COLD WARGAMES

SOURCE.INTERVIEW.AT.WIRED

[..]It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan;

the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US.

UPDATE : 1983 . A NUCLEAR WAR WASN’T DESTINY ,
when Oko (Russian: Око meaning Eye in old Russian),^{[note 1]} is a Russian (previously Soviet) missile defence early warning programme consisting of satellites in Molniya and geosynchronous orbits. Oko satellites are used to identify launches of ballistic missiles by detection of their engines’ exhaust plume in infrared light failed miserably with multiple alarms of missiles strikes but the Russian Colonel Petrov noticed that they were only false positives and so a right man in the right place saved the World .

In the midst of all this came WarGames. It’s a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game — and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn’t have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the “computer company” he’s infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game — Global Thermonuclear War — is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III.

WarGames had its most indelible influence on hacker culture, not defense policy.The Cold War was ending, but the cyberwar was just getting started.

In 1993, the first hacker convention opened its doors. It was (and is) called Defcon, an affectionate nod to the movie that helped popularize the term[…]

>So we wrote down here a List of Notorious Wargames released upon the “real” contest contended in Wargames,

leaving out the hacking theme of how to get in a “WOPR” .

DEFCON by Introversion Software (29 Sept.2006)

DEFCON is a real-time strategy game created by independent British game developer Introversion Software.The gameplay is reminiscent of the “big boards” that visually represented thermonuclear war .You play the role of a military Commander hidden deep within an Underground bunker. Your mission – to successfully exterminate your enemy’s civilian population whilst disabling their ability to attack your own. Start by launching your battleships, subs and bombers in order to decimate your opponent’s defences. Scramble together your alliances but remember only one can stand victorious.

Nuclear War is a single player turn-based strategy game developed by New World Computing and released for the Amiga in 1989. It presents a satirical, cartoonish nuclear battle between five world powers, in which the winner is whoever retains some population when everyone else on earth is dead.

The introduction includes a homage to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Each player – one human, four computer-controlled – is represented by a caricature of a national leader. If there is a computer-controlled winner at the end of the game, that leader is depicted jumping for joy in the middle of a blasted wasteland, crowing “I won! I won!”. If the player wins only the highscore board is shown.

nxs23.Nuclear.War.1989.amiga.adf.NewWorld.Computing

>Nuclear War Remake :

NetNuclear is a freeware TCP/IP multiplayer remake of the classic 1989 computer game Nuclear War by New World Computing, Inc. The original game was released for Commodore Amiga and DOS, which are both obsolete systems today. That, plus the fact that the original game was single player only, gave me the idea of remaking the game for modern systems in portable C code using SDL for graphics, sound and network functions, and throwing in multiplayer support for extra fun! The game can be played against up to four opponents, which can be computer opponents, human opponents or both at the same time.

NetNuclear is currently available for Win32 only.

Download Version 2 (7 Jan 2010) [753 KB]

Download Version 1 (20 Dec 2009) [763 KB]