WarGames

The object

WarGames, released in June 1983 and directed by John Badham, follows David Lightman, a Seattle teenager who dials random phone numbers looking for a games company and instead reaches WOPR, a military supercomputer that runs nuclear-war simulations for NORAD. Mistaking the live system for a game, he nearly starts the Third World War. It is a Hollywood thriller, not a documentary, but no single artifact did more to install the figure of "the hacker" in the public mind.

A movie that rewrote policy

The film's reach went straight to the top. President Reagan watched it at Camp David and, days later, asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs whether someone really could break into the military's computers. The answer, "the problem is much worse than you think," helped produce NSDD-145, the first US national policy on computer security, and fed directly into the debate that produced the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. A teen movie became a line item in national defense.

Why it matters

WarGames gave the culture both its public face and a new vocabulary. The practice of dialing thousands of numbers to find computers became known as "war dialing," named for the film; a generation of future security researchers has said it was the movie that started them. It also planted a more humane idea than the panic around it: that the kid at the keyboard was curious, not malicious, and that the real danger was a system too powerful to question.

The lesson it set loose

Culture teaches a society how to imagine a technology before it understands it. For better and worse, WarGames is where most people first met the hacker, and its closing verdict on automated nuclear war, "the only winning move is not to play," remains one of the sharpest things popular culture ever said about handing judgment to a machine.