Eko, the makers of Her Story, are working on a brand new game about cyberterrorism and the futurism of digital security. The game actually isn't all that new, given that such subject matter was already the heart of the story of WarGames, and now it's being rebooted for today's generation of high-tech digital culture.
The trailer starts with a quick recap of some of the most recent hack attacks, including the 2013 Yahoo! hacks, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, the 2016 Bangladesh Bank hack, and the recent 2017 Equifax hack where 143 million social security numbers were leaked.
This leads into a brief collage of FMV clips and the classic WarGames tagline "Shall we play a game?" We then get a brief glimpse of someone uploading something, and then we're informed that Sam Barlow, who wrote Her Story, is behind the upcoming game.
It's not a traditional game, either. You'll have to focus on choice driven options to "shape the story". What this means exactly isn't explained in the teaser trailer but it does reveal that the game is being made for a release in 2018, presumably for PC.
I'm not entirely sure how well this will tie into the old 1980s flick starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, but Eko did team up with MGM for the project. The old movie was pretty cool, actually, with Broderick accidentally finding a way into a military computer where he begins playing a game with an AI that controls nuclear arms.
The movie was an intense thriller about what could happen if an AI went rogue, playing a game with real life consequences that could result in a nuclear holocaust?
The movie spawned lots of imitators in the world of gaming thereafter, specifically of note was Introversion Software's DEFCON, which not only was inspired by Wargames but also mirrored the aesthetics of the film with the same neon-colored lights set against the foreboding blackboard.
For this upcoming game, it's hard to tell exactly what will be the theme. Thremonuclear war was the focal point of the old 1980s flick due to the fears centered around the Cold War, where-as these days we sometimes have big businesses getting hacked by random groups of hackers with large amounts of data sometimes stolen, sometimes made public (like the Ashley Madison hack) or other times sold and used for nefarious means.
We'll have to wait to find out exactly what will become of Wargames. Sam Barlow's other project, Her Story, was centered around FMV clips of a real-life actress, so there was an interesting mystery element to it. This time around it seems to be about hacking... but we're not really sure what's being hacked?
Based on the Eko website, it seems like this project could be more like a short film than a traditional game, but I guess we'll find out in 2018.
