If you *really* want to be scared, this same thing happened _multiple times_ in real life. In 1979, computer screens at NORAD started showing a massive Soviet nuclear attack on the West, which led to several minutes of intense actions (and panic) before separate, early warning radars confirmed that there had been no launch; it was eventually determined that a system test had inadvertently been displayed on the live screens, nearly causing World War 3. Then in 1983 (a little less than 4 months after WarGames was released and about 3 weeks after the Soviet shootdown of a Korean Airlines 747), a system error in a Soviet nuclear bunker started showing a US launch of 5 ICBMs toward the Soviet Union. In that instance, full scale nuclear war was possibly averted when the duty officer in charge, a Lieutenant Colonel named Stanislav Petrov, independently decided that it was a false alarm and declined to notify his superiors of the "attack". Petrov based his decision on the belief that if the United States were going to launch a first strike, it would not be limited to only 5 missiles. What's truly terrifying is that those two instances weren't even the closest we ever came to full scale nuclear warfare during the Cold War.
@@kgjung2310 Officially, he was reprimanded for not keeping accurate logs during the incident (as he described it, he had one hand on the phone and the other on an intercom the whole time, leaving him without a third hand to record the events). Nevertheless he served out the remainder of his time in the Soviet armed forces then went on to work at a (Soviet) research institute. In his later life, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he came to believe that he had been scapegoated by Soviet authorities over the system glitch which caused the incident.
This movie freaked out Ronald Regan when he saw it. He asked his chairman of the Joint Chiefs “could this really happen?” The general returned a week later, replying “Mr.President, the problem is much worse than you think.” Reagan's interest in the film is credited with leading to the enactment 18 months later of NSDD-145, the first Presidential directive on computer security.
That's the claim, though I find it hard to believe he didn't understand how devastating nuclear war would be given the briefings he would have been given. British Intelligence had briefed him on a Soviet double they had that the Soviets were convinced that the USA was about to attack in 1983. A long planned NATO wargame was cut back in scope because the Soviet leadership believed the exercise was a ruse to cover for a first strike. If it took Steve Guttenberg to convince him we all got really lucky making it to 1984.
@@stumpy2000 To be fair many people were freaked at the thought of nuclear war. Hell, it almost happened on a few occasions, so I'm ok with the president at the time being very worried.
As a bunch of others have said, this movie is actually frighteningly realistic for its time. You had a question about recording tones and opening the door, and yes, that would have been a thing. I actually had a cool little address/phone book device when I was younger that you could put up against a phone mouthpiece, and would play the tones to dial for you, preventing you from misdialing a number you weren't super familiar with, but had saved.
I used to sell those... I'd tell people that it was safer because you didn't have to touch all those disgusting dial pads, that people sneeze on, ever again! It worked! ;-]
I think the most unrealistic part about it was the public school actually having a system you could access via modem to edit records at that time. It did look like an upscale town, tho. Well, that and a computer system capable of launching nuclear weapons ever being made accessible via public network.
Wow. The two of you nailed the premise before it even started. Well done. I was around 8 when this movie came out and I grew up watching it often. My appreciation for it has only grown over the years. There are no shootouts. No car chases. No explosions. All of the action (aside from an accidental car crash through the fence that they left in the movie) is on computer screens. And they writers actually thought out reasonable obstacles for the teams to overcome. "Can't we pull the power?" Well... "The silos would consider that to be the destruction of Norad and follow through with their last received commands." That's great writing. I wish that more movies would think through problems like that.
One of the cool things in this movie is that, normally in movies with the military, it's the military commanders that want to start a war. In this one, the General is the voice of reason, willing to listen.
This was well before the kind of slavering worship that techbros have become accustommed to. Guys who touted computers as the answer to everything were viewed with varying degrees of suspicion mixed with ridicule.
A Hollywood movie (US military approved with full editorial control) was never going to show the truth of nuclear war like a film such as Doctor Strangelove , Threads (BBC) or When the Wind Blows does. Okay for fun but they need to watch none mainstream content to get a proper picture of the war-economy we live in today. There's an obvious reason why they weren't aware of this film - their government doesn't like us to question their motives, certainly not their profit motives at least. I think they're okay with the genocide getting shown (look at all the Iraq war movie propaganda from Hollywood), just not the war for profit set up we have now.
The writers of Wargames went on to write Sneakers (1992) which is similarly hackery-computery. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Hackers (1995) which is about as far away from realistic as you could ever imagine but well, it has its charms.
Sneakers is fantastic. One of the best overall illustrations of hacking culture and the evolution of hackers/crackers into security professionals. Hackers is better than its reputation suggests. Most of the computer dialog is reasonably accurate (if out of date at the time of release) in Hackers, but they made an art direction choice to make everything look more like something out of Neuromancer than what it would have actually been at the time. It is a weird pastiche that turns into into a vaguely cyberpunk version of the 90's.
Hackers is a bizarre mix of somewhat realistic things (social hacking with the tv station security guard, shoulder surfing, the fact that the competition was essentially them using passwords for shit they had broken into previously, phreaking) and the dumbest shit imaginable (the way they dressed and anything to do with the Gibson).
@@aimmethodthose dummies don't realize that they are playing the game. They just don't realize that they are playing the same game of slow, genetic dead end that their counterparts are playing.
Yeah, but at the time Dabney Coleman was pretty typecast as a duplicitous worm kind of character. So when audiences saw his face pop up they likely immediately saw him as an antagonist.
@@tchoupitoulos... and he wasn't much of one. The General was also an famous jerk character as well. It's funny to realize that, within a few years, Matthew Brod would still be using modems to hack into school computers and take an infamous day off.
@@DocMicrowave Uh... the film came long after this was a tradition. TRS80 was 1977, and before that, the Commodores were ?? 1975-76. School systems started opening their mainframes to Commodores as terminals, then TRS-80s kinda broke on their own. The AppleII's offered an identity handshake so using those meant someone could trace the phone-number - which by then was installed on mainframe access. Or rather the interface now demanded some more-than-terminal-ID. Of course, this was being done on mainframes in the 1960s (before my programming days) as the insertion of a COM port (SERIAL) allowed workers greater distance access. I'd be computer hacks that allowed modifications were operating in the early '60s. Question: in the Tom Hanks film APOLLO 13, did you ever see dumb terminals in difference NASA buildings? If so, then they were COM port connected and thus 'outside access' would have been allowed. I don't remember. I should note that early school systems rented computer time into the '70s since mainframes were prohibitively expensive in both hardware, canned software and personnel. "Outside access" via dumb terminals from a mainframe to 'clients' (renters) had to occur so that was deep into 1950s and early '60s when IBM, Sperry, Univac, all of those were selling one mainframe and that company 'time-shared it out' to renters. ie, hacker potentials.
I wish they never stopped making movies like this. Simple premise. No hamfisted romance, realistic setting and details... The tech is dated but the movie STILL HOLDS UP. It's timeless.
Other than the intelligent machine part, everything else is very realistic. Also, this movie, for its time, had a booming low-end sound effect for the virtual missile strikes. In the theater, it was something.
Just to add on... everything was realistic except for the computer voice which was more a device for the movie. There's also no way he could afford all that equipment in his room. 😀
@@dlrhas21 It sounded like a typical voice synthesizer of the time, e.g. Intellivision, it's just that nobody ever used them for the purpose shown in the movie. It did allow Joshua to be more of a "character" though.
The device that he puts the phone on is called a modem. At the time of this movie 300 baud would be considered pretty standard. How fast was that? Due to the vagueries of the technology used at the time it's a little unclear how to translate that into modern data rates, but it's probably no more than 1000 bits per second. I believe that text to voice systems did exist at that time, but they weren't likely to be within reach of a high school kid and they didn't sound near as good as the one in the movie.
My favorite little bits of business in the film: The dad buttering his corn, McKittrick's assistant popping his gum into her mouth (not in the script), the news report of the prophylactic recycling center fire, Ally Sheedy playfully trapping Matthew Broderick between her legs in his bedroom (also unscripted), General Beringer's use of chewing tobacco and his "piss on a spark plug" line (again, improvised), and Dr. Falken's condescending first line upon seeing McKittrick: "Hello, John. I see your wife still picks out your ties." Brilliant.
The dad was an uncle of a friend of mine. Apparently the line "This corn is raw!" was not in the script. The actor was surprised because the "prop corn" they were eating was actually uncooked. They kept the line.
Those are good bits from the movie. I like all those smaller bits, outside the main plot, that make this film even more enjoyable. My other favorite line: "Put X in the center square!" :-)
30:57 It's likely that you just didn't recognize the references to this movie throughout pop culture. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Natasha says the line "Shall we play a game?" and Steve mentions that he has seen the film.
The brilliance of 80’s movies is a movie like this was essentially made for kids. But they weren’t dumbed down as they had a good story and message too. I watched this a zillion times on cable in the 80’s. The irony is we lived in fear everyday of nuclear war even though the point of the movie is nobody wins. They just don’t make movies like this anymore.
This wasn't specifically for kids, it's for a wider audience. There are plenty of dumb 80s kids movies like Mac and Me, Masters of the Universe, The Wizard, Howard the Duck, Garbage Pail Kids, etc...
It's a great movie, don't get me wrong. But the "message", such as it is, is kind of naive, or maybe Pollyanna is a better description. Wars, even nuclear wars, *can* be won. Tic-tac-toe and chess games are won and lost all the time, mainly because of human error. And even with machine learning, they're at the mercy of the programming by humans (Not to mention the graft of defense contractors providing substandard equipment, which would render estimations useless). It's all about where one sets the bar for acceptable loss.
‘Nobody wins” That is precisely why ‘M.A.D.” (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked as a Nuclear deterrent. When both sides have equal power to absolutely and totally obliterate each other, only a Mad-Man would ever resort to using Nukes at all. It relied upon the Moral conscience of everyone in command of Both Nation’s military leadership to understand that regardless of who launches first, neither side would survive, let alone ‘win”. Pretty good incentive to never push the Big Red Button.
George and Simone- I’m 57 and can vouch for this being relatively realistic in terms of the tech- that’s what screens looked like, what dialup sounded like, what interfaces looked like before windows - I am not a hacker but learned Fortran etc at age 11 in 1977 and was programming simple games on my Atari 800 home PC in 1983 and loading games from a cassette tape drive etc would be very slow so it would take forever for a home computer to dial all those numbers and his parents would have gotten a phone bill with 1000s of calls each month and caught him
The year this came out I worked with an office computer for the first time. I agree that all the tech was in common usage at the time. I find it funny to watch younger people look at things like this and be completely confused. It all seems so connected to me that I can't understand why it's so hard to extrapolate backwards.
Same age bracket here (53) but I grew up with an older brother who owned a VC-20 back then (very early 80's), then he switched up to a C-64, so I grew up with computers from my little ol' me in my life. He even wrote a copy protection based on sound for his datasette that required blaring the sounds made from the tape at insanely loud levels via a stereo, then inserting certain correction data into the sounds. This was before the first C-64 floppy drive when the humble cassette tape was the storage medium of choice. Yepp, this was high-end PC stuff back then, someone who was REALLY into it and willing to shell out quite some moolah for it for private use. So I was 'corrupted' by Basic back then. Any coder knows once you've been corrupted by Basic you can't go back. 😁
It's also fun to think that a tiny number of years before it would not have been possible to war dial. You had to manually dial a number, and set all the info for how the computers where to talk to each other, then place the phone into the cradle, so they can talk to each other. Early modems could not detect the data rate, and negotiate the proper connection, you had to know what the other end could do, and set yours to talk to it. I had no idea this was the case myself until watching recent vids on the subject, though I kind of had seen some stuff about the couplers at the time I became aware of modems.
Fun fact: at the time this movie was made, NORAD looked _nothing_ like that. (It probably still doesn't.) Their equivalent of that big flashy multi-level command center was a room with a whole lot of telephones in it. In fact, a representative of NORAD said they were all jealous of that set, and wished the government would shell out to get _them_ a cool screen-covered cavern with dramatic lighting.
Using tape recorders to capture and replay signals is/was a thing. In fact Clifford Stoll used tape recorders to capture modem traffic when tracking down a spy. I strongly recommend his book The Cuckoo's Egg.
I love this movie's ending, with the computer realizing that war is a zero-sum game. A war thriller aimed at teens that's secretly and anti-war film where not a single person dies. A rare thing cinematically.
The two officers in the opening scene (in the missle silo) were a very young Michael Madsen (who you may recognize from his role as Mr Blonde in "Reservoir Dogs" ) and John Spence (who was in "The Rock" and played Leo in the acclaimed series, "The West Wing") The tech and hacks that were used in this film were VERY real and accurate at the time (although how a high school kid managed to acquire so much gear in his bedroom is a bit of a stretch) ... however, most of those life-hack "cheats" (playing the tones to hack an electronic lock... hot-wiring a pay phone... etc) have since been removed from society I would also like to jump on the bandwagon & recommend watching "Sneakers"
I saw this in the theater when it first came out and I can tell you, this was the height of technology at the time, and the thing you set the phone on is a modem. This movie blew me away as a youngster and I cannot tell you how amazing and exciting the ending part was in a packed theater with the giant screen.
Actually it was the acoustic coupler that connected the modem to the phone line(though some had built in modems)... I remember that the acoustic couplers got harder and harder to use as phones started to come out with different shape handsets, and they started making them with different shaped cushions to go accommodate the handsets. The advent of the standard modular plug spelled the beginning of the end of the need for acoustic couplers... I cannot remember if I ever had an acoustic coupler back then, though I do remember using one at least once. I also seem to remember that i got one a long time after they were useful, and people were basically giving them away... I do not remember how fast a connection you could make with one, but I suspect that they would not have done well above about 1200 baud or so(maybe 2400 baud) but certainly not the later 56,000 baud would not have worked because of the way the microphones and speakers were made in the old phones. They were made to pick up and play the frequencies of the human voice and not very high and low frequencies. This made it a lot easier to understand someone on the other end. Ironically, the later MUCH cheaper phones probably would have worked better due to them having the MUCH cheaper full spectrum microphones and speakers.
If you loved this movie and want something similar from the same writing team, Sneakers is an amazing look at hacking with social engineering at the forefront.
YES! Sneakers is amazing. I love movies that engage with the ethics of how computer systems get used. And it’s surprisingly funny for a movie that’s so thrilling.
My dad was a Missile Commander during the cold war. When his rotation came up for silo duty, we would go to the base armory to check out a sidearm. When we watched this movie when it came out originally, he said that aspect of it was relatively accurate. If a partner refuses to turn their key, the gun comes out.
I always wondered about that. I mean, killing the other guy would accomplish nothing, a single person could not launch. I always thought the guns were for if you HAD launched the missiles and did not want to live through the aftermath.
This is one of the most realistic computer movies ever made. The tone capture thing was from 1970's era touch tone phones which used a scheme called DTMF or "Dual Tone Multi-Frequency." Basically when you pressed a key, two of eight possible tones were played. The device receiving this signal decoded it and decided what to do; usually call a phone number but sometimes other things. It was very common in the early 1980's. If you have a modern era landline phone it's very likely that a touch tone phone from 1977 will still work with it. Also, I highly recommend Brainstorm, probably the most accurate portrayal of how scientists work that has ever been made.
Most modern cable to landline modems accept both DTMF and pulse dialing. The modem encodes the number digitally to place the call. But you should be able to connect a dial or touch tone telephone of any era to one.
I saw on a movie once, I don't remember what it was, the plot, or anything, something hacked a call on a rotary phone. I was in my middle teens, so of course, I wanted to try it. I removed the mouthpiece cover, and tapped the connection with a coin, imitating the clicks you hear when rotary dialing. I didn't count the clicks, I just tapped groups of random fast clicks until I hear the ringing. Yes, it worked, but I have no idea who I called, because whoever answered didn't speak English! I hung up immediately, and never tried it again. Geez, the glory of being teenagers is seldom understood until we get old. 😊
Part of the reason why this movie is so beloved by computer geeks is that with some caveats, it was VERY realistic for the time. The exploits David used were widely known in the phreaking community.
LOVE this movie! My brother was WAY into computers, but unlike David's character was an overachiever and went to Williams as a math and computer science major at age 16. He was able to make free long distance calls via his computer as well and almost got my mom in trouble because she worked for the government. When this movie was on TV he used a tape recorder to record the audio and listened to it all the time. When I was 9 and we got a VCR we rented it and I actually got to put faces with the audio. Top ten movie for me! He passed away due to schizophrenia when he was 21 but this movie always makes me think of him. 😊 That was a REALLY old fashioned modem his phone handset was sitting on. My brother used a modem that was like a video game cartridge that plugged into his Commodore 64!
Finding a grey hair on my balls, or meeting a high school classmates 15 year old kid used to make me feel old. Watching reactors struggle with 80s tech can now be added to that list...thanks a lot youngsters.
I received a telephone touch tone generator used to store numbers manually and then one press of the button assigned to a specific numbers would play back the tones. Holding this up to the mouth piece of a phone handset with a dial tone would signal that number for connection instead of manually having to dial that number each time. It was basically a mobile version of those home phones with frequently used numbers the user entered - 10 save slots/buttons iirc. Tech created for a very specific time which remains useful although horribly antiquated.
The finale sequence with WOPR is still one of the best moments in film. "The only winning move is not to play." Still one of the best quotes in film. A strong lesson in the futility of nuclear war.
Alas, none of today's leaders , especially in teh West, seem to have learned it. NATO seems determined to out-escalate Putin in Ukraine. All our aid to that already beaten nation just continues their suffering and slaughter. Meanwhile, in heightened tensions a flock of geese on the radar screen could be mistaken for missiles, and...This has absolutely happened before, more than once, and only luck has allowed us to be here today.
On Matthew Broderick's character using a tape recorder to hack the door, that's actually how keypads usually worked back then, same as the phones of the day. The system didn't read the number you entered, but the sound you got when hitting the keys. That's why every key you hit had a different tone. If you think about it, having the keys each sound different would otherwise be a stupid security issue. Anyone listening who knows the tones could tell what code you entered. They only had those different tones because it was actually the tones that drove the system.
This is how you write a high-stakes movie. You guys called most of the major plot points well in advance, but the stakes are so high and the small beats so perfectly placed and built that the tension by the end is nail-biting even though you’re 95% sure of what’s going to happen. I was a kid in the 80s, and the end of this movie still gives me chills. We came so close.
At the time the common definition of a computer nerd is someone with a $3,000 computer and a $300 car. In the early '80s a $300 car was a car that was only one step up from one that just could start and go down the road. They usually only lasted about a year, or two if you were lucky, at which time you just bought another $300 car. $300 was 3 weeks take home pay for a minimum wage full time job.
Well, it IS a late-70s kit-build computer. And Apple ][, Vic-20, Atari 400 all existed at the time as well. That video terminal very possibly cost more than the computer itself. Otherwise it has to be programmed from the switches on front and the output read via blinking lights, or a teletype machine or line printer. The speech module would also cost a pretty penny. (Quite possibly even built from a kit)
@@sophiamarchildon3998She got a car, I got a computer. How’s that for being born under a bad sign? Amazing that those were close to the same cost. That’s why I’m an idiot today with a love for cars.
Not true. They idea was David was using out of date gear for the time of the movie. He wasn't rich, just a nerd with a passion. His means were about scaveging for his set up. He would have gotten the gear second hand, maybe from tech friends like Jim and Malvin getting rid of stuff, and even from dumpster diving. The director and or producer were talking about it in a documentary I watched just a month or so ago. The video surely is still here on TH-cam.
The IMSAI 8080 came out in 1975. The movie takes place in 1982. He's connected to the machine via terminal. The old S-100 bus system probably was chosen because of all the toggle switches. Also by 1982 there were more modern modems. The use of a phone coupler interface was to explain to viewers how a computer could connect to a phone. The idea of a box directly connected to a phone line would be harder to explain. All the scenes where David is typing on the computer were all pre-arranged programs simulating key inputs. All Broderick had to do was press random keys and each time a he pressed a key, a character was displayed. The voice of WOPR/ Joshua was performed by the actor who played Dr Falken.
This is one of my all time favorites. I've always felt that Ally Sheedy's Jennifer is one of the best, true to life teenagers I've seen on screen, both in character and performance. The scene where she convinces Falken to help, not with a big dramatic speech, but simply by saying "I'm only seventeen years old. I'm not ready to die yet." I also just recently learned that the part of Stephen Falken (a not so subtle take off on Stephen Hawking) was originally offered to John Lennon. He was interested but tragedy kept it from happening.
The 'is this because of what you did with my grade' line is unforgivable on the part of the writers though, especially considering they'd already had a conversation following the news report which showed she understood perfectly well what was going on.
When that lady said, "He's got the code, he's gonna launch." Gets me still to this day. You gotta realize that for us folks who lived thru this era, this was a very poinient movie for its time. Cold War drama was always scary shit.
80s movies often had a way of couching very serious moral and existential dilemmas within these charming story lines. This is a prime example. Nerdy high school kid wants to play a game and ends up almost causing WWIII If you want another great tech-nerdy 80s film watch Real Genius. It’s more of a comedy but like War Games it has real stakes.
Real Genius is one of my favorite 80s movie. I once used a bunch of scientific dictionaries to work out the technical description of the new laser and it actually makes sense.
When I was younger I ended a university exam by leaving an apple on the professor's desk with a note that said "I aced this" in direct homage to Real Genius. Love, love, love the movie.
@8:38 It's a acoustic coupler for the modem (MOdulator/DEModulaor ). It was against AT&T's policy at the time to hook up third party/non-authorized equipment to the lines. Sitting the handset in a cradle was a work-around. Eventually you could just plug the modem directly to the phone line, but that was later.
My school used a coupler to access a computer in my student days. One week we had a teletype with no “break” key. I learned to whistle the right pitch into the phone to induce a break - was actually called out of class once to do that.
My daughter has been sitting in a MinuteMan III silo for the past 3 years after graduating from the Air Force Academy. She loved it but got promoted and is going to Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AFB) in Greenland to watch weather radar. She said the alerts were tedious, but drills were terrifying. Funnily enough, I was stationed at Thule AFB to watch ICBM radar as punishment in the late 70's after duking it out with a 2 Lt in a softball game. Fun times!
It’s called a dial up modem and yes, that’s how it used to work. I would say the most unbelievable part of the movie is how fast his computer runs. Nothing runs fast through a dial up connection.
For another good film showcasing that era of technology, you (George and Simone) should watch Sneakers (1992) with Robert Redford, Sydney Poitier, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell and Ben Kingsley.
@@treetopjones737 I remember. Where I learned how to program as a child. I had 1h per day access to a BBS that had a game that would take 59 min to download from, so had to script the login, search and dl to have it finish before disconnect.
Only starting the watch so likely will add more as you question more, but as a computer kid of the 80s whi also loves this movie I should be able to provide info. 1. The thing the phone went on is an acoustic couple, essentially a 300 bps modem and the first way home users could connect to the "internet" which was pretty much just knowing the phone number of a BBS and using a coupler to connect to one. 2. The recording the beeps thing worked on payphones back in the day (called phreaking) since the sound of coins entering gave different tones but it wouldn't have worked on the door keypad since it's just not tone-based 3. There is a 100% win-rate tactic for tic-tac-toe....at least until your opponent learns the one move to block it
Another good 80s film by the director John Badham is Blue Thunder. It looks at first glance of the cover to be a dumb 80s action film but is actually a pretty grounded thriller with really good characters and a has a similar vibe the this movie.
Yes! Blue Thunder had more to do with privacy - and the loss of it. Funny thing is, these days, people are more than willing to put their entire lives online.
A movie that not a lot of folks have seen, but is actually extremely good, featuring a very smart kid and the dangers of messing with things you don't fully understand is the 1986 film "The Manhattan Project."
trivia: they created the computer voice by recording the actor who plays Dr Falken speak the lines in reverse order. So "Shall we play a game?" was recorded as "Game? a play we shall" and then putting the words back into the correct order so the lines would have unnatural intonation.
This movie REALLY appealed to me when it came out. I was a young computer nerd to be with a VIC-20, later to be replaced by a C64, and this film was SO cool (even though the grown up me can’t understand why I felt it was cool as opposed to being scary)
Yes, the computer tech is accurate for the time period. If you enjoyed this movie and want something where it WASN'T a simulation, you should add "By dawn's early light" to your list. Amazingly tense suspence movie.
I found By Dawn's Early Light on Amazon Prime Video and was surprised & disappointed to find it was in 4:3. I had totally forgotten it was an HBO movie and not a theatrical release.
@@Johnny_Socko I don't think they'd have got away with a theatrical release at the time. It's surprising because there's quite a lot of names and star power in the movie itself.
Growing up, I think the brilliance of this movie was that it made it digestible for my young mind, through Matthew Brodrick's character, to understand that the world could just end and that we were not in control of things. It also helped me understand what a precarious situation a nuclear standoff was. Obviously there were more mature movies on this topic but I think was really well done for what it is. I love this picture.
Great job guys. My dad wo4ked for NCR from 1964 till 2010. He taught me a lot about computers and I got my first home computer in 1981. All the tech in this is correct, I asked my dad if this could have happened, he said yes.
George the problem with being beholden to your conscience in that situation is that if there was an attack - there was no time for the people in the silos to get more information in that scenario. As they mentioned in the next scene, a sub launched missile could take out Washington in less than 10 minutes. What helps the people in the silos is that the missiles have what are called PALs (Permissive Action Link) so that even if they do "accidentally" launch a missile - it will either splash down in the ocean, or the warhead won't detonate, or both - unless the missile was launched with a valid code from the President of the United States. It helps take the burden off the men and women on the front line because it eliminates the risk of error and it isn't their decision that causes the weapon to detonate. That being said - I get it. I'm not sure I could turn that key in that scenario either. The people that do have psychological evaluations prior to being put in the silos to see if they are mentally capable of doing it. And the door thing might have worked depending on the system. If it worked based on touch tones, it would have.
I'm not sure you could ever sleep well again if you knew how many times a real nuclear launch was prevented because one person made a judgement call that the signal of incoming missiles was false. In effect, the crisis in the first scene happened. Many times.
well, according to some sources for quite a few years in the 1960s/70s all Minuteman nuclear missiles had the same activation code: 00000000 if this is true, the military could truthfully say "we have safeguard systems installed" - while at the same time not having an "unnecessary delay" in case of a real attack.
@@Engy_Wuck Sorry - I don't buy that at all. The codes are Alpha-numeric, and if it was simply 00000000 they wouldn't need a guy following the President around with "the football" with the codes. Secondly - ONE guy claimed that, and it was officially denied by the Air Force a few years ago who said that code was NEVER used.
My late brother was a Missile Launch Command Officer, one of those guys underground and with a hand on the key... it's pretty spot on, including the side arms they both carry to use on the other if needed. Also, the basic "computer almost starts a war" plot is real. Early on they ran tests, basically on a system that wasn't isolated, and a programming error almost caused a war during a test. Yes, they developed redundant systems that were off line, for testing/development.
One of the writers of WarGames also wrote Project X (1987), another great Matthew Broderick movie. I think Simone would love that one, it has some military similarities and it makes me a bit tearful when I watch it.
“Sneakers” was the next movie by this writing team, different director though. Not as well remembered as War Games, but also one of my favorite light techno-thrillers. Amazing cast as well.
I feel like this could also be a good answer to, 'Why are Gen X so nihilistic and cynical about everything?' When there's a pretty big part of you that's convinced the world is going to be destroyed, in your formative years, it's gotta have an effect.
I can vividly remember my dad telling me we'd be the lucky ones as we lived close to a primary target; one flash of light and it'd be over before you knew what was happening. It's the people further away to feel sorry for.
@@Dunkelzahn2057 Except... I think it's foolish and arrogant to believe Gen X are the ONLY gen to have gone thru that. Again, since 1945, everyone's aware of nukes. Look at 1959's ON THE BEACH (Gregory Peck)... the early ' 60s films FAILSAFE with the agreed-upon payback annihilation of NYC... DR STRANGELOVE and many others written thru the '50s. Those thoughts didn't form in a void. The pretense that one generation 'owns' the only concept of a bad future is arrogant AND stupid. Also, read up on the mania that actually DID occur in 1962's buildup to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
With the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war looming over us, to me, this was a very real movie. And while fun, it was very nerve-wracking watching it for the first time (I was like 13 or so when I saw it for the first time). The Day After came a few years later, but was a TV movie about nuclear war that has haunted my nightmares for decades. Definitely worth a watch.
I also have to recommend Sneakers. One of my all-time favorite movies with an all-star cast: Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, etc. Another great film starring Dabney Coleman is "Cloak and Dagger". It's of the same timeframe as War Games and similar in tone. An excellent spy thriller.
@@me109aaProbably not Sidney Poitier either, 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was a late 60's movie. Still, they might have and both of them were exceedingly good actors so I'd thought to include them.
There is an “experience” with this film that has to be seen in the theatre. It starts with the “tic-tac-toe” sequence near the end and the WOPR running all the stalemate solutions. In the theater watching the film, the crowd got deathly quiet as all these flashing lights, colors and apprehension just flooded the room and then..total darkness. It really built up to that ending. Watch it on a big screen TV in a pitch black room and you get a sense of it.
The scene at the end when Joshua is running through the war simulations at high speed with all the flashing etc. was really cool to see in theaters. Also, after seeing the corn buttering strategy in this film my whole family tried it out the next time we had corn lol
So hyped to watch this. Take away the obvious fiction, this movie captures my younger years so well: Phone number range scans, dot matrix printouts of "need to investigate further", figured out how to manipulate grades in my school's computerized system, parents being completely clueless of my hobby, phreaking, BBS cultures, .. Such good times! I legitimately get nostalgic watching WarGames.
In the opening scene, it was a simulation launch. The missile commanders were not told that it was a simulation, to see if they could actually be trusted to carry out the duties for which they've been trained and assigned (expensively). Being an unannounced simulation, 22% did not turn their keys ..... However, the other 78% DID turn their keys, yet no launches actually occurred. The cradle thingy that he sets the phone receiver into is a modem. It allows the computer to hear the dial tones/pulses coming from the external computer it is logged into.
This film is a really underrated classic. People always focus on the computer technology being 'dated' without realizing how timeless are the themes and everything else.
Missile bunker command protocols back then were clear regarding refusal to turn the key at the appointed time. The launch officers were armed for a reason. If it came down to it and you refused to turn the key, the other launch officer was authorized to use deadly force to either convince you or make you pay the ultimate price for dereliction of duty in a time of war. To this day, officers and NCOs at just about every level are authorized to shoot and kill troops who disobey orders during war. It doesn't happen because of the professionalism of those serving in our military, but it CAN happen, and they know it. The "contraption" he set the phone on was a very, very early modem. Instead of just attaching the phone line, it required the actual receiver to be attached to transfer the audible handshake protocol.
I absolutely loved this movie as a kid. I’m impressed at how many lines you predicted before they happened. Yes, in the ‘80s, this is how we computer geeks communicated. That wasn’t quite the sound that the computer modem made, though. And the “acoustic coupler” (putting the handset in a speaker/mic device) was becoming outdated in 1984 - I used “direct connect” modem where the phone line plugged right into the modem. (And speeds were not nearly as fast as they would need to be for the graphics in this movie!).
This movie had a huge role in the book for Ready Player One. The main character had to play as the role as Matthew Broderick in VR to get to the first key.
"Tron" was a wonderful and silly film, but one thing about it grows more alarmingly familiar by the day - the MCP. That thing was scary, and I don't see anyone making any effort to prevent it actually coming into existence in some way.
Loved your reaction! :) The contraption that David puts the phone on is an 'acoustic coupler modem', which was kinda out of the date by the time the movie came out, but the production team thought people would be more familiar with it. It was essentially just an older style of modem that connects directly to the phone via the receiver's speaker and microphone instead of being a self-contained unit. :)
I love John Badham's direction. He directed a lot of TV series in the 70s and graduated to movies in the 80s Short Circuit and Bird on a Wire were also big hits.
This movie literally changed my life back in 1983, I was 15 at the time. I saw WarGames 3 times in one week at the local theater here in southern Finland, and nagged mom and dad to buy me a computer. A month later they gave in and bought me a Commodore 64, on which I learned to code (BASIC and assembler), played games and whatnot. This became my main hobby for years (before computers it was mostly mopeds and such). I studied computer sciences in school, and eventually started working in IT nine years later in 1992. I am still doing that. Not sure if I made the right choice, but here we are.
Love this movie, thanks for a great reaction. This was Matthew Broderick's second movie. The same year this came out, 1983, he won his first Tony Award. He was 20.
Something I noticed about that first scene -- Michael Madsen's character is holding the gun and there's a click. I think he DID pull the trigger and they'd unloaded the gun due to there being a full-mission-profile drill on. Also, honestly? I think that since it's an audio lock it's entirely possible that David's trick with the door would work. WIL WHEATON built a device from a hacker's magazine to make free public phone calls using stuff at Radio Shack and claimed about 7 years ago that he used it from "1989, to just before whenever the statute of limitations would expire by now".
A predecessor to this movie with a similar plot but far more serious/less cartoony presentation is: COLOSSUS the Forbin Project. The movie is hard to find but, you should find and watch it. ALSO: Please watch FAIL SAFE which stars Jane's dad Henry Fonda, whom I think you met in 12 Angry Men, as the U.S. President dealing with issues around nukes. For nukes of another kind, Please watch The China Syndrome staring Henry's daughter Jane Fonda and Kirk's son Michael Douglas as well as Jack Lemon and Wilford Brimley, whom you may know from The Firm and his mirroring role as the Postmaster General in a Seinfeld episode.
The scariest part of this film is that it was inspired by an actual event. In the early 80's a computer technician at NORAD fed a simulation into the operation system and basically the same thing happened in real life as what went down in the film. Minus the flimsy "AI" part.
This movie helped inspire my interest in computers. Now I have a Systems Engineer for the DoD. The 1980's was full of movies about the cold war and intelligent under-achieving teenagers. Another one that comes to mind is The Manhattan Project (1986) with John Lithgow, about a kid who builds an atomic bomb as his National Science Fair project.
I was trying to remember the name of that one. If no one mentioned it I was going to look through Lithgow 's IMDb. It's not as good as War Games but still a great movie from that period.
In 1964 there was a research project (The Nth Country Project) to see if a physics grad with no access to secret information and who had never worked in the field could design and build a functional nuclear device. Two years later the pair of researchers handed in their project, which could be built in any decent machine shop, and would have had a yield of about 15MT, assuming they could have found the fissionable material (the refining of which is still a problem for certain nation states today).
So happy you all watched this. You're probably getting a lot of answers in the comments, but there is a full-length "making of" documentary on TH-cam that gives extensive background into the film, and the history surrounding it.
That dialing in computing was real. Before the internet as we know it we used to have these things called BBS's they looked like what he gets into. You would dial up a BBS and play some games on it for a limited series of turns for the day, then disconnect so others could call in and play their turns. That was the gaming part of it anyway. Dialing into work like he did the school was legitimate back then and even today it's still seen as kind of a secure way to remotely administer something.
In the military, or at least the Army when I was in, you absolutely had the right/duty to question or disobey an unlawful order. "Just following orders" is not an acceptable excuse with a court martial/military tribunal. 8:41 "I need to know what that contraption is he sets the phone on." ITS A MODEM! Damn, I'm old. The ending calls to mind: "War. War never changes."
They watched A Few Good Men about a year ago and that was one of the important points in the movie - Lt. Weinberg alludes to the Nuremberg Trial and says that the defense of "Just following orders" won't hold up in court and although the two on trial weren't found guilty of murder, they were still dishonorably discharged for conduct unbecoming an officer, because although they were following an order, it was still an unlawful one that resulted in the death of a cadet and they were wrong for carrying it out.
Hey, guys! Great pick for a reaction. This is an unheralded classic. Remember, this movie came out at the height of the Cold War. We had nuclear bomb drills at my high school. There was a whole day devoted to Nuclear Awareness. So if you can imagine that context and mindset when you watched it, it hits even HARDER. Hope you've been well!
There's a cool moment of foreshadowing in the beginning. When one of the operators gets that faulty red light on the console, the more experienced operator casually tells him to thump it with his finger to fix it. As a human being, he has the common sense to tell the difference between a real signal and a glitch. That inability to tell the difference becomes the main problem for the rest of the film.
Yes, as others have said, the computer technology shown here is largely spot on for the time. I used an acoustic modem (that device into which the phone headset was plugged in) when using a "portable" terminal to our campus mainframe when I was a graduate student in 1981. Most people in the computer lab used teletype machines to communicate with the mainframe but there were a few CRT monitor display systems available like the one David used in the movie.
Y’all were the perfect audience for this! Interesting insight that everything that went wrong was due to human error. But as you said, the main message is to not go to war. When I saw this as a kid after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I just saw it as a neat movie. But I rewatched it at the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, and the scene with all the nuclear launches flashing on screen actually made me cry. Cold War fears not completely gone.
YES that's how computers worked. The device that receives the phone handset is a MODEM (MODULATOR/DEMODULATOR). A regular phone call was made to a second computer and digital data was converted to audio tones. The sounds you hear at the start are the two computers negotiating protocols and transmission speeds.
Well, the device with the two cups that accepted the handset of the phone was the acoustic coupler. In this movie, the modem would be incorporated in the base of the coupler, but a few years before this, the modem and the coupler would have been separate boxes of hardware. And then about the time this movie came out, modems were designed to not include the coupler part and the modem, which had an interface with the computer, would just plug directly into the phone line.
8:45 The thing he's setting the phone receiver on is a VERY old school modem. It functioned by sending and receiving sounds through the phone itself. People would have to dial by phone to connect directly to a specific server. That's why he was getting different phone numbers.
I love this movie as it brings back such fond memories! I was a kid and went to high school in the 80s, and I had started learning computers around the age of 11 or 12 (what fun programming in BASIC and Assembly on TRS-80s, Vic 20s, and C64s!) my first modem I got was 300 baud, and I was blown away that through a phone you could connect to other computers. Most people didn’t know the first thing about computers so you had to find your small community of computer nerds to belong with. The first software I bought came in a plastic baggy with a xeroxed manual and used a dataset (a cassette tape), and most software I had was hand typed by me copying printouts of source code in the few computer magazines there were. Later when BBS came along it was so cool! It felt like a VERY early internet in a way, only there were very few people, but you could chat on some with others logged in, swap files with each other, and play primitive door games. For the most part, Wargames does capture the feel of computing in those days, and there was something special about it because so few people did it. The slowly character at a time print out on the screen that is still even mimicked in some films today, came from the modems being so slow you could litterally see letter after letter displayed. The other part of the movie that captures things so well, is the threat of nuclear war; the cold war was our version of climate change and was scary as hell. In 1983 the TV movie “The Day After” came out, and I think it is still the world’s most viewed TV movie. I remember us talking in classes at school about it. In 1984 “Threads” a similar movie came out. I had nightmares for real about nuclear war, and it always seemed it could come at any time.
It's easy to be beholden to your conscience in times like today, but this movie was the height of the Cold War. The idea of there being one button you could press that would destroy the world, and the threat of global destruction, was very real at the time.
The disturbing thing about this movie is how much of it is totally plausible and real. Even the Joshua AI which was pretty far off when the movie came out is frighteningly close now.
I’d say the movie is very much portraying the top brass’ criticism and anger toward the logically-thinking key-holders as THE problem. Also, computer hobbyists back then WERE essentially electrical engineers. The trick with the dial tones is because dial tones are just the amplified sound of a certain frequency. Back in the day, the sound of the numbers being pressed wasn’t just a haptic sound, but rather a speaker projecting the sound of the actual electrical impulses that comprise a “phone number”. So what Broderick did was repeat the specific pattern of electrical impulses, with the sound being an extra “oh I get it” for the audience.
Absolutely real and accurate. Grew up during this time and pretty much used all of that equipment. Dial up modem, 5.25 inch floppy disks and drives etc.
The school year of '83-'84 was my senior year of high school. It was the first year they had an official computer class which you learned BASIC computer language which was part of what they used for the movie, so this really hit home. Unfortunately, I didn't pursue more of an education in computer science. And of course, Ally Sheedy launched a million of missiles in the hearts of many boys. For more "hacking", check out the movie "Sneakers" with an all-star cast which is shamefully underrated.
I imagine at some point you've heard of those old dial up modems and how they made all those funny screeching sounds as they would connect? Well, those sounds were the data being communicated during connection. So these even more ancient modems back in the rotary dialing days used to require a physical phone to send and receive those sounds in order to communicate back and forth. You dial the number like normal, then place the phone into the "cradle" and as long as you're connected on the call the two computers can use sound to trade information.
In the book Ready Player One, one of the challenges is to act as Matthew Broderick's character from start to finish, so you would have to know the movie by heart
The thing MB put the phone on was the modem. In the early 80s, whoever few people that had computers online would connect it through their phone lines. Fiber optics were a thing of the future back then. As far as I know, this movie is scarily realistic on describing hacking techniques of the times. Also, it warmed my heart to recognize the guy who didn't turn the key - the great, late, John Spencer, best known for his role as Leo McGarry. I miss him.
- The two missile techs in the silo are John Spencer (who refused to turn the key), and Michael Madsen (who pulled the gun). Spencer is best known for his Emmy-winning role as White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry on 'The West Wing', and he passed away in real life during the show's final season as his character was running for Vice President. Madsen was Mr. Blonde in 'Reservoir Dogs' and Budd in 'Kill Bill'. - The voice of Joshua/WOPR was actor John Wood, who played Dr. Stephen Falken. Basically, all they did was record him saying the lines in many different ways...then piece together the lines word by word from various takes, then run it through a vocoder. Broderick and Wood would appear in another film during the 1980s, the medieval romance adventure 'Ladyhawke' with Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Leo McKern, directed by Richard Donner. It is a wonderful film that no reactors have touched yet! - General Beringer played by Barry Corbin ad-libbed a lot of his lines. - President Ronald Reagan loved the film, but it scared him. It also scared other politicians in Washington, creating a lot of legislation and starting investigations into real gaps in security concerning the military and computers. At the time the film was made, hacking was not illegal. It didn't become illegal until 1990. In fact, Broderick's character was based on a real hacker. - The film was written by Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker. Together, they also wrote 'Sneakers' with Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier. Parkes became a major producer, with credits like the Men In Black franchise, Sweeney Todd, The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, The Road To Perdition, Gladiator, Deep Impact, Amistad, Twister, and Awakenings. His wife, Laurie McDonald, also has many of the same credits as a producer with him. In fact, they are still production executives at DreamWorks, and have worked extensively with Steven Spielberg. Lasker wrote Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro, and Project X with Matthew Broderick.
If you *really* want to be scared, this same thing happened _multiple times_ in real life. In 1979, computer screens at NORAD started showing a massive Soviet nuclear attack on the West, which led to several minutes of intense actions (and panic) before separate, early warning radars confirmed that there had been no launch; it was eventually determined that a system test had inadvertently been displayed on the live screens, nearly causing World War 3.
Then in 1983 (a little less than 4 months after WarGames was released and about 3 weeks after the Soviet shootdown of a Korean Airlines 747), a system error in a Soviet nuclear bunker started showing a US launch of 5 ICBMs toward the Soviet Union. In that instance, full scale nuclear war was possibly averted when the duty officer in charge, a Lieutenant Colonel named Stanislav Petrov, independently decided that it was a false alarm and declined to notify his superiors of the "attack". Petrov based his decision on the belief that if the United States were going to launch a first strike, it would not be limited to only 5 missiles.
What's truly terrifying is that those two instances weren't even the closest we ever came to full scale nuclear warfare during the Cold War.
and Petrov was punished for not following SOP and launching.
Yep. I was going to bring up the Petrov incident myself. Glad to see I'm not the only person who remembers hearing about it.
@@kgjung2310 Officially, he was reprimanded for not keeping accurate logs during the incident (as he described it, he had one hand on the phone and the other on an intercom the whole time, leaving him without a third hand to record the events). Nevertheless he served out the remainder of his time in the Soviet armed forces then went on to work at a (Soviet) research institute.
In his later life, after the fall of the Soviet Union, he came to believe that he had been scapegoated by Soviet authorities over the system glitch which caused the incident.
@@Harv72b If he had launched he might have gotten that third hand after all.
Wasn't there one that was attributed to a goose flying too low and tripping some kind of alarm?
This movie freaked out Ronald Regan when he saw it. He asked his chairman of the Joint Chiefs “could this really happen?” The general returned a week later, replying “Mr.President, the problem is much worse than you think.” Reagan's interest in the film is credited with leading to the enactment 18 months later of NSDD-145, the first Presidential directive on computer security.
Didn’t he get freaked out by the Day After as well.
Lucky he didn’t watch Threads…
That's incredible.
That's the claim, though I find it hard to believe he didn't understand how devastating nuclear war would be given the briefings he would have been given. British Intelligence had briefed him on a Soviet double they had that the Soviets were convinced that the USA was about to attack in 1983. A long planned NATO wargame was cut back in scope because the Soviet leadership believed the exercise was a ruse to cover for a first strike. If it took Steve Guttenberg to convince him we all got really lucky making it to 1984.
@@stumpy2000 Compared to "Threads," "The Day After" is an optimistic, happy garden party.
@@stumpy2000 To be fair many people were freaked at the thought of nuclear war. Hell, it almost happened on a few occasions, so I'm ok with the president at the time being very worried.
I feel that everyone who grew up in the 80s knows what DEFCON means thanks to this film.
What about that maroon 'Vette?
A crook with hearing loss? Yes, it's a dad joke. 80's kid. Now in my 40's. I am obligated to make dad jokes.
Funny enough the hacker convention in Las Vegas is called DEFCON because of this movie and the fact that they nuked Las Vegas.
As a bunch of others have said, this movie is actually frighteningly realistic for its time. You had a question about recording tones and opening the door, and yes, that would have been a thing. I actually had a cool little address/phone book device when I was younger that you could put up against a phone mouthpiece, and would play the tones to dial for you, preventing you from misdialing a number you weren't super familiar with, but had saved.
Dude,I had one of those too,pretty neat thing to a 13 year old me
The local Morning Zoo guy called it his "Dig (short for digit) Dialer." It always sounded kind of dumb when he did.
@@Whateva67 I think I was about 15 at the time, so right there with ya!
I used to sell those... I'd tell people that it was safer because you didn't have to touch all those disgusting dial pads, that people sneeze on, ever again! It worked! ;-]
I think the most unrealistic part about it was the public school actually having a system you could access via modem to edit records at that time. It did look like an upscale town, tho.
Well, that and a computer system capable of launching nuclear weapons ever being made accessible via public network.
Wow. The two of you nailed the premise before it even started. Well done.
I was around 8 when this movie came out and I grew up watching it often. My appreciation for it has only grown over the years. There are no shootouts. No car chases. No explosions. All of the action (aside from an accidental car crash through the fence that they left in the movie) is on computer screens. And they writers actually thought out reasonable obstacles for the teams to overcome. "Can't we pull the power?" Well... "The silos would consider that to be the destruction of Norad and follow through with their last received commands." That's great writing. I wish that more movies would think through problems like that.
I was 8 too. This movie made a big impression on me.
One of the cool things in this movie is that, normally in movies with the military, it's the military commanders that want to start a war. In this one, the General is the voice of reason, willing to listen.
This was well before the kind of slavering worship that techbros have become accustommed to. Guys who touted computers as the answer to everything were viewed with varying degrees of suspicion mixed with ridicule.
A Hollywood movie (US military approved with full editorial control) was never going to show the truth of nuclear war like a film such as Doctor Strangelove , Threads (BBC) or When the Wind Blows does.
Okay for fun but they need to watch none mainstream content to get a proper picture of the war-economy we live in today.
There's an obvious reason why they weren't aware of this film - their government doesn't like us to question their motives, certainly not their profit motives at least. I think they're okay with the genocide getting shown (look at all the Iraq war movie propaganda from Hollywood), just not the war for profit set up we have now.
The writers of Wargames went on to write Sneakers (1992) which is similarly hackery-computery. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention Hackers (1995) which is about as far away from realistic as you could ever imagine but well, it has its charms.
Sneakers is such a fun movie. Great cast too.
Sneakers is fantastic. One of the best overall illustrations of hacking culture and the evolution of hackers/crackers into security professionals.
Hackers is better than its reputation suggests. Most of the computer dialog is reasonably accurate (if out of date at the time of release) in Hackers, but they made an art direction choice to make everything look more like something out of Neuromancer than what it would have actually been at the time. It is a weird pastiche that turns into into a vaguely cyberpunk version of the 90's.
Passport?
Hackers is a bizarre mix of somewhat realistic things (social hacking with the tv station security guard, shoulder surfing, the fact that the competition was essentially them using passwords for shit they had broken into previously, phreaking) and the dumbest shit imaginable (the way they dressed and anything to do with the Gibson).
@@SadPeterPan1977including ned ryerson!
“The only winning move is not to play” still quoted all the time
Especially in m@n0sphere.
That is straight up Bruce Lee, there.
Also “Shall we play a game” - Black Widow in Winter Soldier.
@@aimmethod The sentence will outlive those creeps.
@@aimmethodthose dummies don't realize that they are playing the game. They just don't realize that they are playing the same game of slow, genetic dead end that their counterparts are playing.
My favorite thing about this movie is that there's no "bad guy". Even the military people are trying to save lives.
Yeah, but at the time Dabney Coleman was pretty typecast as a duplicitous worm kind of character. So when audiences saw his face pop up they likely immediately saw him as an antagonist.
@@tchoupitoulos... and he wasn't much of one. The General was also an famous jerk character as well. It's funny to realize that, within a few years, Matthew Brod would still be using modems to hack into school computers and take an infamous day off.
Except Mr. Ligget
@@Cbcw76 I always felt that 'hacking the school computer' was a deliberate nod to his role in War Games.
@@DocMicrowave Uh... the film came long after this was a tradition. TRS80 was 1977, and before that, the Commodores were ?? 1975-76. School systems started opening their mainframes to Commodores as terminals, then TRS-80s kinda broke on their own. The AppleII's offered an identity handshake so using those meant someone could trace the phone-number - which by then was installed on mainframe access. Or rather the interface now demanded some more-than-terminal-ID. Of course, this was being done on mainframes in the 1960s (before my programming days) as the insertion of a COM port (SERIAL) allowed workers greater distance access. I'd be computer hacks that allowed modifications were operating in the early '60s. Question: in the Tom Hanks film APOLLO 13, did you ever see dumb terminals in difference NASA buildings? If so, then they were COM port connected and thus 'outside access' would have been allowed. I don't remember.
I should note that early school systems rented computer time into the '70s since mainframes were prohibitively expensive in both hardware, canned software and personnel. "Outside access" via dumb terminals from a mainframe to 'clients' (renters) had to occur so that was deep into 1950s and early '60s when IBM, Sperry, Univac, all of those were selling one mainframe and that company 'time-shared it out' to renters. ie, hacker potentials.
That "WHUMP" sound effect for the missile hits is fantastic, they wanted you to physically feel it in the theater.
Right? Combined with the blinding light too...
I wish they never stopped making movies like this.
Simple premise. No hamfisted romance, realistic setting and details... The tech is dated but the movie STILL HOLDS UP. It's timeless.
Other than the intelligent machine part, everything else is very realistic. Also, this movie, for its time, had a booming low-end sound effect for the virtual missile strikes. In the theater, it was something.
Was it no treble and ALL BASS? Could you can FEEL those missle strikes more than heard them?
Just to add on... everything was realistic except for the computer voice which was more a device for the movie. There's also no way he could afford all that equipment in his room. 😀
@@bgeeryYep, a total hand me down setup.
@@dlrhas21 It sounded like a typical voice synthesizer of the time, e.g. Intellivision, it's just that nobody ever used them for the purpose shown in the movie. It did allow Joshua to be more of a "character" though.
The device that he puts the phone on is called a modem. At the time of this movie 300 baud would be considered pretty standard. How fast was that? Due to the vagueries of the technology used at the time it's a little unclear how to translate that into modern data rates, but it's probably no more than 1000 bits per second. I believe that text to voice systems did exist at that time, but they weren't likely to be within reach of a high school kid and they didn't sound near as good as the one in the movie.
My favorite little bits of business in the film: The dad buttering his corn, McKittrick's assistant popping his gum into her mouth (not in the script), the news report of the prophylactic recycling center fire, Ally Sheedy playfully trapping Matthew Broderick between her legs in his bedroom (also unscripted), General Beringer's use of chewing tobacco and his "piss on a spark plug" line (again, improvised), and Dr. Falken's condescending first line upon seeing McKittrick: "Hello, John. I see your wife still picks out your ties." Brilliant.
The dad was an uncle of a friend of mine. Apparently the line "This corn is raw!" was not in the script. The actor was surprised because the "prop corn" they were eating was actually uncooked. They kept the line.
Because of this film, I use a piece of bread and butter for corn.
Those are good bits from the movie. I like all those smaller bits, outside the main plot, that make this film even more enjoyable. My other favorite line: "Put X in the center square!" :-)
Yes, classic!@@kenfreeman8888
@@dahobdahob "Could we have pills? And cook the corn?" Always crack up hearing that.
30:57 It's likely that you just didn't recognize the references to this movie throughout pop culture. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Natasha says the line "Shall we play a game?" and Steve mentions that he has seen the film.
Loads of references in the computer game Uplink.
Terminator, especially T-3, the base premise of the machines taking control and causing global nuclear destruction.
@@Deathbird_Mitch The premise is actually older than this movie. Such as X-Men's "Days of Future Past" storyline.
Loved that little moment.😂
The brilliance of 80’s movies is a movie like this was essentially made for kids. But they weren’t dumbed down as they had a good story and message too. I watched this a zillion times on cable in the 80’s. The irony is we lived in fear everyday of nuclear war even though the point of the movie is nobody wins. They just don’t make movies like this anymore.
This wasn't specifically for kids, it's for a wider audience. There are plenty of dumb 80s kids movies like Mac and Me, Masters of the Universe, The Wizard, Howard the Duck, Garbage Pail Kids, etc...
It's a great movie, don't get me wrong. But the "message", such as it is, is kind of naive, or maybe Pollyanna is a better description. Wars, even nuclear wars, *can* be won. Tic-tac-toe and chess games are won and lost all the time, mainly because of human error. And even with machine learning, they're at the mercy of the programming by humans (Not to mention the graft of defense contractors providing substandard equipment, which would render estimations useless). It's all about where one sets the bar for acceptable loss.
@@Hexon66 Never seen a movie where a nuclear war was won by humans.
YES!
‘Nobody wins”
That is precisely why ‘M.A.D.” (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked as a Nuclear deterrent.
When both sides have equal power to absolutely and totally obliterate each other, only a Mad-Man would ever resort to using Nukes at all.
It relied upon the Moral conscience of everyone in command of Both Nation’s military leadership to understand that regardless of who launches first, neither side would survive, let alone ‘win”.
Pretty good incentive to never push the Big Red Button.
George and Simone- I’m 57 and can vouch for this being relatively realistic in terms of the tech- that’s what screens looked like, what dialup sounded like, what interfaces looked like before windows - I am not a hacker but learned Fortran etc at age 11 in 1977 and was programming simple games on my Atari 800 home PC in 1983 and loading games from a cassette tape drive etc would be very slow so it would take forever for a home computer to dial all those numbers and his parents would have gotten a phone bill with 1000s of calls each month and caught him
The year this came out I worked with an office computer for the first time. I agree that all the tech was in common usage at the time. I find it funny to watch younger people look at things like this and be completely confused. It all seems so connected to me that I can't understand why it's so hard to extrapolate backwards.
His friends were phone phreaks so he would have made those calls free.
Same age bracket here (53) but I grew up with an older brother who owned a VC-20 back then (very early 80's), then he switched up to a C-64, so I grew up with computers from my little ol' me in my life. He even wrote a copy protection based on sound for his datasette that required blaring the sounds made from the tape at insanely loud levels via a stereo, then inserting certain correction data into the sounds. This was before the first C-64 floppy drive when the humble cassette tape was the storage medium of choice.
Yepp, this was high-end PC stuff back then, someone who was REALLY into it and willing to shell out quite some moolah for it for private use.
So I was 'corrupted' by Basic back then. Any coder knows once you've been corrupted by Basic you can't go back. 😁
"1000s of calls each month" - you
"Oh, there's ways around that." - David
It's also fun to think that a tiny number of years before it would not have been possible to war dial. You had to manually dial a number, and set all the info for how the computers where to talk to each other, then place the phone into the cradle, so they can talk to each other.
Early modems could not detect the data rate, and negotiate the proper connection, you had to know what the other end could do, and set yours to talk to it.
I had no idea this was the case myself until watching recent vids on the subject, though I kind of had seen some stuff about the couplers at the time I became aware of modems.
Fun fact: at the time this movie was made, NORAD looked _nothing_ like that. (It probably still doesn't.) Their equivalent of that big flashy multi-level command center was a room with a whole lot of telephones in it. In fact, a representative of NORAD said they were all jealous of that set, and wished the government would shell out to get _them_ a cool screen-covered cavern with dramatic lighting.
Using tape recorders to capture and replay signals is/was a thing. In fact Clifford Stoll used tape recorders to capture modem traffic when tracking down a spy. I strongly recommend his book The Cuckoo's Egg.
I met him in person at a Macworld in the early 90s. He's just as fascinating in person as in the book.
Same here. Cliff Still is a fascinating guy, and that book should be a must-read for any computer guy (or girl). It's a page-turner.
My brother in law used to have a tone dialer that allowed him to make free phone calls from pay phones basically the same way.
Behold. The DTMF decoder chip in play.
I love that book!
When he asks the computer is it a game or is it real and it answers what's the difference . Always puts a chill down my spine.
It’s the one moment from this film I distinctly remember from the theater, feeling my stomach sink as the meaning sunk in.
Now you have computer dudes who say that
I love this movie's ending, with the computer realizing that war is a zero-sum game. A war thriller aimed at teens that's secretly and anti-war film where not a single person dies.
A rare thing cinematically.
The two officers in the opening scene (in the missle silo) were a very young Michael Madsen (who you may recognize from his role as Mr Blonde in "Reservoir Dogs" ) and John Spence (who was in "The Rock" and played Leo in the acclaimed series, "The West Wing")
The tech and hacks that were used in this film were VERY real and accurate at the time (although how a high school kid managed to acquire so much gear in his bedroom is a bit of a stretch) ... however, most of those life-hack "cheats" (playing the tones to hack an electronic lock... hot-wiring a pay phone... etc) have since been removed from society
I would also like to jump on the bandwagon & recommend watching "Sneakers"
Matthew Broderick always a boy of obscene wealth.
RIP John Spencer. A good actor.
I saw this in the theater when it first came out and I can tell you, this was the height of technology at the time, and the thing you set the phone on is a modem. This movie blew me away as a youngster and I cannot tell you how amazing and exciting the ending part was in a packed theater with the giant screen.
Actually it was the acoustic coupler that connected the modem to the phone line(though some had built in modems)... I remember that the acoustic couplers got harder and harder to use as phones started to come out with different shape handsets, and they started making them with different shaped cushions to go accommodate the handsets.
The advent of the standard modular plug spelled the beginning of the end of the need for acoustic couplers...
I cannot remember if I ever had an acoustic coupler back then, though I do remember using one at least once. I also seem to remember that i got one a long time after they were useful, and people were basically giving them away... I do not remember how fast a connection you could make with one, but I suspect that they would not have done well above about 1200 baud or so(maybe 2400 baud) but certainly not the later 56,000 baud would not have worked because of the way the microphones and speakers were made in the old phones. They were made to pick up and play the frequencies of the human voice and not very high and low frequencies. This made it a lot easier to understand someone on the other end. Ironically, the later MUCH cheaper phones probably would have worked better due to them having the MUCH cheaper full spectrum microphones and speakers.
If you loved this movie and want something similar from the same writing team, Sneakers is an amazing look at hacking with social engineering at the forefront.
Sneakers is so great.
Yes. Very much this!
Sneakers is massively underrated. They would be great reacting to it.
YES! Sneakers is amazing. I love movies that engage with the ethics of how computer systems get used. And it’s surprisingly funny for a movie that’s so thrilling.
Not to mention the stellar cast in Sneakers! Great movie!
My dad was a Missile Commander during the cold war. When his rotation came up for silo duty, we would go to the base armory to check out a sidearm. When we watched this movie when it came out originally, he said that aspect of it was relatively accurate. If a partner refuses to turn their key, the gun comes out.
I always wondered about that. I mean, killing the other guy would accomplish nothing, a single person could not launch. I always thought the guns were for if you HAD launched the missiles and did not want to live through the aftermath.
This is one of the most realistic computer movies ever made. The tone capture thing was from 1970's era touch tone phones which used a scheme called DTMF or "Dual Tone Multi-Frequency." Basically when you pressed a key, two of eight possible tones were played. The device receiving this signal decoded it and decided what to do; usually call a phone number but sometimes other things. It was very common in the early 1980's. If you have a modern era landline phone it's very likely that a touch tone phone from 1977 will still work with it. Also, I highly recommend Brainstorm, probably the most accurate portrayal of how scientists work that has ever been made.
Most modern cable to landline modems accept both DTMF and pulse dialing. The modem encodes the number digitally to place the call. But you should be able to connect a dial or touch tone telephone of any era to one.
I saw on a movie once, I don't remember what it was, the plot, or anything, something hacked a call on a rotary phone.
I was in my middle teens, so of course, I wanted to try it.
I removed the mouthpiece cover, and tapped the connection with a coin, imitating the clicks you hear when rotary dialing. I didn't count the clicks, I just tapped groups of random fast clicks until I hear the ringing. Yes, it worked, but I have no idea who I called, because whoever answered didn't speak English! I hung up immediately, and never tried it again.
Geez, the glory of being teenagers is seldom understood until we get old. 😊
Part of the reason why this movie is so beloved by computer geeks is that with some caveats, it was VERY realistic for the time. The exploits David used were widely known in the phreaking community.
LOVE this movie! My brother was WAY into computers, but unlike David's character was an overachiever and went to Williams as a math and computer science major at age 16. He was able to make free long distance calls via his computer as well and almost got my mom in trouble because she worked for the government. When this movie was on TV he used a tape recorder to record the audio and listened to it all the time. When I was 9 and we got a VCR we rented it and I actually got to put faces with the audio. Top ten movie for me! He passed away due to schizophrenia when he was 21 but this movie always makes me think of him. 😊 That was a REALLY old fashioned modem his phone handset was sitting on. My brother used a modem that was like a video game cartridge that plugged into his Commodore 64!
Finding a grey hair on my balls, or meeting a high school classmates 15 year old kid used to make me feel old. Watching reactors struggle with 80s tech can now be added to that list...thanks a lot youngsters.
😂 100% incl. the grey hair. Except I’m 35yrs after high school.
I'm amazed he hadn't seen the movie yet, it's an iconic 'computing' movie
I received a telephone touch tone generator used to store numbers manually and then one press of the button assigned to a specific numbers would play back the tones. Holding this up to the mouth piece of a phone handset with a dial tone would signal that number for connection instead of manually having to dial that number each time. It was basically a mobile version of those home phones with frequently used numbers the user entered - 10 save slots/buttons iirc. Tech created for a very specific time which remains useful although horribly antiquated.
@@jasonm8017Class of '88?
@@Saiman9000 👍🏼 ‘88 ahhh, good times
The finale sequence with WOPR is still one of the best moments in film. "The only winning move is not to play." Still one of the best quotes in film. A strong lesson in the futility of nuclear war.
Alas, none of today's leaders , especially in teh West, seem to have learned it. NATO seems determined to out-escalate Putin in Ukraine. All our aid to that already beaten nation just continues their suffering and slaughter. Meanwhile, in heightened tensions a flock of geese on the radar screen could be mistaken for missiles, and...This has absolutely happened before, more than once, and only luck has allowed us to be here today.
On Matthew Broderick's character using a tape recorder to hack the door, that's actually how keypads usually worked back then, same as the phones of the day. The system didn't read the number you entered, but the sound you got when hitting the keys. That's why every key you hit had a different tone. If you think about it, having the keys each sound different would otherwise be a stupid security issue. Anyone listening who knows the tones could tell what code you entered. They only had those different tones because it was actually the tones that drove the system.
This is how you write a high-stakes movie. You guys called most of the major plot points well in advance, but the stakes are so high and the small beats so perfectly placed and built that the tension by the end is nail-biting even though you’re 95% sure of what’s going to happen. I was a kid in the 80s, and the end of this movie still gives me chills.
We came so close.
Did you ever notice Gen. Beringer is chewing 'Red Man' tobacco while sneering at the Reds?
When this movie was made, David's computer setup was top of the line. It probably cost several thousand dollars at the time.
At the time the common definition of a computer nerd is someone with a $3,000 computer and a $300 car.
In the early '80s a $300 car was a car that was only one step up from one that just could start and go down the road. They usually only lasted about a year, or two if you were lucky, at which time you just bought another $300 car. $300 was 3 weeks take home pay for a minimum wage full time job.
Well, it IS a late-70s kit-build computer. And Apple ][, Vic-20, Atari 400 all existed at the time as well. That video terminal very possibly cost more than the computer itself. Otherwise it has to be programmed from the switches on front and the output read via blinking lights, or a teletype machine or line printer. The speech module would also cost a pretty penny. (Quite possibly even built from a kit)
@@sophiamarchildon3998She got a car, I got a computer. How’s that for being born under a bad sign? Amazing that those were close to the same cost. That’s why I’m an idiot today with a love for cars.
Not true. They idea was David was using out of date gear for the time of the movie. He wasn't rich, just a nerd with a passion. His means were about scaveging for his set up.
He would have gotten the gear second hand, maybe from tech friends like Jim and Malvin getting rid of stuff, and even from dumpster diving.
The director and or producer were talking about it in a documentary I watched just a month or so ago. The video surely is still here on TH-cam.
The IMSAI 8080 came out in 1975. The movie takes place in 1982. He's connected to the machine via terminal. The old S-100 bus system probably was chosen because of all the toggle switches. Also by 1982 there were more modern modems. The use of a phone coupler interface was to explain to viewers how a computer could connect to a phone. The idea of a box directly connected to a phone line would be harder to explain.
All the scenes where David is typing on the computer were all pre-arranged programs simulating key inputs. All Broderick had to do was press random keys and each time a he pressed a key, a character was displayed.
The voice of WOPR/ Joshua was performed by the actor who played Dr Falken.
10:37 The weird guy in the glasses was played by Eddie Deezen, who also played in GREASE.
He basically plays this part in every movie.
Also, if they’ve seen enough of _Dexter’s Laboratory,_ then they’ve heard him as the voice of Mandark. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!
@@0okamino I dream of a LORD OF THE RINGS remake where Eddie Deezen plays Gandalf.
Yes, damn you. Imagine it. IMAGINE IT NOW! Bwahahahaha.
This is one of my all time favorites. I've always felt that Ally Sheedy's Jennifer is one of the best, true to life teenagers I've seen on screen, both in character and performance. The scene where she convinces Falken to help, not with a big dramatic speech, but simply by saying "I'm only seventeen years old. I'm not ready to die yet." I also just recently learned that the part of Stephen Falken (a not so subtle take off on Stephen Hawking) was originally offered to John Lennon. He was interested but tragedy kept it from happening.
The 'is this because of what you did with my grade' line is unforgivable on the part of the writers though, especially considering they'd already had a conversation following the news report which showed she understood perfectly well what was going on.
When that lady said, "He's got the code, he's gonna launch." Gets me still to this day. You gotta realize that for us folks who lived thru this era, this was a very poinient movie for its time. Cold War drama was always scary shit.
80s movies often had a way of couching very serious moral and existential dilemmas within these charming story lines. This is a prime example. Nerdy high school kid wants to play a game and ends up almost causing WWIII If you want another great tech-nerdy 80s film watch Real Genius. It’s more of a comedy but like War Games it has real stakes.
Real Genius is one of my favorite 80s movie. I once used a bunch of scientific dictionaries to work out the technical description of the new laser and it actually makes sense.
You have to get revenge on Gerry Hathaway.
It's a moral imperative!
I second Real Genius! That movie is hilarious!
Popcorn, anyone?
When I was younger I ended a university exam by leaving an apple on the professor's desk with a note that said "I aced this" in direct homage to Real Genius. Love, love, love the movie.
Definitely watch Real Genius. "I was hot and I was hungry"
"I'd piss on a sparkplug if I thought it'd help!" Hilarious line.
He had lots of good lines in this movie. I use the "After very careful consideration .. " one all the time LOL
@@bghammock"Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, sir, a man of your education!"
Barry Corbin dredged it up when the director needed a crazy line at a tense moment!
@8:38 It's a acoustic coupler for the modem (MOdulator/DEModulaor ). It was against AT&T's policy at the time to hook up third party/non-authorized equipment to the lines. Sitting the handset in a cradle was a work-around. Eventually you could just plug the modem directly to the phone line, but that was later.
My school used a coupler to access a computer in my student days. One week we had a teletype with no “break” key. I learned to whistle the right pitch into the phone to induce a break - was actually called out of class once to do that.
My daughter has been sitting in a MinuteMan III silo for the past 3 years after graduating from the Air Force Academy. She loved it but got promoted and is going to Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AFB) in Greenland to watch weather radar. She said the alerts were tedious, but drills were terrifying. Funnily enough, I was stationed at Thule AFB to watch ICBM radar as punishment in the late 70's after duking it out with a 2 Lt in a softball game. Fun times!
It’s called a dial up modem and yes, that’s how it used to work. I would say the most unbelievable part of the movie is how fast his computer runs. Nothing runs fast through a dial up connection.
Remember when 1200 baud was fast.
For another good film showcasing that era of technology, you (George and Simone) should watch Sneakers (1992) with Robert Redford, Sydney Poitier, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell and Ben Kingsley.
@@treetopjones737 I remember. Where I learned how to program as a child. I had 1h per day access to a BBS that had a game that would take 59 min to download from, so had to script the login, search and dl to have it finish before disconnect.
I was lucky, my first PC came with a 14400 baud modem. Fast enough to dial in to the internet. Imagine loading a website and it takes over a minute.
@@geefhotmail6311 haha. My first computer was an Apple 2 E and it didn’t have a modem.. because the internet didn’t exist yet.. I’m old..
Only starting the watch so likely will add more as you question more, but as a computer kid of the 80s whi also loves this movie I should be able to provide info.
1. The thing the phone went on is an acoustic couple, essentially a 300 bps modem and the first way home users could connect to the "internet" which was pretty much just knowing the phone number of a BBS and using a coupler to connect to one.
2. The recording the beeps thing worked on payphones back in the day (called phreaking) since the sound of coins entering gave different tones but it wouldn't have worked on the door keypad since it's just not tone-based
3. There is a 100% win-rate tactic for tic-tac-toe....at least until your opponent learns the one move to block it
Another good 80s film by the director John Badham is Blue Thunder. It looks at first glance of the cover to be a dumb 80s action film but is actually a pretty grounded thriller with really good characters and a has a similar vibe the this movie.
One of the best of the military aircraft centered 80's/90's movies. Has a fair bit of cheese, but cool helicopter and some great stunt work.
Badham also directed the first Short Circuit film.
@@Madbandit77 And, funnily enough, Saturday Night Fever!
Yes!
Blue Thunder had more to do with privacy - and the loss of it.
Funny thing is, these days, people are more than willing to put their entire lives online.
It’s worth it just to hear Warren Oats say “Fudgecicle”
A movie that not a lot of folks have seen, but is actually extremely good, featuring a very smart kid and the dangers of messing with things you don't fully understand is the 1986 film "The Manhattan Project."
Seconded. A really smart under-the-radar film, featuring a teenage Cynthia Nixon!
Amazing how much detail they go into about how the bomb actually works.
2 votes!!!!
Love that film too! It was pretty cool to be a teen during this time. One of my earliest John Lithgow films.
And Colossus The Forbin Project.
trivia: they created the computer voice by recording the actor who plays Dr Falken speak the lines in reverse order. So "Shall we play a game?" was recorded as "Game? a play we shall" and then putting the words back into the correct order so the lines would have unnatural intonation.
This movie REALLY appealed to me when it came out.
I was a young computer nerd to be with a VIC-20, later to be replaced by a C64, and this film was SO cool (even though the grown up me can’t understand why I felt it was cool as opposed to being scary)
Sign the petition to bring back the Simone "Woo"
The only reason I am here! 🤣🫨woo!
If George has to fast-read all those names every episode, then Simone should do HER part and "woo" to cheer him on
More Simone “woo” please!
Simone needs to woo everybody!
Pretty please Simone! I'll draw a t shirt idea for that specific Simone-ism.
Yes, the computer tech is accurate for the time period.
If you enjoyed this movie and want something where it WASN'T a simulation, you should add "By dawn's early light" to your list. Amazingly tense suspence movie.
Not a lot of people remember "By Dawn's Early Light" but it is indeed another great nuclear techno-thriller.
Don't forget "The Day After"... the movie that scarred a generation (well, most of us, anyway.... not me, though).
I found By Dawn's Early Light on Amazon Prime Video and was surprised & disappointed to find it was in 4:3. I had totally forgotten it was an HBO movie and not a theatrical release.
@@Johnny_Socko I don't think they'd have got away with a theatrical release at the time. It's surprising because there's quite a lot of names and star power in the movie itself.
@@IggyStardust1967 Try Threads - makes The Day After look like a slapstick comedy.
The technological accuracy on display in this movie holds up incredibly well 40 years later.
Growing up, I think the brilliance of this movie was that it made it digestible for my young mind, through Matthew Brodrick's character, to understand that the world could just end and that we were not in control of things. It also helped me understand what a precarious situation a nuclear standoff was. Obviously there were more mature movies on this topic but I think was really well done for what it is. I love this picture.
Great job guys.
My dad wo4ked for NCR from 1964 till 2010. He taught me a lot about computers and I got my first home computer in 1981. All the tech in this is correct, I asked my dad if this could have happened, he said yes.
George the problem with being beholden to your conscience in that situation is that if there was an attack - there was no time for the people in the silos to get more information in that scenario. As they mentioned in the next scene, a sub launched missile could take out Washington in less than 10 minutes.
What helps the people in the silos is that the missiles have what are called PALs (Permissive Action Link) so that even if they do "accidentally" launch a missile - it will either splash down in the ocean, or the warhead won't detonate, or both - unless the missile was launched with a valid code from the President of the United States.
It helps take the burden off the men and women on the front line because it eliminates the risk of error and it isn't their decision that causes the weapon to detonate.
That being said - I get it. I'm not sure I could turn that key in that scenario either.
The people that do have psychological evaluations prior to being put in the silos to see if they are mentally capable of doing it.
And the door thing might have worked depending on the system. If it worked based on touch tones, it would have.
I'm not sure you could ever sleep well again if you knew how many times a real nuclear launch was prevented because one person made a judgement call that the signal of incoming missiles was false. In effect, the crisis in the first scene happened. Many times.
well, according to some sources for quite a few years in the 1960s/70s all Minuteman nuclear missiles had the same activation code: 00000000
if this is true, the military could truthfully say "we have safeguard systems installed" - while at the same time not having an "unnecessary delay" in case of a real attack.
@@JeshuaSquirrel Didn't it happen in Hawaii just a couple years ago?
@@xsanguine8 without the PALs - nothing would have happened.
@@Engy_Wuck Sorry - I don't buy that at all.
The codes are Alpha-numeric, and if it was simply 00000000 they wouldn't need a guy following the President around with "the football" with the codes.
Secondly - ONE guy claimed that, and it was officially denied by the Air Force a few years ago who said that code was NEVER used.
My late brother was a Missile Launch Command Officer, one of those guys underground and with a hand on the key... it's pretty spot on, including the side arms they both carry to use on the other if needed. Also, the basic "computer almost starts a war" plot is real. Early on they ran tests, basically on a system that wasn't isolated, and a programming error almost caused a war during a test. Yes, they developed redundant systems that were off line, for testing/development.
One of the writers of WarGames also wrote Project X (1987), another great Matthew Broderick movie. I think Simone would love that one, it has some military similarities and it makes me a bit tearful when I watch it.
Lawrence Lasker, also known for Awakenings
Yes, Project X is great and no one has reacted to that one.
I saw this twice in theaters and countless times on vhs growing up. It still holds up today as a brilliant story.
“Sneakers” was the next movie by this writing team, different director though. Not as well remembered as War Games, but also one of my favorite light techno-thrillers. Amazing cast as well.
As a child during the 70's and 80's, I can confirm the fear of a first strike was really sold the both side's people.
Since 1945, actually. Julian and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 because "it was really sold" to people.
I feel like this could also be a good answer to, 'Why are Gen X so nihilistic and cynical about everything?' When there's a pretty big part of you that's convinced the world is going to be destroyed, in your formative years, it's gotta have an effect.
Putin and Medvedev has threatened the UK, and others, with a first strike several times in the last year. He doesn't mean it.
I can vividly remember my dad telling me we'd be the lucky ones as we lived close to a primary target; one flash of light and it'd be over before you knew what was happening. It's the people further away to feel sorry for.
@@Dunkelzahn2057 Except... I think it's foolish and arrogant to believe Gen X are the ONLY gen to have gone thru that. Again, since 1945, everyone's aware of nukes. Look at 1959's ON THE BEACH (Gregory Peck)... the early ' 60s films FAILSAFE with the agreed-upon payback annihilation of NYC... DR STRANGELOVE and many others written thru the '50s. Those thoughts didn't form in a void. The pretense that one generation 'owns' the only concept of a bad future is arrogant AND stupid. Also, read up on the mania that actually DID occur in 1962's buildup to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
With the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war looming over us, to me, this was a very real movie. And while fun, it was very nerve-wracking watching it for the first time (I was like 13 or so when I saw it for the first time). The Day After came a few years later, but was a TV movie about nuclear war that has haunted my nightmares for decades. Definitely worth a watch.
I also have to recommend Sneakers. One of my all-time favorite movies with an all-star cast: Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, etc. Another great film starring Dabney Coleman is "Cloak and Dagger". It's of the same timeframe as War Games and similar in tone. An excellent spy thriller.
They won't know who River Phoenix was.
@@me109aa They saw Stand By Me & Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ... and they probably know his brother from The Joker & Gladiator ...
And they might recognize the child protagonist of *Cloak & Dagger* (1984).
@@me109aaProbably not Sidney Poitier either, 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was a late 60's movie. Still, they might have and both of them were exceedingly good actors so I'd thought to include them.
There is an “experience” with this film that has to be seen in the theatre. It starts with the “tic-tac-toe” sequence near the end and the WOPR running all the stalemate solutions. In the theater watching the film, the crowd got deathly quiet as all these flashing lights, colors and apprehension just flooded the room and then..total darkness. It really built up to that ending. Watch it on a big screen TV in a pitch black room and you get a sense of it.
The scene at the end when Joshua is running through the war simulations at high speed with all the flashing etc. was really cool to see in theaters. Also, after seeing the corn buttering strategy in this film my whole family tried it out the next time we had corn lol
So hyped to watch this. Take away the obvious fiction, this movie captures my younger years so well: Phone number range scans, dot matrix printouts of "need to investigate further", figured out how to manipulate grades in my school's computerized system, parents being completely clueless of my hobby, phreaking, BBS cultures, ..
Such good times! I legitimately get nostalgic watching WarGames.
In the opening scene, it was a simulation launch. The missile commanders were not told that it was a simulation, to see if they could actually be trusted to carry out the duties for which they've been trained and assigned (expensively). Being an unannounced simulation, 22% did not turn their keys ..... However, the other 78% DID turn their keys, yet no launches actually occurred.
The cradle thingy that he sets the phone receiver into is a modem. It allows the computer to hear the dial tones/pulses coming from the external computer it is logged into.
An analogue modem, which used sound frequencies to send the data, which is why the squeaks and squeals were audible.
This film is a really underrated classic. People always focus on the computer technology being 'dated' without realizing how timeless are the themes and everything else.
Missile bunker command protocols back then were clear regarding refusal to turn the key at the appointed time. The launch officers were armed for a reason. If it came down to it and you refused to turn the key, the other launch officer was authorized to use deadly force to either convince you or make you pay the ultimate price for dereliction of duty in a time of war. To this day, officers and NCOs at just about every level are authorized to shoot and kill troops who disobey orders during war. It doesn't happen because of the professionalism of those serving in our military, but it CAN happen, and they know it.
The "contraption" he set the phone on was a very, very early modem. Instead of just attaching the phone line, it required the actual receiver to be attached to transfer the audible handshake protocol.
I absolutely loved this movie as a kid. I’m impressed at how many lines you predicted before they happened.
Yes, in the ‘80s, this is how we computer geeks communicated. That wasn’t quite the sound that the computer modem made, though. And the “acoustic coupler” (putting the handset in a speaker/mic device) was becoming outdated in 1984 - I used “direct connect” modem where the phone line plugged right into the modem. (And speeds were not nearly as fast as they would need to be for the graphics in this movie!).
This movie had a huge role in the book for Ready Player One. The main character had to play as the role as Matthew Broderick in VR to get to the first key.
"The Net" (1995) with Sandra Bullock is also a good film to watch as is "Chain Reaction" (1996) with Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman and Rachel Weisz.
Great film, that sadly never loses its relevance.
"Tron" was a wonderful and silly film, but one thing about it grows more alarmingly familiar by the day - the MCP. That thing was scary, and I don't see anyone making any effort to prevent it actually coming into existence in some way.
@@Serai3 Nooooo, in fact everyone WANTS that.
Loved your reaction! :) The contraption that David puts the phone on is an 'acoustic coupler modem', which was kinda out of the date by the time the movie came out, but the production team thought people would be more familiar with it. It was essentially just an older style of modem that connects directly to the phone via the receiver's speaker and microphone instead of being a self-contained unit. :)
I love John Badham's direction. He directed a lot of TV series in the 70s and graduated to movies in the 80s Short Circuit and Bird on a Wire were also big hits.
I'm pretty sure that Ally Sheedy ended up in The Breakfast Club because Matthew forged her grades. This was the start of extended universes in film.
This movie literally changed my life back in 1983, I was 15 at the time. I saw WarGames 3 times in one week at the local theater here in southern Finland, and nagged mom and dad to buy me a computer. A month later they gave in and bought me a Commodore 64, on which I learned to code (BASIC and assembler), played games and whatnot. This became my main hobby for years (before computers it was mostly mopeds and such). I studied computer sciences in school, and eventually started working in IT nine years later in 1992. I am still doing that. Not sure if I made the right choice, but here we are.
Plot twist: Your real name is Linus Torvalds.
Another movie written by Lawrence Lasker is “Sneakers,” which is another very good techno-thriller with a goddamn amazing cast.
yes - another realistic depiction of hacking in a pop movie, at least script-wise
WTF ? He wrote both !? I had never checked. Legend !
I adore Sneakers
@autohmae yes they actually wrote it before wargames.
Love this movie, thanks for a great reaction. This was Matthew Broderick's second movie. The same year this came out, 1983, he won his first Tony Award. He was 20.
Something I noticed about that first scene -- Michael Madsen's character is holding the gun and there's a click. I think he DID pull the trigger and they'd unloaded the gun due to there being a full-mission-profile drill on.
Also, honestly? I think that since it's an audio lock it's entirely possible that David's trick with the door would work. WIL WHEATON built a device from a hacker's magazine to make free public phone calls using stuff at Radio Shack and claimed about 7 years ago that he used it from "1989, to just before whenever the statute of limitations would expire by now".
A predecessor to this movie with a similar plot but far more serious/less cartoony presentation is: COLOSSUS the Forbin Project. The movie is hard to find but, you should find and watch it.
ALSO: Please watch FAIL SAFE which stars Jane's dad Henry Fonda, whom I think you met in 12 Angry Men, as the U.S. President dealing with issues around nukes. For nukes of another kind, Please watch The China Syndrome staring Henry's daughter Jane Fonda and Kirk's son Michael Douglas as well as Jack Lemon and Wilford Brimley, whom you may know from The Firm and his mirroring role as the Postmaster General in a Seinfeld episode.
The scariest part of this film is that it was inspired by an actual event. In the early 80's a computer technician at NORAD fed a simulation into the operation system and basically the same thing happened in real life as what went down in the film. Minus the flimsy "AI" part.
This movie helped inspire my interest in computers. Now I have a Systems Engineer for the DoD. The 1980's was full of movies about the cold war and intelligent under-achieving teenagers. Another one that comes to mind is The Manhattan Project (1986) with John Lithgow, about a kid who builds an atomic bomb as his National Science Fair project.
I was trying to remember the name of that one. If no one mentioned it I was going to look through Lithgow 's IMDb. It's not as good as War Games but still a great movie from that period.
In 1964 there was a research project (The Nth Country Project) to see if a physics grad with no access to secret information and who had never worked in the field could design and build a functional nuclear device. Two years later the pair of researchers handed in their project, which could be built in any decent machine shop, and would have had a yield of about 15MT, assuming they could have found the fissionable material (the refining of which is still a problem for certain nation states today).
So happy you all watched this. You're probably getting a lot of answers in the comments, but there is a full-length "making of" documentary on TH-cam that gives extensive background into the film, and the history surrounding it.
I remember when they used to have those documentaries on TV. I'm going to go look for that, thanks
That dialing in computing was real. Before the internet as we know it we used to have these things called BBS's they looked like what he gets into. You would dial up a BBS and play some games on it for a limited series of turns for the day, then disconnect so others could call in and play their turns. That was the gaming part of it anyway. Dialing into work like he did the school was legitimate back then and even today it's still seen as kind of a secure way to remotely administer something.
The phone thing is an acoustic coupler - used when you couldn't actually plug a modem into the phone line.
In the military, or at least the Army when I was in, you absolutely had the right/duty to question or disobey an unlawful order. "Just following orders" is not an acceptable excuse with a court martial/military tribunal.
8:41 "I need to know what that contraption is he sets the phone on." ITS A MODEM! Damn, I'm old.
The ending calls to mind: "War. War never changes."
They watched A Few Good Men about a year ago and that was one of the important points in the movie - Lt. Weinberg alludes to the Nuremberg Trial and says that the defense of "Just following orders" won't hold up in court and although the two on trial weren't found guilty of murder, they were still dishonorably discharged for conduct unbecoming an officer, because although they were following an order, it was still an unlawful one that resulted in the death of a cadet and they were wrong for carrying it out.
Hey, guys! Great pick for a reaction. This is an unheralded classic. Remember, this movie came out at the height of the Cold War. We had nuclear bomb drills at my high school. There was a whole day devoted to Nuclear Awareness. So if you can imagine that context and mindset when you watched it, it hits even HARDER. Hope you've been well!
There's a cool moment of foreshadowing in the beginning. When one of the operators gets that faulty red light on the console, the more experienced operator casually tells him to thump it with his finger to fix it. As a human being, he has the common sense to tell the difference between a real signal and a glitch. That inability to tell the difference becomes the main problem for the rest of the film.
Yes, as others have said, the computer technology shown here is largely spot on for the time. I used an acoustic modem (that device into which the phone headset was plugged in) when using a "portable" terminal to our campus mainframe when I was a graduate student in 1981. Most people in the computer lab used teletype machines to communicate with the mainframe but there were a few CRT monitor display systems available like the one David used in the movie.
Shout out to Barry Corbin here; such an underrated actor.
Makes me miss Northern Exposure.
@@jsharp3165 never got into that.
Y’all were the perfect audience for this! Interesting insight that everything that went wrong was due to human error. But as you said, the main message is to not go to war.
When I saw this as a kid after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I just saw it as a neat movie. But I rewatched it at the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, and the scene with all the nuclear launches flashing on screen actually made me cry. Cold War fears not completely gone.
YES that's how computers worked. The device that receives the phone handset is a MODEM (MODULATOR/DEMODULATOR). A regular phone call was made to a second computer and digital data was converted to audio tones. The sounds you hear at the start are the two computers negotiating protocols and transmission speeds.
Well, the device with the two cups that accepted the handset of the phone was the acoustic coupler. In this movie, the modem would be incorporated in the base of the coupler, but a few years before this, the modem and the coupler would have been separate boxes of hardware. And then about the time this movie came out, modems were designed to not include the coupler part and the modem, which had an interface with the computer, would just plug directly into the phone line.
8:45 The thing he's setting the phone receiver on is a VERY old school modem. It functioned by sending and receiving sounds through the phone itself. People would have to dial by phone to connect directly to a specific server. That's why he was getting different phone numbers.
I love this movie as it brings back such fond memories! I was a kid and went to high school in the 80s, and I had started learning computers around the age of 11 or 12 (what fun programming in BASIC and Assembly on TRS-80s, Vic 20s, and C64s!) my first modem I got was 300 baud, and I was blown away that through a phone you could connect to other computers. Most people didn’t know the first thing about computers so you had to find your small community of computer nerds to belong with. The first software I bought came in a plastic baggy with a xeroxed manual and used a dataset (a cassette tape), and most software I had was hand typed by me copying printouts of source code in the few computer magazines there were. Later when BBS came along it was so cool! It felt like a VERY early internet in a way, only there were very few people, but you could chat on some with others logged in, swap files with each other, and play primitive door games. For the most part, Wargames does capture the feel of computing in those days, and there was something special about it because so few people did it. The slowly character at a time print out on the screen that is still even mimicked in some films today, came from the modems being so slow you could litterally see letter after letter displayed.
The other part of the movie that captures things so well, is the threat of nuclear war; the cold war was our version of climate change and was scary as hell. In 1983 the TV movie “The Day After” came out, and I think it is still the world’s most viewed TV movie. I remember us talking in classes at school about it. In 1984 “Threads” a similar movie came out. I had nightmares for real about nuclear war, and it always seemed it could come at any time.
It's easy to be beholden to your conscience in times like today, but this movie was the height of the Cold War. The idea of there being one button you could press that would destroy the world, and the threat of global destruction, was very real at the time.
The disturbing thing about this movie is how much of it is totally plausible and real.
Even the Joshua AI which was pretty far off when the movie came out is frighteningly close now.
I’d say the movie is very much portraying the top brass’ criticism and anger toward the logically-thinking key-holders as THE problem.
Also, computer hobbyists back then WERE essentially electrical engineers. The trick with the dial tones is because dial tones are just the amplified sound of a certain frequency. Back in the day, the sound of the numbers being pressed wasn’t just a haptic sound, but rather a speaker projecting the sound of the actual electrical impulses that comprise a “phone number”. So what Broderick did was repeat the specific pattern of electrical impulses, with the sound being an extra “oh I get it” for the audience.
My family was stationed at Loring AFB when this movie came out. Awesome experience. This movie shaped my childhood. It's what got me into computers.
Me too, though I was on a base in Germany at the time.
Absolutely real and accurate. Grew up during this time and pretty much used all of that equipment. Dial up modem, 5.25 inch floppy disks and drives etc.
The school year of '83-'84 was my senior year of high school. It was the first year they had an official computer class which you learned BASIC computer language which was part of what they used for the movie, so this really hit home. Unfortunately, I didn't pursue more of an education in computer science. And of course, Ally Sheedy launched a million of missiles in the hearts of many boys. For more "hacking", check out the movie "Sneakers" with an all-star cast which is shamefully underrated.
I imagine at some point you've heard of those old dial up modems and how they made all those funny screeching sounds as they would connect? Well, those sounds were the data being communicated during connection. So these even more ancient modems back in the rotary dialing days used to require a physical phone to send and receive those sounds in order to communicate back and forth. You dial the number like normal, then place the phone into the "cradle" and as long as you're connected on the call the two computers can use sound to trade information.
In the book Ready Player One, one of the challenges is to act as Matthew Broderick's character from start to finish, so you would have to know the movie by heart
The thing MB put the phone on was the modem. In the early 80s, whoever few people that had computers online would connect it through their phone lines. Fiber optics were a thing of the future back then.
As far as I know, this movie is scarily realistic on describing hacking techniques of the times.
Also, it warmed my heart to recognize the guy who didn't turn the key - the great, late, John Spencer, best known for his role as Leo McGarry. I miss him.
- The two missile techs in the silo are John Spencer (who refused to turn the key), and Michael Madsen (who pulled the gun). Spencer is best known for his Emmy-winning role as White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry on 'The West Wing', and he passed away in real life during the show's final season as his character was running for Vice President. Madsen was Mr. Blonde in 'Reservoir Dogs' and Budd in 'Kill Bill'.
- The voice of Joshua/WOPR was actor John Wood, who played Dr. Stephen Falken. Basically, all they did was record him saying the lines in many different ways...then piece together the lines word by word from various takes, then run it through a vocoder. Broderick and Wood would appear in another film during the 1980s, the medieval romance adventure 'Ladyhawke' with Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Leo McKern, directed by Richard Donner. It is a wonderful film that no reactors have touched yet!
- General Beringer played by Barry Corbin ad-libbed a lot of his lines.
- President Ronald Reagan loved the film, but it scared him. It also scared other politicians in Washington, creating a lot of legislation and starting investigations into real gaps in security concerning the military and computers. At the time the film was made, hacking was not illegal. It didn't become illegal until 1990. In fact, Broderick's character was based on a real hacker.
- The film was written by Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker. Together, they also wrote 'Sneakers' with Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier. Parkes became a major producer, with credits like the Men In Black franchise, Sweeney Todd, The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, The Road To Perdition, Gladiator, Deep Impact, Amistad, Twister, and Awakenings. His wife, Laurie McDonald, also has many of the same credits as a producer with him. In fact, they are still production executives at DreamWorks, and have worked extensively with Steven Spielberg. Lasker wrote Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro, and Project X with Matthew Broderick.