The movie was a hit, costing US$12 million, but grossing over $79 million in the US alone. The NORAD set was the most expensive single movie set ever built up to that time, at the staggering cost of $1 million.
The teenager, unaware of the machine's real purpose, discovers what he believes to be a simulation game called "Global ThermonuclearWar" and begins to "play." Unbeknownst to him, WOPR sets in motion preparations for a real attack against the Soviet Union. With the aid of the machine's creator (Wood), disaster is narrowly averted when the hacker manages to teach WOPR about the futility of war by getting it to play endless drawn games of tic-tac-toe against itself which segue into cycles through all the nuclear war stategies that WOPR has devised. WOPR then learns that "the only winning move is not to play."
It was in part a cautionary tale about technology and the dangers of leaving machines in control of unleashing destruction, in an echo of the Doomsday device of . It also generalized the idea of the Cold War period in the 1970s and 1980s that somewhere there was a "button" that when pressed would nuke the whole world away (the button, marked "LAUNCH", had several prominent close-ups), and its final sequence graphically demonstrated the concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Also, it was one of the first movies to deal with teenage hackers and their activities.
At least one computer/video game was licensed from the WarGames movie, published in 1983 by THORN EMI Video under the movie's name and the alternative name Computer War. It was released for the Atari 8-bit family and the Commodore VIC-20, and possibly for other platforms as well.
The user account "Stephen Falken" was present by default for a long time in the operating systemNetBSD, in homage to WarGames.
