WarGames

Trivia

• 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.
• In the Nintendo Entertainment System game ' (based on the television series of the same name), to win the game, the player must play tic-tac-toe against a supercomputer to demonstrate the futility of nuclear war, just as in the movie. In the game, the tic-tac-toe board is superimposed on a world map.
• The user account "Stephen Falken" was present by default for a long time in the operating system NetBSD, in homage to WarGames.
• Both NetBSD and OpenBSD have a "game" named wargames, which when run will prompt the user for if they wish to play a game, then will run the game selected or if an invalid selection will state: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
• In movie commentary, the main inspiration for the character of Stephen Falken was drawn from professor Stephen Hawking, hence the similar character name.
• The jeep crash outside NORAD was not supposed to take place, and was instead an actual crash. However, the crash was later believed to enhance the action element required in that part of the movie, so it stayed.
• In Lasker, Parkes, and John Badham's commentary on WarGames, they mention that the role of Stephen Falken was originally written as an acting vehicle for John Lennon.
• In order to maintain a neutral computer-like voice, Joshua's voice actor James Ackerman read his lines backwards.
• Contrary to some rumors, the hacker Kevin Mitnick was not an inspiration for the character David Lightman, according to screenwriter Lawrence Lasker, who hadn't even heard of him until a rather long time after the movie release.
• The arcade games played in the movie were Galaxian and Galaga.
• Known hardware used in David Lightman's room are: an IMSAI 8080 computer, an IMSAI IKB-1 keyboard, an IMSAI FDC-2 dual 8" floppy drive, a 17" Electrohome monitor, and a 1200 baud Cermetek 212A modem, relabelled "IMSAI".
• This movie carried the first reference to firewalls.