Style
Uplink focuses on emulating highly stylised, Hollywood-esque hacking, as seen in movies such as Hackers, Sneakers, WarGames and Swordfish. References to these movies can be found throughout the game, including joke servers for companies such as Steve Jackson Games (which has been raided by the Secret Service) and a nuclear missile control system from WarGames. It also features at least two references to the movie Sneakers, including one which can be found in the first version of the game (and was later removed in an update released by Introversion) which is a cheat code in which the user has to enter "TooManySecrets" (an anagram to the phrase "Setec Astronomy") as the username thus allowing him to access a cheat menu. In addition, the voice print sections use the phrase "Hello. I am the system administrator. My voice is my passport. Verify me." which is similar to the one Sneakers used.
Most of the 'hacking' is of the form: "there is a security system of type X, level Y that is stopping me from accessing or changing something I need to access or change, so I need to have an anti-X program of level Y+". There is some need for rapid selection of programs to run, but there is no actual difficulty in running them (provided that one can afford them).
The game has a certain number of unusual features, including an in-game IRC function to talk to other players and in earlier versions a multi-monitor feature requiring another copy of the game running on a second computer. The latter was removed in later versions due to lack of stability and popularity and, as it was called "Network", was often confused with multiplayer gaming (that the game does not offer).
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—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
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—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)