I loved WarGames. Now Mental Floss has a fun article of 15 Surprising Facts about the movie, including the fact that President Reagan was also a fan:
The film garnered a lot of fans, but perhaps
none more famous than the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who
saw the film during an opening weekend screening at Camp David, arranged by
[co-writer Lawrence] Lasker.
…Reagan was fascinated by the film, so much so that the
following week he stopped a meeting regarding upcoming nuclear negotiations
with the Russians to give everyone in the room a full breakdown of the plot.
When he was finished, he asked General John W. Vessey Jr.—then the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to look into just how plausible the film was. Vessey
did some research and determined that WarGames actually
was a prescient indicator of a rising threat in the (then) very new world of
cybersecurity. A little more than a year later, Reagan signed a classified
national security directive titled “National Policy on Telecommunications and
Automated Information Systems Security.” It was the first computer security directive given by a
president, all because he’d seen a movie about a kid who wanted to play some
computer games.
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