WarGames
Short description
WarGames follows David Lightman, a teenager with a talent for breaking into computer systems. Looking for unreleased video games, he connects by chance to a military network instead of a game company. Believing he has joined an ordinary game, he starts playing against a system that controls the United States' nuclear defenses, and his moves are read as preparations for a real attack. With his friend Jennifer and the programmer who built the system, Stephen Falken, David tries to stop the countdown he has set in motion.
John Badham directed the film, the third of fifteen features in his career, following Dracula and preceding Blue Thunder. Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker wrote the screenplay, and Richard Hashimoto and Harold Schneider produced it. Matthew Broderick plays David, with Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy, Barry Corbin and Juanin Clay among the cast. The production cost about 12 million dollars and took roughly 80 million worldwide, a strong return for a drama with science fiction and thriller elements.
Film critics rated it 7.8 out of 10 across 46 reviews, noticeably higher than the audience scores of 7.1 on IMDb from around 121,000 votes and 7.1 on TMDB from a much smaller pool. The critical agreement and the lasting volume of viewer votes point to a film that has stayed visible for decades.
What's left behind the scenes
- During the height of the Cold War, the film popularized the concept of DEFCON in popular culture. It is thanks to this film that the hacker conference held in the United States received its name – DEFCON.
- The film gave its name to one of the hacking techniques for scanning telephone networks for publicly accessible modem pools — wardialing.
- The scenario of the battle was recreated in the 2006 computer game DEFCON, which accurately reproduces the 'schematic nature' of military operations and DEFCON levels.
- The offer to play chess ('How about a nice game of chess?'), posed by the supercomputer to the player, can be found in the computer game Fallout, and the mention of a 'strange game that you can win without even starting it' — in another part — Fallout 2.
- In the computer game Culpa Innata, you can find a computer that largely replicates Joshua. The main character can play chess with it (always losing) and tic-tac-toe (always a draw, or, if 0 players are specified, the computer freezes while playing against itself). 'Global thermonuclear war' is also on the list of games, but the main character refuses to play it.
- The film was released in 1983, the same year ARPANET switched to the TCP/IP protocol, which can be considered the beginning of the internet era.
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