Reconstructing the lost 1990s "Cassette Trilogy".

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/5ooax2/the_lawnmower_manhackersvirtuosityreconstructing/

The Lawnmower Man, Hackers, and Virtuosity together form a single narrative that is the most triumphant example of the genre/aesthetic known as Cassette Futurism. Indeed, when taken as a whole, these three movies are a distillation of the entire 1990s, of that peculiar zeitgeist.
On the surface, the three films have almost nothing in common (The Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity share a director). They were not intended to be connected, yet they follow on one after the other so well that to view them as a single whole, one need only normalise the names of the characters between films and the movies gel perfectly. The only thing missing is the usual expository dialogue that sequels sometimes have to elaborate on what, if anything, has happened to characters between the films. While I believe the Cassette Trilogy is so strong that it doesn’t need any, I have written simple summaries of what happens between each movie to explicitly connect them, as well as noted any changes in character names between films. Spoilers below.
The Cassette Trilogy:
The Lawnmower Man. Jobe fails to completely escape the VSI building before it explodes. The part of him that connects to the internet causes a massive network crash as shown by all the world’s telephones ringing at once. The FBI investigates the crash and are lead to Dr. Angelo. All evidence of Jobe was destroyed along with the VSI building, leaving them to conclude that Dr. Angelo was responsible for the crash. Knowing that if Angelo is convicted he’ll go to prison possibly for life, Peter takes the fall for him. As a minor, Peter is only barred from using computers until he’s 18. To make it up to him, Angelo secretly teaches Peter everything there is to know about computers. Around his 18th birthday, Peter moves to a new city and changes his legal name (now Dade Murphy) and creates an online alias, “Crash Override”.
Hackers. Following the saving of his friends and the thwarting of The Plague, Crash Override and his friends feel as though they are invincible. They continue on their hacking escapades, all the while becoming more hard line in their ideology and more brazen with their actions. The increasing militarism alienates the oldest member of the group, Nikon, who parts ways and turns his back on the hacker ethos and becomes a cop. Crash Override has changed his name yet again (now Matthew Grimes) and his group of friends are now a terrorist organisation. Feeling betrayed by his old friend, Grimes specifically targets Nikon for revenge, but the plan backfires and the hackers are killed by Nikon, who has since dropped his aliases and uses his birth name, Parker Barnes. In the attack, Barnes accidentally kills civilians and is sent to prison. There he’s recruited into a secret virtual reality project.
Virtuosity. The movie ends with the final destruction of the evil AI SID 6.7. This serves to close out the trilogy by bringing it back to where it started. Whereas Jobe was a real human who wanted to live in the virtual world, SID was a virtual human that wished to live in the real world.