon 5’s Bruce Boxleitner, all of whom can be relied upon to always take a genre role seriously.

One more thing. The music, composed by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, is amazing.

Otherland - Tad Williams (1996-2001)

The four-book Otherland saga is set in the near future, where the Net is a worldwide virtual reality internet system offering total immersion of the kind that Second Life could never achieve, where you can exist in a world far more exciting than what the real world can offer you.

Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher in South Africa, has a brother Stephen in hospital, in an inexplicable coma.

With the assistance of her student, a Bushman named !Xabbu, Renie enters the virtual reality, uncovering a virtual world of incredible scale and detail containing Otherland, a luxury executive part of the VR populated by the super-rich, which hides the secret of what has affected Stephen and the other children.

In the best traditions of heroic fantasy, there are many, many other characters all with their own intriguing stories.

This was three years before the first Matrix film came out, by the way.

Because it came out before “Internet buzz” was really a thing, Tad Williams’ unique series has faded from collective geek memory somewhat.

There’s a TV series in development hell as we speak, but it’s been there for a few years now. Still, there’s an appetite for the genre just now, so maybe they’ll adapt it.

Meantime, the books are well worth your attention.

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) - Dir. Sam Crane / Pinny Grylls

During the Time Of Covid, you found ways to pass the time.

You watched television. A lot of television.

You took up building Lego models.

You shared videos of your family singing “humorous” songs on Youtube.

And if you were Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, you tried to mount a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the popular multi-player online video game Grand Theft Auto, with auditions open to anybody held within the game.

Now anybody familiar with Grand Theft Auto will know that the majority of players of the game go round stealing and killing, which is, in a sense, what the game is designed for, and precisely the catharsis many found necessary during those long months of boredom.

So there is something of a disconnect with what our guys were trying to achieve, and they have a little difficulty getting the concept over of what they are trying to do.

They get killed a lot during the audition process.

Sam’s other half, director and non-gamer Pinny Grylls gets involved. There is a hilarious sequence where she turns up in the game because its the only way she can get to have a proper conversation with him. Relatable.

I’ve never seen anything quite like Grand Theft Hamlet, shot entirely within the game, with all the characters (subjects?) represented solely by their in-game avatars.

This is an amazing movie that deserves a huge audience.

It may be a little hard to find, but it is currently on the Mubi platform - I just checked and you can get seven days free just now, so have at it, you won’t regret it..

Wreck-It Ralph (2012) / Ralph Breaks The Internet (2018)

A love letter to old video arcade games featuring more references to classic games than you can shake a joystick at, plus games specially created for the film.

Wreck-It Ralph, played to perfection by John C. Reilly with his trademark “resting pissed-off voice”, is the designated baddie in the arcade game Fix-It Felix, Jr, his mission in life being to destroy stuff which good guy handyman Felix then fixes.

The real star of the film for me is the brattish yet vulnerable small-child sidekick Vannelope (Sarah Silverman), a racer in the brighter-pink-than-Barbie game Sugar Rush.

The does-what-it-says-on-the-tin sequel’s pretty amazing, too.

Shaun Of The Dead (2004) - Dir. Edgar Wright

Although the main characters are gamers, this is more of a zombie movie than a gamer movie really, but it does contain possibly the greatest gamer-related line in screen history.

SPOILER - Shaun Of The Dead ending

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