WarGames is a 1983 American Cold War science-fiction film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film stars Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Ally Sheedy.

The film follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system, and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.

The film was a box office success, costing US$12 million, and grossing $79,567,667 after five months in the United States and Canada. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards. A sequel, WarGames: The Dead Code, was released direct to DVD on July 29, 2008.

Plot

During a surprise drill of a nuclear attack, many United States Air Force Strategic Missile Wing missileers prove unwilling to turn a required key to launch a missile strike. Such refusals convince John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) and other systems engineers at NORAD that missile launch control centers must be automated, without human intervention. Control is given to a NORAD supercomputer, WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), programmed to continuously run military simulations and learn over time.

WarGames is a 1984 video game developed by Coleco for the ColecoVision, and later ported to the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. The game's goal is to defend the United States against nuclear attack, much in the style of a less frantic Missile Command. The principal designer was Coleco staffer Joseph Angiolillo.

Joseph Angiolillo presented a one-hour seminar on the creation of WarGames at the August 2011 Board Game Players Convention in Lancaster, PA where he showed a DVD of the his creation process and memos and lists from Coleco showing the designers of each Coleco product.

The game was directly inspired by MGM's 1983 film WarGames, but instead of depicting the film's events, it adapts its iconic NORAD scene into playable form. It is one of a handful of games that feature waging nuclear war, and one of the few without an aim of winning it.

The game has been considered one of the best video games ever to be designed for the ColecoVision, and one of the few video games to be truthful to its source property.