Based on the true story of Akila Couloumbis's wartime boyhood, Newbery Honor winner Audrey Couloumbis, writing with her husband Akila, explores what it was like coming of age in Nazi occupied Greece, and tells a story of family, friendship, and unlikely heroes.

There's no way to win. The game itself is pointless! But back at the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war. That there can be "acceptable losses."

In the 1983 movie WarGames, a NORAD supercomputer runs through all possible scenarios for bilateral nuclear war, finding they all lead to global annihilation. It calls nuclear war “a strange game” and concludes, “The only winning move is not to play.”

“War Games” was the seminal geek hacker movie that inspired many a young cyber sleuth when it debuted in 1983. The movie told the story of how a kid found a back door into a military computer and accidentally set off a nuclear confrontation and launched the careers of actors Ally Sheedy and Mathew Broderick.

Lasker was inspired by a television special presented by Peter Ustinov on several geniuses, including Stephen Hawking. Lasker said, "I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating—that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS.

The writers based General Beringer on General James Hartinger. Hartinger was the Commander in Chief of NORAD in the early 1980s.

It turned out that there was a good reason WarGames was so accurate: for their research the screenwriters had interviewed Willis Ware, who wrote a 1967 paper called Security and Privacy on Computer Systems and for years headed the computer science department at the RAND Corporation, an Air Force-funded think tank.