Hacker Cinema
The Last Starfighter
1984 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Nick Castle
AdventureScience FictionAction
Video game expert Alex Rogan finds himself transported to another planet after conquering the video game The Last Starfighter, only to find out it was just a test. He was recruited to join the team of best Starfighters to defend their world from the attack.
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35 comments on Hacker News
There have been a few movies that each revolutionised CGI in their own way. The Last Starfighter, flight of the navigator, tron, jurassic park, toy story, Terminator 2
No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film.
The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until about '81 - '82. Textured rendering was driven by rapid performance gains with parallel and vector processors. I can't think of any use of textured surfaces until the early 1980s, outside of some experimental things like "A Computer Animated Hand" (1972).
The Genesis effect in Star Trek II (1982) was considered mind-blowing at the time. Most people in the audience would have never seen anything like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer. A very expensive one minute of film.
What we would recognize as the early 3D graphics scifi style emerges in the early-mid 80s. For example, The Last Starfighter (1984): https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
But films without CG are clearly superior and it’s not even in contention.
Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra alone have incredible fully live shot special effects which can not be easily replicated with CG and have aged like fine wine, unlike the trash early CG of the 80s and 90s which ruined otherwise great films like the last starfighter
With a few honourable exceptions, the CGI effects tend to age pretty bad, ruin movies over time.
Lets say, The Last Starfighter (1984's CGI) versus: Startrek III (1984), 2010 The Year We Make Contact (1984) and so on, even Buckaroo Banzai (1984) is watchable.
With the current popcorn CGI being used today, the same thing will happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q-Qs3loKoc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
"Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada."
It was named Starfighter after the movie 'The Last Starfighter' iirc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
They had a great name.
For anyone who didn't see the kinda cheesy '80s light sf movie, The Last Starfighter, the premise is appealing and classic: (minor SPOILERS) young adult kid stuck living and working in a trailer park, wants more, there's a Starfighter video arcade game set up in the park, one day he goes for the record on the game, and turns out the game was a recruitment tool for something much bigger than his humble trailer park, and he passed.
(Co-stars Robert Preston, as a very enterprising and scrappy recruiting headhunter, a bit like his The Music Man film character, but without the musical numbers.)
The Star Fleet Technical Manuals were so cool as a kid. The Last Starfighter was an amazing movie and those ships were so cool.
Inspired a lot of kids like me to draw their own ships.
> sort of banality
There’s a gestalt to the word in the US. If the words are parsed or translated literally, particularly for esl, I can see how it would seem very plain. But speaking as a kid from the American eighties, I don’t think “starship” is banal - anything but! It evokes for me all sorts of wonder and fantasy, probably tied to the media consumed - movies like The Last Starfighter, old Trek reruns, and books and comics.
It's a reference to an 80s movie called "The Last Starfighter" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
I was confused as well. I looked it up and apparently it's a reference to The Last Starfighter movie.
The Last Starfighter game from the movie, always remember watching that movie and wishing it was possible to play the game. Basic by any 3d space game standard now but had a nice style and looked fun.
> Also, there's the minor problem that there's no video hardware.
I believe there were a few frame buffers available. IIRC, the movie "The Last Starfighter" had their VFX rendered on an Y-MP and they would require some form of pre-visualization during the production process, but transfers from render to viz could be achieved with network or magnetic storage sneakernet.
Interesting that the male lead of "The Music Man," (film and stage versions) Robert Preston, also starred in a film where he brings out the talent latent on Earth. In "The Last Starfighter" a huckster named Centauri places an arcade game in various places as a sort of "Excalibur" test to find twitch-game experts who could defend the Star League's Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada.
For your further pop culture enjoyment: fans of stories like these may enjoy a more modern version -- Ernest Cline's "Armada" shares many similarities. You might remember Cline from such films as "Fanboys" and "Ready Player One." I imagine "Armada" will get its own film adaptation someday.
> I loved that book actually.
I liked it too, Alan Dean Foster did some nice worldbuilding there (that ended up very non-canon) that you don't usually see in franchise novels.
Another good example of this that comes to mind is 'Spock's World' by Diane Duane (though I think most of the worldbuilding there did become canon).
The other ADF movie novelization I recall fondly is 'The Last Starfighter'.
First, the Last Starfighter. My mom said this was the first movie I stayed awake for the entire time as a toddler, and while I don't remember seeing it in a theater, I think this made me instantly interested in everything computers and space, and I eventually became a rocket scientist (kinda). Yay!
Network - It was made a long time ago, but it's really about Facebook. Watch it.
Requiem for a dream - I'll never forget this movie, ever. This will make you want to quit all your drugs.
Hearts of Darkness (A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) - This is the making of Apocalypse Now, and it's amazing. It's so much more than a documentary about how to make a movie, it's about life, movie making, and youtube, long before it existed.
Wargames - still relevant about how technology could destroy us. I feel like this is the Ferris Bueller's Day Off for Hackers.
And lastly, who could forget, Hackers.
This reminds me of an episode of the old Clerks cartoon show. They were playing an arcade game about pushing blocks around to build a pyramid, which turned out to be a Last Starfighter type qualification exam. Except, of course, what winning qualified you to do was be enslaved and forced to push actual stone blocks to build a pyramid.
But you’ve sort of just rediscovered the business model of all advertising? All kinds of media are in the business of attracting attention. Then, if you want, you can sell that attention to someone else in the form of advertising. The trick with candy crush etc is that the content attracting attention doesn’t actually have to be “good” in the way that honest creators intend, just addictive.
The article omits 1984’s The Last Starfighter, which I believe was the first film to use CGI to render “ real life” objects.
Star Wars, 1977 (the Death Star diagram), The Black Hole, 1979 (the wireframe model of the titular black hole-- drawn on a plotter!), etc. By 1986 we'd already had two entire films based around CGI-- Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984).
The name reference is to "The Last Starfighter", an old movie wherein some aliens used a cabinet video game to find the humans with the greatest natural skill at piloting their space-combat vessels. If you win the video game, a robot is dispatched to the cabinet's location to recruit the player.
Naturally, Starfighter extended the premise that analysis of one's play can predict one's work performance to recruiting software professionals. Win the game; get hired.
It is a simple concept but if you aren't familiar with CTF or the movie The Last Starfighter it can take a moment to put the concepts together as to what they are trying to achieve.
- create games/challenges that require programming and problem solving
- recruit individuals based on success in the challenges and related data points
There was some magic to the 80s childhood movies -- Star Wars, ET, Last Starfighter, Goonies -- that I don't think can be bottled. Whatever stories hold that place for our kids, I don't think they will be the same movies that did it for us. There's just something about seeing Star Wars in the context of that time, and it's not the same as seeing it now.
From Author Aric Wilmunder: "In 1983 I was hired by Atari Corporate Research and in '84 I transferred to Atari Coin-Op where I was part of a small R&D team under Lyle Rains, the brains behind Asteroids and Atari Football. I was tasked with designing and building a sequel to Star Raiders, the most sophisticated space battle simulator of it's time. While I was still working on the design, Atari Marketing had purchased the rights to develop games based on the movie The Last Starfighter, and when the movie did poorly at the box-office, they quickly re-branded the Atari 800 game as Star Raiders II. The actual sequel that I was coding was just a few months from completion and as a result it never shipped, but it did serve as my resume when I went to work for George Lucas' fledgling games group, Lucasfilm Games. So after more than 30 years sitting on a floppy disk in my garage, here's the true Star Raiders II."
I'm like 99% certain it's in reference to the movie "The Last Starfighter"[0] where the protagonist, an avid player of an arcade game with the same title, finds himself recruited into an alien space fleet based on his stellar performance in the game.
The parallels should hopefully be obvious: have fun playing the game. But if you stand out, it's because you've demonstrated some set of marketable skills that other organizations are looking for. If you've set the 'contact me about potential jobs' bit in your Starfighters profile, they'll spend some effort trying to land you a gig with their client companies.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
Well, it evokes The Last Starfighter movie kind of feel, where a kid beats a video game and thus proves he's ready for something greater, so I can understand feeling special "for being chosen", no matter how automatic that criteria likely was (the human brain can deceive itself into thinking events are more deliberately chosen and less random than they actually are)
He's referring to the (1984) movie "The Last Starfighter", in which an arcade game is used to recruit a fighter pilot.
It's also where patio11 + ptacek got the name for that project.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
I wonder whether the name has something to do with the movie "The last Starfighter": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
The Last Starfighter is by far the most underrated scifi movie of all time.
I'm sure the name is from a much earlier movie (mid-80s), The Last Starfighter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
I presume it is based on the film "The Last Starfighter" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/ - in which a teen perfects an arcade game, and is then selected as a pilot for the actual spacecraft.
Congrats to the CodeCombat team! Their recruitment-oriented business model reminded me of an 80's movie called The Last Starfighter [1]: A young guy living in the middle of nowhere masters a space fighter arcade game. He has no idea that it's actually a fighter pilot training and recruitment tool until one night, when he's picked up by a "headhunter" (in a spacebound DeLorean) to join the force defending the galaxy against alien invaders. Fun flick, with some decent early CGI.
The parallels, I think, really help demonstrate how the CC concept has the potential to change young people's lives.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
That was likely an homage to the 1984 film The Last Starfighter -- a teenager gets recruited "by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war" via being the top scorer on an arcade game.
That meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack