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This article is about the movie. For games which simulate battle or conflict situations see Wargaming.
WarGames was a 1983 science fiction film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, and directed by
John Badham. The film starred Matthew Broderick in his first major film role as David Lightman, Ally Sheedy as Jennifer Mack, Dabney Coleman as John
McKittrick, and John Wood as Stephen
Falken.
The movie was a hit, costing US$12 million, but grossing over $79 million in the US alone. The NORAD set was the most expensive single movie set ever built up to that time, at the staggering cost of $1 million.
Warning: Plot details
follow.
In the film, Broderick, a hacker, uses his IMSAI microcomputer and modem to gain access to the NORAD military
artificial intelligence computer system called
WOPR¹ that can control the United
States' arsenal of ICBMs.
The teenager, unaware of the machine's real purpose, discovers what he believes to be a simulation game called "Global
Thermonuclear War" and begins to
"play." Unbeknownst to him, WOPR sets in motion preparations for a real attack against the Soviet Union. With the aid of the machine's creator (Wood), disaster is narrowly averted when the hacker
manages to teach WOPR about the futility of war by getting it to play endless drawn games of tic-tac-toe against itself which segue into cycles through all the nuclear war stategies that WOPR has devised. WOPR then learns that "the only winning move is not to play."
It was in part a cautionary tale about technology and the dangers
of leaving machines in control of unleashing destruction, in an echo of the Doomsday device of Dr. Strangelove. It also generalized the idea of
the Cold War period in the 1970s and
1980s that somewhere there was a "button" that when pressed would nuke the whole world
away (the button, marked "LAUNCH", had several prominent close-ups), and its final sequence graphically demonstrated the concept
of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Also, it
was one of the first movies to deal with teenage hackers and their activities.
At least one computer/video game was licensed from the WarGames movie, published in 1983 by THORN EMI Video under the
movie's name and the alternative name Computer War. It was released for the Atari 8-bit family and the Commodore
VIC-20, and possibly for other platforms as well.
The user account "Stephen Falken" was present by default for a long time in the operating system NetBSD, in homage to
WarGames.
See also: demon dialing, warchalking, war dialing, war driving (the latter three actually derived from WarGames)
Notes
- WOPR = War Operations Plan and Response; in the movie, this computer system is running a program named "Joshua"
External links
- MGM's official WarGames site
- IMDb entry on
WarGames
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