WarGames

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"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.

  1. Actually, they're from the game DEFCON: Everybody Dies, which uses the graphics of those screens.