The year was 1983, a movie would come along that would start a small revolution among teenagers with a healthy interest for videogames. A young man would use his hacking and videogaming skills to stop the outbreak of World War 3. 

The movie was Wargames and the hacker would be Matthew Broderick in one of his first roles in the movie business. This flick has a very special place in my moviecollection since it was one of the reasons why i got interested in computers at a early age. I wasn't alone in having a dream of becoming the greatest hacker of all time, eventhough the most interesting part of hacking at the time was the ability to change ones highschool grades.

Let's look closer at this masterpiece.  Broderick playes David, a teen computer genious who uses his skills to, among other things, change his grades at school, book flighttickets (amazing at the time) and download illegal software. Everything was done over his superfast 1200baud modem.

After showing of some of he's computing moves to his soon to be girlfriend, Ally (played by Jennifer Katherine Mack), he suddenly manages to hook up to a yet unknown games server. He usually browses through the servers of different companies to find new games, on this server however he found names of games that were totally unknown to him. So he does the only logical thing to do, he starts a game on the list called Global Thermonuclear War.

He chooses to play as The Sovjet Union and finds himself intrigued by this somewhat sophisticated game. The bad news is that he's not playing a game at all, he's playing against NORADS (North American Aerospace Defense Command) mainframe called W.O.P.R (War Operation Plan Response). In reality he has hacked himself into their backdoor, and while he thinks he's playing a game, the mainframe thinks The Sovjet Union is getting ready to strike. The countdown to WW3 begins and US military soon shows up to track down David and stop him from making a huge mistake.

After becoming aware of what he and his soon to become girlfriend have done, they try to get a hold of the creator of W.O.P.R's Ai Joshua. The climax of the movie is when they all end up at NORAD's headquarter/mission cotroll and try to convince Joshua that The Sovjet hasn't launched their missiles and that it's all just a game. It turns out to be too late and NORADs missiles are automatically readied for launch. Can David with the help of Davids creator Stephen Falkin outwit americas most inteligent computer?

Wargames is a inteligent movie depicting some of the problems involving artificial inteligence in global warfare. When it comes to the technology used in the movie, one can't actually laugh at it, quite the contrary one gets more and more nostalgic looking at the hardware. The computers, modems, screens, drives with 8" disks, everything used in the movie were high-tech at the time. This was the start of the computer age, the movie didn't start it, but it was one of the first to show the capabilities while still keeping with reality. Other movies at the time often went overboard, sometimes to the extent that the viewer knew that the technology created wouldn't happen in the near future.

What i love about this movie is that it keeps a serious tone, it doesn't become silly (ok, the tic-tac-toe might be a little funny). The settings are also awesome, the studio built a massive set that would become the NORAD command center, it cost above $1.000.000 and gave a early indication to plasma/lcd-screens. Barry Corbin, who plays NORAD's General Jack Beringer, also delivered one of the famous lines in computer shutdown history:

"After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your system sucks"