wargames2

MikeAnd what finally happened to this wonderful prop?…MIKE FINK– Well, the WOPR was broken up for scrap and I retrieved some of the electronics. There really wasn’t much to it. The display went back to the fellow who built it (see below). To correct Sellam [Ismail], it was not a backlit liquid crystal display, it was a flourescent matrix, similar to a lot of segmented alphanumeric displays at the time. It was essentially a large flat glass envelope with some sort of noble gas and some sort of anode/cathode arrangement/addressing scheme that made individual dots glow. (Damn! That’s it! The guy who designed and built that display was Lowell Noble! He died a few years back, but he was another great guy. If I remember correctly, I think that one of Lowell’s contributions to life on Earth was as a member of the team that designed the tritium trigger that made fusion bombs possible. Always hard to square with my experience of him.) Lowell did do some experimenting with LCD’s for color displays in the mid 80’s, and developed a full color laser projector that was the first I had ever seen (also mid-80’s). In fact, I didn’t see anything to equal it until the late 90’s.
A new DVD digital release of Wargames? Yep! You read it here. I was just contacted about possibly providing the original 1983 WarGames film props to be used for a special edition DVD of the film WARGAMES for Fox Home Entertainment. I thought the Director’s Cut DVD would be the pinnacle of promotion for this 24-year old classic, but the wizards of Hollywood have devised something even greater! We’ll have to wait a bit to see what comes of this, but if history is any kind of soothsayer, I’d bet a burger ‘n beer that it’ll be worth watching!