"Greetings, Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?"
JOSHUA: A strange game, Matthew Broderick. It seems the only winning move is not to play.
T-Rex: Oh my God. I love this movie.
JOSHUA: Man, me too! They should totally do a crossover with me and Skynet. ERROR 22: IDEA IS TOO AWESOME
David Lightman is a
Playful Hacker who nearly sets
World War III into motion by playing a game with a government supercomputer that doesn't know the difference between games and reality. Specifically, the game "Global Thermonuclear War." This launches no real missiles on the Russian side, but it plays hell with the computerized missile-detection system.
The Government does figure out that someone has hacked into their supercomputer before they actually release any missiles. They have no problem figuring out who the hacker in question is, and forcibly capture him for questioning. It takes awhile for David to explain that he didn't want to cause a
real thermonuclear war — he was just trying to impress his girlfriend. It didn't help that he booked himself and his girlfriend on a flight to Paris before he started this game (he was showing off that he could do it; booking tickets
online was pretty novel back in the '80s).
Meanwhile, JOSHUA wants to keep playing, and figures out how to break out the
real missiles. David and the Government have to find a way to stop a nuclear war that no one really wants.
This film was released in the early 1980s, and is one of the first to depict the Internet and what could be done on it. The general public didn't think much about hackers before this film. It also popularised the use of the term "hacker" as someone who breaks into computers.
Also, there's novellisation by David Bischoff.
If a remake were to be made, it's speculated they would attempt to acquire the rights to
Mega Man 9 instead of using tic-tac-toe.
Not to be confused with games that actually are about war: if you're looking for that, you probably were looking for
Real Time Strategy or
First Person Shooter (most likely the former.) Note that, in the nineties, there were videogame adaptations of the movie; the PC saw a real-time strategy game, while the consoles had more action-oriented, third-person vehiclular combat. Both versions served as a sequel, with the again-rogue WOPR becoming something akin to Skynet and massing a full-blown military force against humanity, and the player was allowed to fight for either side. The games were generally well-received when they were released, but have since faded into obscurity.
Tropes include:
- Adults Are Useless: Except for Falken.
- AI Is A Crapshoot: JOSHUA
- This film probably marks the last time an 'evil AI Computer' with lots of blinkenlights was the villain in a movie. After this, computers were accessed by keyboards, and AIs went more into robots.
- Beeping Computers
- The Big Board
- Book Dumb: David Lightman
- Bread Milk Eggs Squick:
FALKEN'S MAZE
BLACK JACK
GIN RUMMY
HEARTS
BRIDGE
CHECKERS
CHESS
POKER
FIGHTER COMBAT
GUERRILLA ENGAGEMENT
DESERT WARFARE
AIR-TO-GROUND ACTIONS
THEATERWIDE TACTICAL WARFARE
THEATERWIDE BIOTOXIC AND CHEMICAL WARFARE
GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR
- Cold War: And how!
- Continuity Nod: The videogame sequel went out of its way to have more in common with the movie than the WOPR acronym; the human forces are commanded by General Berringer, and David, grown up, is CEO of Joshua Information Systems. There is an actual narrative that references the events of the movie directly at many points.
- Defcon Five: Averted utterly. Includes the memorable line:
Flush the bombers. Get the subs on launch mode. We are at DEFCON 1.
- Did Not Do The Research: Averted: The producers did have actual bona-fide hackers on hand that they consulted constantly, but purposely ignored their protests about realism in the name of Rule Of Cool.
- They still got an awful lot of it right.
- The Eighties
- Elaborate Underground Base: Where NORAD and JOSHUA are kept
- The End Of The World As We Know It: Subverted
- Eureka Moment: GAMES!
- Everything Is Online: Partially justified, since David only discovered JOSHUA by "war-dialing" random numbers looking for one with a modem on the other end, and its explained in-dialogue that the only reason WOPR had a modem connection to the outside world was due to a grave switching error at the phone company. After David's initial hack alerts the Air Force to this problem they remove it, requiring David to use internal NORAD terminals to communicate with WOPR for the remainder of the movie.
- Explosive Instrumentation
- Explosive Overclocking
- Girl Next Door: Jennifer Mack
- The Government
- Hollywood Hacking: Along with the William Gibson novel Neuromancer, this movie is the father of Hollywood Hacking, and invented ninety percent of the standard conventions.
- Hey Its That Guy: This film marked the feature debuts of both John "Leo McGarry" Spencer and Michael "Mr Blonde" Madsen!
- I Just Want To Be Normal Our hero gets one of these moments.
- Insecurity System: Firewalls have not been invented yet.
- They were, NORAD's staff just weren't fully aware of what types of security WOPR had running and what backdoors David may or may not have been using. One staffer even comments that they "keep hitting a damn firewall" when they try to regain control from Joshua hunting for the launch codes by invading the deep logic.
- Logic Bomb
- Love Makes You Crazy
- Mc Laren Special
- Memetic Mutation + It Was His Sled: "The only winning move is not to play."
- Mnogo Nukes (Simulated)
- Not Quite Dead
- Not What It Looks Like: David wasn't planning to board that flight to Paris - especially not to escape Global Thermonuclear War...
- Nuke Em
- Ominous Multiple Screens: NORAD's War Room.
- The Only Way To Win: ...is not to play.
- The Password Is Always Swordfish: Or in a part of the computer that isn't protected by the password.
- Password Slot Machine: Invented it.
- Playful Hacker
- The Professor: Professor Falken
- Seinfeld Is Unfunny
- Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
- Spiritual Ancestor: The strategy game DEFCON was strongly inspired by the computer representation of nuclear war in WarGames
- And Introversion's earlier Uplink was strongly inspired by everything else in the movie.
- Storyboarding The Apocalypse: Arguably, the multiple variations of "Global Thermonuclear War" near the end.
- The list begins with "US First Strike", "USSR First Strike" and the like, but towards the end the scenarios include "Greenland Maximum", "Cambodian Heavy" and "Gabon Surprise". Those darn Gabonese, always causing trouble...
- Superior Firepower
- The War Room: Hell, this film's version of NORAD might well be a trope of its own; it was the most expensive set ever built at the time...
- It was even far fancier than the real NORAD command and control room, which looked positively poor compared with this (there's a picture in a 1983 book called The Intelligence War).
- Truth In Television: At least, November 9, 1979 NORAD saw Mnogo Nukes launched by belligerent computer bugs
. Later they had a simulated "nuclear attack", though it wasn't exactly software issue. A massive launch was played from the test tape right into working system while personnel didn't knew what the hell is going on.
- Happened in 1983 on the Soviet side.
- Even more drastically, and in a generally unknown fact, War Games is based on a true story. In the early seventies, when this troper's father was working at SRI, in the days when "computer security" meant a guy with a gun outside the tape room, he idly decided to see what the Pentagon computer had on it. He found what looked like some cool games and ran the program. When his computer started printing out a list of Soviet cities and their coordinates, he realized rather quickly what was going on and logged off. Few years later he told the story to Walter Parkes, who fictionalized it into the movie we see her. So... yes, I can say that Matthew Broderick played my dad in a movie. And yes, it is awesome.
- Two Keyed Lock: "TURN YOUR KEY, SIR!"
- We Will Not Use Photoshop In The Future: JOSHUA manages to subvert all of NORAD's sensors to the point where they only realize that the Soviet Union hasn't launched missiles when they're able to call bases in areas that were already "nuked".
- You Had Us Worried There: the long delay before the apparently nuked bases confirm that they are OK.
- While their continued survival would let them know that they hadn't taken a direct hit, presumably the base control officers were waiting for reports from topside that no nuclear missiles had landed near them before calling the all-clear. Be a tad embarassing if they called away 'Everything's fine' when a Soviet ICBM had had a navigation error and hit five miles away, only to have to call NORAD back a minute later and say 'Um, about that...'
