Games and independence
In The Last Starfighter, a teenage video game prodigy (Lance Guest) earns the adulation of his intergenerational trailer park community by breaking the high score record on the Last Starfighter arcade game, not realizing that the game was being used by an alien civilization to recruit expert players to assist them in an intergalactic war in the real world. The sequences of simulated game play were produced by Atari in anticipation of a Last Starfighter video game release that fell victim to the game industry crash of 1983. Although they are being used to cultivate teenage military competence -- a problematic conceit that returns in Toys (1992) and Ender's Game (2013) -- the general framing of videogames as catalysts for teenage competence and independence from parental or societal control is uniquely characteristic of the decade's dispensation toward games and their potential for positive impact on real world social behavior. Released the same year as the McIntosh computer (which was memorably marketed as a device capable of delivering the masses from totalitarian bondage), The Last Starfighter tapped into nascent PC-era cultural fantasies of technology as a means of improving one's social status.
In D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), an android boy who has lost his memory begins to suspect he is not an ordinary human when he turns out to be an expert player of the racing game Pole Position on an Atari home computer system. In this protracted sequence of game play, D.A.R.Y.L. reveals the film industry's fascination with the emerging genre of computer-generated imagery and its willingness to profit from association with video games in popular culture. Narratively, D.A.R.Y.L.'s video game playing skills demonstrate their value when he turns out to be an expert car driver in the real world, allowing him to escape from his military creators. As D.A.R.Y.L.'s social skills and self-knowledge improves -- essentially reforming his autistic-like social tendencies to more socially acceptable behavior -- he is ultimately integrated into his adopted family as if he were an ordinary child.
Even during the games-positive decade of the 1980s, few films achieved the level of synergy seen in Todd Holland's The Wizard (1989). Created through a close collaboration between Universal Pictures and game manufacturer Nintendo, the film presented audiences with their first glimpse of both Nintendo's newest version of the popular Super Mario Bros. franchise and its now infamous Power Glove controller. Although it comes close to decade's end, The Wizard offers perhaps the most unwaveringly boosterish vision of games culture, featuring multiple, protracted sequences of on-screen game play featuring Nintendo titles, leading up to a climactic showdown in which contestants play Super Mario 3 as a spectator sport at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Audience reactions to the final competition offer a final moment of redemption and familial bonding toward the withdrawn videogame prodigy who turns out to be using games as a way of working through a trauma related to his sister's death.
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- Climactic videogame play sequence introduces Super Mario Bros. 3 in The Wizard
- Video game play as generational and gender conflict in Night of the Comet
- Arcade game record breaking brings intergenerational harmony in The Last Starfighter
- An android boy discovers his inhumanity when playing video games in D.A.R.Y.L.