Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

327 points - today at 1:49 PM

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herodoturtle today at 5:27 PM
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!

bilekas today at 3:15 PM
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.
par today at 5:17 PM
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.
ericskiff today at 7:37 PM
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.

jghn today at 3:40 PM
I couldn't find the garbage file. I'm such a failure, now Davinci is going to overturn all the oil tankers
enkonta today at 3:03 PM
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.
caust1c today at 7:52 PM
> 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!
trentnix today at 3:11 PM
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.
invader today at 9:19 PM
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.

vidalakistrajk today at 10:57 PM
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!
unicorn_cowboy today at 10:23 PM
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."

TheSilva today at 3:28 PM
Sadly, looking through the code, doesn't show up any "GARBAGE" file easter egg to be found.

Amazing stuff, nevertheless!

syx today at 5:37 PM
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

avsn today at 8:52 PM
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.
echelon_musk today at 4:09 PM
> You're gonna love New York. It's the city that never sleeps.
mackman today at 4:41 PM
OK who is gonna turn this into a functional terminal emulator for me?
JaggedJax today at 5:02 PM
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?

diggyhole today at 3:36 PM
It's in the place I put the thing that one time!
shon today at 3:36 PM
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.

nickthegreek today at 3:55 PM
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.
stack_framer today at 8:41 PM
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.
benrutter today at 4:05 PM
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

ultrahax today at 9:44 PM
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.
k2enemy today at 8:38 PM
I highly recommend Hackers Curator for fans of the movie [0] Outstanding interviews with cast and crew, prop projects, etc.

[0] https://hackerscurator.com

axus today at 4:11 PM
The addressing on that hex dump is all over the place.. and not even byte-aligned!
elric today at 7:15 PM
I miss the time when rollerblades seemed like the ideal mode of transport.

My ankles don't.

nirav72 today at 8:27 PM
The 1990s depiction of a filesystems in movies like Hacker or Disclosure was just weird. Then you had products like Microsoft Bob.
jus3sixty today at 5:57 PM
Some of you tough tech guys are talking a lot of sh$@ but I bet you couldn’t hack a Gibson.
runjake today at 4:14 PM
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.

_joel today at 9:03 PM
Can I run this on my new pentium pro laptop, or is it RISC only?
fred_is_fred today at 3:31 PM
This is really slow for me on my laptop. Does it need a P6 to run? I heard those have a killer refresh rate.
LandoCalrissian today at 3:59 PM
Easily my biggest guilty pleasure movie, warts and all, I still love it.
hackrmn today at 7:45 PM
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?!

lchengify today at 6:16 PM
I was so proud of myself in college when I could finally name all those books in the bar scene.
erickhill today at 5:29 PM
Oh dang I made it to the end of the grid/world. Got scared in the darkness and retreated back to the light.
evan_ today at 5:29 PM
This is great, is there any way to just have it fly around autonomously?
iberator today at 6:08 PM
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?

racl101 today at 8:28 PM
YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
ethinton today at 3:09 PM
That's delightful - thanks for sharing!

Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.

JCattheATM today at 4:46 PM
This is really cool! Thanks for making and sharing.
ryan42 today at 8:55 PM
god wouldn't be up this late...
aenis today at 4:02 PM
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.
iJohnDoe today at 8:45 PM
So friggin’ cool. Well done.
kriro today at 4:51 PM
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" :)

shmerl today at 8:13 PM
Cool. The only thing that's missing are keys for turning / rotating.

Would be nice to get one from Johnny Mnemonic too.

deleted today at 3:16 PM
pjmlp today at 3:47 PM
"RISC architecture is gonna change everything." :)
KeybInterrupt today at 4:10 PM
Yeah! Hack the Planet :D
k6hkUZtLUM today at 5:59 PM
Hack the Planet!
waldopat today at 5:45 PM
Phenomenal work!
throwaway314155 today at 10:55 PM
Am I the only one who vehemently despised this movie?
cmrdporcupine today at 5:46 PM
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!"

myvoiceismypass today at 5:28 PM
This absolutely made my week! (I still have the Hackers movie poster framed in my office.)
anthk today at 5:03 PM
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.
29athrowaway today at 4:12 PM
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.

stewartjarod today at 3:50 PM
LOVELY :D
RRRA today at 4:16 PM
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!

RazerWazer today at 6:02 PM
You have now become The Plague.
fvv today at 5:16 PM
wonderful
0xcb0 today at 4:05 PM
I love it. Hack the planet. Thank you so much.
bitwize today at 3:42 PM
"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.

anthk today at 5:08 PM
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.
MrCurryCasino today at 9:52 PM
Such a crap, corny movie. Cliché dialogues. Didn't age well, typical 90s techbabblebullshit drivel.

Strange days OTOH...