WarGames

Trivia: Closely listen to the TV playing in the background, when Mathew Broderick comes home from school, before all his trouble starts with the Feds. The local news is on, and is saying "a fire broke out in a prophylactic recycling factory."

Trivia: When Joshua starts playing through various scenarios at the end of the film, a list of the scenarios flash over the screen. The research for the film was so comprehensive that they actually managed to acquire the real list of war games the US government had, and the list in the film is directly based on that one.

Trivia: WOPR's name is a historical joke. An early computer used to predict war strategies at NORAD was called BRGR. (Whopper/Burger get it?)

Grumpy Scot

Trivia: The filmmakers originally intended Stephen Falken to be a wheelchair-bound Stephen Hawking-like type. In the end, they just couldn't picture David and Jennifer carrying the wheelchair up and down the stairs in NORAD, so they decided to change his image.

Trivia: The voice on the pocket tape recorder in the infirmary is that of the film's director, John Badham.

Factual error: At the end of the movie WOPR tries to crack the launch-code using brute force. So far so good. When WOPR finds out one digit of the 10 digit code, the first digit locks and the search goes on with the remaining 9 digits. Then he finds the second one, it locks too and so on. Problem is, brute force doesn't work that way. It would be too easy (26 letters and 10 numbers = only 36 possibilities for one digit). Brute-Force works only "all or nothing", you can't sneak your way to the whole code one by one.

Goekhan

More mistakes in WarGames

David Lightman: [On the computer] Hello, are you still playing the game?
Joshua: Of course. I should reach Defcon 1 and release my missiles in 28 hours. Would you like to see some projected kill ratios?
David Lightman: Sixty-nine percent of the housing destroyed. Seventy-two million people dead. [Types into computer] Is this a game or is it real?
Joshua: What's the difference?

More quotes from WarGames

Question: Since David told McKittrick that he thought he was only playing a game and at the time didn't know that he hacked into WOPR, McKittrick tells him that they're still on Defcon 4. Why would it still be on Defcon 4 instead of it going back to Defcon 5 after David confessed everything?

Answer: The assistant to McKitrict explains that US is waiting to go back on DEFCON once the Russians do so.

Answer: McKittrick doesn't believe David. He thinks he's covering for accomplices...most likely Russian spies.

More questions & answers from WarGames

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