WarGames
- "How about a nice game of chess?"- Joshua
WarGames is a 1983 film in which the US military needs a machine (which they have dubbed "WOPR") to automatically manage the launch of nuclear weapons, cause those silly humans seem to have reserves about blowing up a few million people. A scientist named Stephen Falken designs an AI to run the machine, which he names "Joshua" after his dead son (it makes sense in context). Of course, rule #1 of fictional AI's is that they must all either be stupid or evil, and this one doesn't seem to realize that: A. Nuclear War has no winners, and B. There is a difference between a game and the real world. Then a teenager hacks it, because all 1980's IBM PC's were powerful enough to randomly find a military computer and hack the US's nuclear missile launch systems. After much confusion is caused, the hero, scientist, military, and girl that always comes along on adventurous plots to provide a love story and sexiness stop the computer and save the world from nukes.
An infamous screenshot from the movie of the missile launch display screen that shows the world and a bunch of nuke sites[1] has showed up in DYOS more times than should be possible, usually either when nukes were fired or just for the fun of it. Also, Rhiza Kalanin has a function on her PDA that can play all the games that were included on the computer in the game, and then some more stuff.
- ↑ Actually, they're from the game DEFCON: Everybody Dies, which uses the graphics of those screens.