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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 United States alone. The NORAD set was the most expensive single movie set ever built up to that time, at the staggering cost of $1 million.

In the film, a hacker (Broderick) equipped with a 1970s vintage IMSAI microcomputer and modemA modem (a portmanteau word constructed from mod ulator and dem odulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal ( sound), to encode digital information, and that also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. (connected to the telephone by an acoustic couplermodem In telecommunications, the term acoustic coupler has the following meanings: # An interface device for coupling electrical signals by acoustical means--usually into and out of a telephone instrument. A terminal device used to link data terminals and), inadvertently gains access to the NORAD military artificial intelligenceThis article is about modelling human thought with computers,. For other uses of the term AI see Ai''. Artificial intelligence also known as machine intelligence is defined as intelligence exhibited by anything manufactured (i. artificial) by humans or ot computer system, called WOPRWOPR (pronounced " Whopper") is a fictional military computer featured in the feature movie WarGames''. Its name is an acronym for W ar O peration P lan R esponse. It is programmed to play numerous war games, including one called Global Thermonuclear War¹, that controls the United States' arsenal of ICBMMinuteman III missile soars after a test launch. An intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM is a long-range ballistic missile using a ballistic trajectory involving a significant ascent and descent, including sub-orbital flight. The FOBS had a partials.

The teenager, under the impression that he has hacked into a gaming software manufacturer's computer database and unaware of the machine's real purpose, discovers what he believes to be a simulation video game called "Global Thermonuclearmushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 lifted nuclear fallout some 60,000 feet (18 km) above the epicenter. A nuclear weapon is a weapon that derives its energy from nuclear reactions and has enormous destructive power a single n WarFor other uses of War, see War (disambiguation). War is conflict, between relatively large groups of people, which involves physical force inflicted by the use of weapons. Other terms for war include armed conflict hostilities and police action''. See Lim" and begins to "play." Unbeknownst to him, WOPR sets in motion preparations for a real attack against the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1. With the aid of Stephen Falken (the machine's creator), disaster is narrowly averted when they manage 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.