49 Fun Facts About War Games

Who stars as teenage hacker David Lightman in the 1983 film WarGames?

Matthew Broderick plays David Lightman; the writers modelled the character on David Scott Lewis, a real hacking enthusiast they had met while researching the script.

Who replaced the fired original director of WarGames early in shooting?

John Badham took over and judged that the existing footage went wrong because its two young leads weren't having any fun, so he set out to make their hacking look like a thrill.

Which future Beverly Hills Cop director was fired from WarGames three weeks into shooting?

Martin Brest was dismissed after three weeks of filming over creative differences; his footage was darker in tone than the light film its writers had developed.

Who portrays Jennifer Mack, David's classmate, in WarGames?

Ally Sheedy plays Jennifer Mack; she later said she couldn't make heads or tails of the script, which made it easy to play the scenes where Jennifer keeps asking David what he is doing.

Who portrays NORAD systems chief Dr. John McKittrick?

Dabney Coleman plays Dr. John McKittrick, who argues for automating missile launches after a drill in which many silo crews refused to turn their keys.

Which English stage actor plays the reclusive scientist Stephen Falken in WarGames?

John Wood plays Falken; a Royal Shakespeare Company star, he had won a Tony in 1976 for Travesties, in a role Tom Stoppard wrote specifically for him.

Which former Beatle showed interest in playing Falken while the WarGames script was being written?

John Lennon had shown interest in playing Falken; he was shot dead in New York in December 1980, while the script was still being developed.

Which actor plays General Beringer, the NORAD commander who distrusts WOPR in WarGames?

Barry Corbin plays Beringer, whom the writers based on NORAD's real commander, General James Hartinger, after he buttonholed them at the base and took them to the bar to talk about the script.

What does the acronym WOPR stand for in WarGames?

War Operation Plan Response spends its days playing out every possible war as a game; in the film it is handed the missiles after many launch officers refuse to turn their keys in a drill.

Which real physicist inspired the reclusive scientist Falken in early drafts of WarGames?

Stephen Hawking was the model: Falken began as a dying astrophysicist, until the film's first director dropped the wheelchair for looking too much like Dr. Strangelove.

WarGames began as a 1979 script about a dying scientist and a too-smart kid; what was it called?

The Genius had no computers in it at all: hacking entered the story only after the writers met a futurist who linked bright kids, computer games and the military.

What machine does David use to change his grades and reach WOPR?

IMSAI 8080: its makers were working on a computer system for car dealerships when they built this clone of the Altair 8800, sold at first as a kit.

In which California town is the games company David is hunting when he stumbles onto WOPR?

Sunnyvale is home to Protovision, the games company whose unreleased titles David wants to play early; instead he reaches an unnamed computer that offers him a list of games.

What is the backdoor password that gets David into WOPR?

The password is Joshua, the name of Falken's dead son; David's hacker friends Jim and Malvin had explained that programmers leave such backdoors into their systems.

Which game does David pick from the list, setting off the crisis?

David chooses Global Thermonuclear War and plays the Soviet side, targeting American cities; the same menu also listed chess, checkers and poker.

WOPR sits inside which real military installation in Colorado?

NORAD's command centre in the film is inside Cheyenne Mountain; the set built for it, with its huge video wall, was far grander than the real facility then was.

After escaping NORAD, David and Jennifer find Falken living under an assumed name where?

An island off the Oregon coast is where Falken lives under the name Robert Hume, having resigned himself to nuclear war as inevitable.

How does David finally get out of NORAD after escaping the infirmary?

By joining a tourist group on its way out: David beats the infirmary's door lock and then simply leaves with the visitors the staff had grumbled about earlier.

In WarGames, what proves to NORAD that the Soviet strike on its screens is fake?

The targeted bases report in unharmed: Falken persuades the general to ride out the attack with the base commanders on the line, and they are still talking after the screens show the impacts.

Why can't NORAD simply unplug WOPR in the WarGames finale?

The silos would launch automatically: McKittrick warns that their computers would read a shutdown as the destruction of NORAD and carry out their last instructions.

Which game do Falken and David make WOPR face itself at, to teach it futility?

Falken and David set the computer to play Tic-tac-toe against itself; after a long run of draws it simulates every nuclear scenario, finds no winner and gives up.

WOPR concludes that nuclear war is "a strange game" in which the only winning move is what?

The computer's verdict is 'Not to play': having found every nuclear exchange unwinnable, it relinquishes control and asks, "How about a nice game of chess?"

Which film led 1983's box office, where WarGames ranked fifth?

Return of the Jedi led the year with about $250M; WarGames, made for roughly $12M, earned almost $80M at home and outgrossed that summer's James Bond film, Octopussy.

Which of these was one of WarGames' three Oscar nominations?

Best Original Screenplay was a nomination for Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes, who admitted that when they started in 1979 they didn't know home computers could connect to one another.

Which critic gave WarGames four out of four stars and called it "an amazingly entertaining thriller"?

Roger Ebert also ranked it among the best films of the year so far in his Chicago Sun-Times review, while adding that he was not claiming it was accurate about computers, only convincing.

Which president watched WarGames, asked the Joint Chiefs whether it could happen, and ordered a security review?

Ronald Reagan saw the film at Camp David in June 1983 and asked General John Vessey whether it could happen; the reply a week later was that the problem was worse than he thought.

WarGames helped prompt NSDD-145 in 1984, the first presidential directive on what?

Computer security reached the Oval Office because the president, fresh from watching the film, asked his generals whether its break-in could really happen; the directive was signed in September 1984.

Which hacking term was coined after David's method of finding WOPR in WarGames?

Wardialing, having a modem call every number in a block to find other computers, took its name from the film; hackers had called it demon dialing, and Wi-Fi's wardriving was later named after it.

Which Milwaukee teenage hacker group made headlines in 1983 for breaking into Los Alamos computers?

The 414s took their name from Milwaukee's telephone area code; with the film fresh in cinemas, the press labelled their Los Alamos break-in 'the WarGames case'.

The man who took over directing WarGames was already famous for which 1970s hit?

Saturday Night Fever, with John Travolta, had made his name in 1977; in 1983 he had two thrillers in cinemas within weeks, the police-helicopter film Blue Thunder arriving just before WarGames.

The official WarGames video game, a missile-defence strategy title, first appeared on which console?

ColecoVision got the game first because the console's maker, Coleco, developed it; the player shields American cities from incoming missiles, and home-computer versions followed.

Which 2006 Introversion strategy game was inspired by WarGames?

DEFCON, released by Introversion Software in 2006, recreates the film's glowing vector map of a nuclear exchange, with players scoring by the millions of enemy civilians killed.

Which designer of the video-clip mystery Her Story led the 2018 interactive series #WarGames?

Sam Barlow joined the interactive-video firm Interlude, later renamed Eko, to make it; instead of offering choices, the series tracks which character's video feed you watch and tailors what follows.

NORAD, whose war room is the setting of the WarGames finale, stands for what?

North American Aerospace Defense Command is run jointly by the United States and Canada; until 1981 the A stood for Air, and the change reflected its growing job of warning against missiles.

Colin Cantwell, who made the NORAD screen animations for WarGames, had earlier designed spaceships for which film?

Star Wars owes Colin Cantwell its first X-wing, TIE fighter and Death Star designs; for WarGames he drew the war-room maps on Hewlett-Packard computers lent for the job.

Which actor, the nerdy Eugene in Grease, plays David's hacker friend Malvin in WarGames?

Eddie Deezen plays Malvin opposite Maury Chaykin's Jim; the pair explain back doors to David, and Deezen liked to say a famous critic had called him film's first computer nerd.

Which Soviet officer judged the 1983 launch warning a glitch, months after WarGames opened?

Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer at the Serpukhov-15 bunker on 26 September 1983, reasoned that five apparent launches made no sense as a first strike and reported a malfunction.

Which ABC television film of 1983, the year of WarGames, showed a nuclear attack on Kansas?

The Day After drew about 100 million viewers that November; where WarGames had played the bomb as a thriller that ends in relief, it showed a Kansas town after the missiles land.

Which November 1983 NATO exercise convinced some Soviet leaders a first strike was coming?

Able Archer 83 rehearsed the release of nuclear weapons so realistically, with new codes and radio silences, that Soviet air units in East Germany and Poland were placed on alert.

A 1983 NATO nuclear-release exercise was run from SHAPE headquarters, in which country?

Belgium has hosted SHAPE, NATO's military headquarters, at Casteau near Mons since 1967, when it had to leave its base outside Paris after France pulled out of the alliance's military command.

Kriegsspiel, the first wargame adopted by a real army for training, was developed by which country?

Prussia developed Kriegsspiel: Georg von Reisswitz's 1824 version was adopted by the Prussian army, and after its victory over France in 1871 other armies rushed to copy it; the word means wargame.

In Kriegsspiel, who moves the blocks on the map after reading each team's written orders?

An umpire reads the orders and moves the blocks as he judges the troops would really have carried them out, so the players give commands without needing to know the rules.

Which novelist wrote Little Wars, a 1913 rulebook for fighting battles with toy soldiers?

H. G. Wells subtitled Little Wars a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty; its battles were settled by firing a toy cannon to knock down the enemy's soldiers.

How did Red pass orders unheard by Blue's electronics in Millennium Challenge 2002?

Motorcycle messengers carried the orders, so Blue's eavesdropping heard nothing; the $250M exercise, the costliest American war game to that date, had assumed an enemy who would use radios and phones.

After Red sank Blue's fleet in Millennium Challenge 2002, the Pentagon did what?

Refloated the ships and carried on: Paul Van Riper's cruise missiles and small boats had sunk sixteen of them, so the fleet was restored and Red was told to follow a script.

In which city is David Lightman a high-school student in WarGames?

David lives in Seattle with his parents and attends high school there, where he uses his home computer to alter his biology grade on the school's system.

Willis Ware, who told the WarGames writers military computers could be reached from home, worked at which think tank?

RAND Corporation's Willis Ware had warned in 1967 that networked computers could be broken into; he told the writers that officers who wanted to work from home at weekends would leave a way in.

Which US city does David pick as his first target when he plays the Soviet side in WarGames?

Las Vegas goes first, and then David adds his own home town to the list; both strikes promptly show up as real incoming missiles on NORAD's screens.

At which film festival did WarGames premiere as the closing-night film, weeks before its US release?

Cannes closed its 1983 festival with WarGames, shown out of competition; behind the scenes its financing partner EMI was suing the studio over who had the right to release it abroad.