10 Movies Which Tried To Capture The Essence Of Gaming

6. The Last Starfighter

On paper, The Last Starfighter sounds like little more than a cheap Star Wars rip-off - watching it, you're inclined to agree. But you'd also have to admit that it's not as bad as you might think, and the film has become something of a guilty pleasure for fans of more obscure 1980s B-movies which play with genre expectations on a low budget. Like Tron, The Last Starfighter uses early CGi to tell the story of teenage gamer Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) who smashes the high score on his local arcade machine Starfighter before finding himself summoned up to fight in an intergalactic war. The witty dialogue throughout and some surprisingly inventive special effects elevate The Last Starfighter above the sci-fi plagiarism you might expect, and it is perhaps one of the first films to be inspired by video games which itself spawned a video game. Unfortunately the arcade version of The Last Starfighter never made it into production - the head of Atari deemed the $10,000 per unit price tag way too high.