WOPR Terminal
A WarGames-style NORAD terminal, rebuilt from scratch — talk to WOPR, play tic-tac-toe, checkers or hangman, or trigger Global Thermonuclear War. No framework, no backend, no live AI.
Key Features & Outcomes
- Tic-tac-toe backed by a real minimax — genuinely unbeatable, not a scripted 'AI'
- A scripted conversation layer in WOPR's own voice ("HELLO", "WHO ARE YOU", "ARE YOU JOSHUA") — deliberately not a live model call, to stay both authentic to the film and free to run
- Sound synthesized entirely with the Web Audio API — no audio files, since the CSP a page like this runs under wouldn't allow loading one anyway
- A physical CRT monitor, not a full-viewport terminal — a bezel, a fixed 4:3 screen, scanlines and phosphor glow scoped to the glass, not the page
The brief
Recreate WarGames' NORAD computer interface — not the film, the interface. Boot text, phosphor glow, the menu of games WOPR lists ("Falken's Maze," "Global Thermonuclear War"), and the one thing everyone actually remembers: an unbeatable game of tic-tac-toe.
The build
Proof first: the whole interface, state machine and all three games were validated as a single interactive Artifact before a real repo existed at all — the riskiest part wasn't the games, it was whether the terminal felt right. Once it did, porting to a real, deployed project was packaging, not redesign.
- Three real games, not one. Tic-tac-toe (true minimax), checkers (click-to-select, legal-move highlighting, capture-preferring AI), and hangman (a Cold-War word list) — all client-side, all built after the interface itself was proven.
- A CRT that's actually bounded. The first version filled the whole browser viewport — nothing read as a physical object. Rebuilt as a real monitor: a plastic bezel, a fixed aspect ratio, scanlines and vignette scoped to the glass rather than the page.
- An original backdrop, not the film's own frames. Reference stills from the actual movie came up as an idea for backgrounds — flagged instead of used directly: recreating an interface style is transformative, embedding literal copyrighted film stills on a live, attributed site isn't. Built an original tactical-grid backdrop (pulsing target dots, dashed tracking arcs) that evokes the same mood without reproducing any specific frame.
Why it matters
The whole thing runs as flat, static files on Cloudflare Workers — no framework, no database, no server. Every "AI" in it (WOPR's dialogue, tic-tac-toe's unbeatability) is either scripted or a real, small, from-scratch algorithm, not a model call — a reminder that "feels intelligent" and "calls an LLM" aren't the same requirement, and conflating them here would have added cost and latency for a worse, less authentic result.