War Games is one of those movies I always watch when it comes on tv. I'm sure you have one or some of those too. I re-watched it when the anniversary edition DVD came out a few years ago. It was then I noticed a very young Michael Madsen and John Spencer as the silo operators at the prologue of the movie.
The film also had me wonder what Dabney Coleman has been up to, I hadn't heard much about him lately (since then he has co-starred in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire).
Matthew Broderick is very good as the teen hacker who gets over his head when he hacks into the NORAD computer, potentially starting WW3. Ally Sheedy is a little annoying as "the girl" he is trying to impress, but I don't know what other teen actress options they had back then. John Hurt is also good as the reclusive scientist, that typical sort that feels remorse inventing something that the government uses for destructive means.
The film just shows you how far along computers and technology have come, although the technology was portrayed as state of the art, the screens were were still primitive and memory limits were tiny compare to what we have now (the commentary track mentioned computers then had 256 K! Some files are even bigger than that, I can't imagine a whole computer could be that small).
There are many other character actors such as Barry Corbin as the bombastic colonel at NORAD and Maury Chaykin as a slobbery computer programmer.
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