"Shall We Play a Game?"

In the late spring of 1983, a little-know movie hit the big screen and introduced audiences to a new world of technology filled with things that audiences had never heard of before: Hackers. Artificial intelligence. Supercomputers. Firewalls. Backdoor passwords. War dialing. Defcon. And of course, an interesting simulation called Global Thermonuclear War.

When "WarGames" arrived during the height of the Cold War, it combined cutting edge computer technology with a modern military thriller. The concept was simple enough: a bright high school student accidentally accesses a military supercomputer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) and begins playing what he thinks is a game. Except it's not, and soon he discovers that the "game" he's playing may very well trigger World War III with the Soviet Union. Directed by John Badham ("Saturday Night Fever," "Blue Thunder") and starring Matthew Broderick as the iconic high school computer whiz David Lightman, "WarGames" became a sleeper hit and took American audiences, largely unfamiliar with computers and high-tech, by storm. Consider how Broderick's character had an IMSAI 8080 microcomputer that he connected to a modem via an acoustic coupler. "WarGames" was a blockbuster film about computers before the phenomenon of the personal computer, arriving before Apple's famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh.

Few movies have been as influential as "WarGames." The popular hacker conference Defcon was named after the movie's "DEFCON" system at NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). The terms "war dialing" and "war driving" are derived from "WarGames," specifically Lightman programming his computer to dial every number in Sunnyvale, Calif., in order to find what he thinks is a new computer game company (it's actually NORAD's computer system WOPR). The hacker magazine "2600" was launched the following year after the movie's release and was named in honor of the 2600-Hz tone used by famous hacker and phone phreaking pioneer John "Captain Crunch" Draper, who served as a technical advisor for "WarGames." In fact, screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes spoke with a number of hackers and security experts and would later write "Sneakers," another high-tech thriller released in 1992.

In addition to being a box office smash, grossing approximately $80 million in the summer of 1983, "WarGames" became instantly relevant like no other film at that time. "Wired" magazine referred to the movie as "Silicon Valley's 'Jaws'" in that it frightened the masses about the dangers of hackers and AI-controlled weapons. In fact, the movie immediately caught the attention of former President Ronald Reagan; reportedly, "WarGames" spooked some legislators in Washington, D.C., who began to wonder if something like the movie's plot could really happen. And in fact, later that year the infamous hacker group known as "the 414s" broke into several computer systems, including a U.S. Department of Defense computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (you know, where they perform top secret nuclear weapon research). The incidents led to Congress passing several anti-hacking laws.

But "WarGames" did more than scare the government and the computer illiterate masses. It also helped inspire a generation toward computer science, and 25 years later, the legacy of "WarGames" is still strong. Last year, British game developer Introversion released the "WarGames"-inspired strategy title DEFCON, which emulated the movie's NORAD missile strike sequences and "big board" maps. Last spring, Google held a special event in honor of the film's 25th anniversary.

"WarGames," quite simply, was a movie ahead of its time, combining several topical events into its narrative thread including the threat of nuclear war, the advance of modern computer technology and the popularity of video games. You may not have known about computer hacking before, but "WarGames" brought awareness of it to the forefront. Tom's Games looks back at the classic film and talks with director John Badham about making "WarGames" and just how close the movie is to reality. Brian "Jericho" Martin of Attrition.org, a well-known computer security reference site, also weighs in about the film's impact on a generation.

Artwork for the 1983 release of "WarGames."

TOM'S GAMES: Watching "WarGames" again, a question went through my mind: How likely was it that this could happen back then, and how likely is it that it could happen today?

JOHN BADHAM: I think it's probably a lot more difficult today. There's more of an era of trust about it. It was something everybody was excited about, how to start linking up computers. First you just had computers trying to do things by themselves. You sat there and fed information into them, now this computer could talk to that computer, and you had to figure out ways to do it, and it was pretty complicated. There was this whole atmosphere of trust and "We're working on this together." So the thought that someone might have stumbled in through some back door into the NORAD system is certainly a stretch, but not out of complete credibility. Nowadays, forget it. No way. Everything is separated, but this was before Al Gore invented the Internet. There are so many more safeties. Just witness how many times Microsoft wants to send security updates and completely screw up its Windows program! I just got it running right, and now you...damn! Screwed me again.

TG: Was "WarGames" inspired by any real life incidents?

BADHAM: There was a couple of incidents that inspired the story, but they were really taken to a new level by Walter Parkes and Larry Lasker, who had written the script. Larry's parents were friends of the Reagans. Larry and Walter were both Yale students, and they got to see NORAD system as VIPs through the Reagans. The thought occurred, "What if a kid could get in from home? What a mess he could create." They went off on that with brilliant research that explained what NORAD was really like, what all these war games were - which were these various scenarios the war department had been working on for decades - and how this would all play out. There's certainly a history of computer movies. Beyond "2001: A Space Odyssey," there's "Colossus: The Forbidden Project," these two giant computers battling one another for control of the world. It kind of comes out of some of that history. And here the idea was...which nobody understood at the time, Universal didn't understand it, they put the movie in turn-around. "A kid can do this? Oh, get out of here! We can't even boot up the computer. What are you talking about?"

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