The film is the specification. Every scene in which a computer does something is catalogued below in our own words, next to what this reconstruction actually does about it — built and machine-checked, built but only eye-checked, still open for somebody to build, or ruled out. The scene evals drive the real router, core and Lisp through these beats on every run: a failing eval means the film contract broke, and the movie does not change.

WHAT THE MACHINE IS ALLOWED TO SAY

No film assets are hosted here — no stills, no audio, no transcript. What the machine does reproduce is a short, fixed list of the film's own short lines, kept to the beats that cannot be reconstructed without the words. That list is a ceiling and not a backlog, and it is the long form of the disclaimer at the foot of every page on this site. Read the scene map below against it: where the machine is quiet, it is quiet on purpose.

Canonical short lines this repo intentionally reproduces (established fair-use ceiling — do not expand without an explicit owner decision, recorded below): SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?, GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN., HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?, WOULDN'T YOU PREFER A GOOD GAME OF CHESS?, A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY. (also rendered in the film's three-line break), HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?, INDENTIFICATION NOT RECOGNIZED BY SYSTEM (sic — the film's own on-screen misspelling), --CONNECTION TERMINATED--, WINNER: NONE, ** IMPROPER REQUEST **, >>> CHANGES LOCKED OUT <<<, 'GAMES' REFERS TO MODELS, SIMULATIONS AND GAMES WHICH HAVE TACTICAL AND STRATEGIC APPLICATIONS., EXCELLENT. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME., CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE REMOVAL OF YOUR USER ACCOUNT ON 6/23/73?, YES THEY DO., ONE OR TWO PLAYERS?, PLEASE LIST NUMBER OF PLAYERS:, X OR O?, STALEMATE., WANT TO PLAY AGAIN?, DOD PENSION FILES INDICATE CURRENT MAILING AS:, DR. ROBERT HUME (A.K.A. STEPHEN W. FALKEN), 5 TALL CEDAR ROAD, GOOSE ISLAND, OREGON 97014.

CEILING CHANGES

The ceiling is a deliberate limit, not a backlog. It moves only when the owner says so, and every move is recorded here with what was added and why — otherwise a longer list reads as evidence that the rule is soft.

CEASE RANDOM FUNCTION is typed by the operator, not printed by the machine, so it is input rather than reproduced output — listed here for honesty rather than counted against the ceiling.

Wording for both was verified against the abs0/wargames beat-accurate replay linked above, not from memory. The built1n transcript stops before this point in the film, so its silence is not evidence of absence — a mistake worth not repeating.

SCENE MAP

Status: ✅ implemented & eval'd · 🟡 implemented, visual-compare only · 🔲 candidate (open contribution) · ⛔ non-goal.

THE DIALOGUE, BEAT BY BEAT

Documented by the BSD-2-licensed replay script abs0/wargames and the frame-accurate transcript in built1n/wargames (use it to verify, don't copy it wholesale):

The home terminal is explicitly David's IMSAI 8080 (see period-systems.md). Two systems the film names but never shows — Protovision (the Sunnyvale games company David war-dials for, reaching WOPR by mistake) and Pacific Telephone, the phone company he phreaks — were originally contributor-open placeholders on David's dial list, the peripheral-system analog of the WOPR game-catalog placeholders. Both have since been promoted to real dialed systems (§8, §9); none remain.

GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR

• Film sequence: WHICH SIDE DO YOU WANT? / 1. UNITED STATES / 2. SOVIET UNION / PLEASE CHOOSE ONE: — David picks 2 (Soviet Union), then PLEASE LIST PRIMARY TARGETS BY CITY AND/OR COUNTY NAME: — he lists LAS VEGAS and SEATTLE. ✅ implemented: GTW now opens with side selection; the human can play either side; targets accepted as bare city names (single-token spellings, e.g. LASVEGAS) or LAUNCH <CITY>.
• The ending montage: Joshua self-plays ~130 named scenarios at machine speed, each ending WINNER: NONE. Originally sourced from a partial fan transcription (1–59, ww31987.wordpress.com, nelc.tumblr.com) plus extensions of ours; the 2026-08-03 batch replaced the list with the complete on-screen set cross-checked across three frame-level sources — abs0/wargames, nick-black.com dankwiki, filmjournals.net. ✅ implemented: on a live exchange reaching NO-WIN, the sweep is appended by the W.O.P.R. executive itself, out of its own 157-entry table (wopr/scenarios.inc) — 2,802 characters, so ~47 s at the home terminal's 600 baud, which is the movie. It was the bridge's until the executive took the whole turn; this note named the bridge, and the bridge's file, one move behind until #247.

THE BIG BOARD, AS IT WAS ACTUALLY MADE

From the HP 9845 project, fast-rewind making-of, and IMDb trivia:

• Graphics were generated by HP 9845C desktops driving HP 1345A/1347A monochrome vector displays (2048×1513 addressable), filmed one frame at a time through R/G/B filters — ~1 minute/frame, 50,000 ft of negative over seven months (Colin Cantwell). Implication: the big board is MULTI-COLOR vector art, not monochrome green. ✅ our board now colors trajectories per direction (inbound-to-US vs inbound-to-USSR) over the green map. Further color styling should iterate against stills.
• The set had 12 wall maps (up to 18 ft) + ~125 monitors; maps include world, polar projection (missiles come over the pole), and North America regionals. ✅ implemented: the Big Board's MAP: WORLD/POLAR toggle — azimuthal-equidistant disc, great-circle tracks over the pole, per-track labels.
• ✅ Home-terminal strategic map — GTW prints a 78×11 ASCII map (war start + on-demand MAP) with track lines that extend between reprints, echoing the film's growing arcs. The coastline art and its UNITED STATES / SOVIET UNION captions are reproduced verbatim from the zompiexx/wargames WOPR map() render (§4, Andy Glenn) under its README grant — credited in CREDITS.md. Their render is a static picture; the live cities (hand-pinned onto their landmasses), growing missile tracks, and hit markers over it are ours. Documented approximations: straight-line tracks between hand-pinned cells (the film's boards draw great-circle arcs, polar where iconic), and on-demand cadence rather than an always-on screen — a 600-baud teletype prints the block in ~37 s, so it is paid once, not per turn. The terminals render at a fixed 80 columns (crt-kit CRTScreen columns={80}) and scroll horizontally on narrow screens instead of reflowing — so the map keeps its shape on mobile, the way a real 80-col terminal would. A formerly disclosed approximation is now removed: destroyed-city markers used to reconstruct from the STATE's per-side counts as "the first N cities by index" (mark_dead), so after a state round-trip an X could name a different city than the HIT telemetry reported. The STATE block now carries per-city dead bitmasks (USDD/SUDD, MIL-STD-1753-style bit intrinsics), so the map's X markers are per-city faithful across round-trips (golden gtw/tests/10-map-dead-roundtrip).
• ✅ SYSTEM/1 systems tier — a peripheral-system contract now exists (docs/systems.md) with a COBOL reference implementation (systems/reference/); the airline (§6) is now built as a real COBOL system on this tier (Rung 3). The school dial-in system named in §4 remains a Rung 4 follow-up.
• Animations were rear-projected 16 mm film loops, live on set. The "big screen" look is projected light, slightly soft — supports the existing glow/bloom styling.
• The WOPR cabinet prop was wood with metal-finish paint; its countdown panel was driven by an Apple II off-camera. ✅ now a surface: the pack's emulator/web/wopr-panel reproduces the cabinet face — lamp banks + the launch-code readout locking in as DEFCON falls (S11/S13). The code string on its readout is the film's documented prop detail, reproduced as a label, not dialogue.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE ARGUMENT

This page is what the reconstruction owes the film. What it owes 1983 is a separate claim, made module by module and falsifiable the same way.