Tron! – Memory Lane
Enter the game grid and… reminisce!If you’re of a certain age–and if you’re a geek–Tron changed your life. Rarely has a fantasy been so fascinatingly realized as the day-glo game grid of Tron. What a movie! What an extravaganza! What a geek-raised-on-BASIC’s dream come true! Do computer game geeks dream of electric sheep?It featured Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, and a young and scenery chewing Jeff Bridges. All played roles in the “real world” and it was fascinating to see how the computer avatars differed from their real world counterparts. Bridges was the User caught in the game, the old scientist who invents the technology that can (preposterously) transform matter into computer bits and bytes was a sphinx-like guru in the mainframe, Boxleitner’s Tron program was the hero, the flipside of his nerdy straight laced human counterpart, and David Warner–the CEO of the evil corporation–was Sark in the game world. He wasn’t the Master Control Program – he was the lackey to his own creation. And then he grew gigantic at the end.
Looking back, it was a pretty bad movie. The acting was hammy, the computer technology and jargon inaccurate and silly, and that’s probably why people who were adults when the movie was released tend to disregard it completely. But for kids, it was sublime and fantastic. Why? Because it appealed to what was going on in our heads as we played games. It went beyond our imagination, but still accomplished what we wanted it to. We wanted to enter the game grid. We wanted to be our computer avatar and fight the crude enemies for real. Plus, what kid didn’t like the Tanks, Recognizers, the disks (that made Frisbee a deadly game) and, above all, the Lightcycles?It was a bad movie but it was also a completely realized movie. Not in terms of story, there were gaping holes, but in terms of design. The combination of colorful neon, the drabness of the skin tones and backgrounds, the awesome nascent CGI effects (that lightcycle scene is still watchable today) and, of course, Wendy Carlos’s awesome digital, cold and soulless, yet sad and evocative soundtrack, all came together to make Tron a visually and auditory stunner that stayed with us all. On top of that it was a messianic allegory. A User enters the world where Users are Gods. He is mortal and in danger and he visits a program for council (the Sphinx-like old guy) and then goes on to confront the enemy and￠ ok, it isn’t much of a Christ allegory after all, but it’s filled with mythological imagery. Jeff Bridges is Spartacus, a messiah, and a game designer all rolled into one!
Then came the games. Bally Midway’s Tron apparently made more money than the movie over the course of its long life. It can still be found in arcades and movie theaters today and it’s still eminently playable. Oddly it functioned like Journey. You are presented with a timer and a crossroads of sorts. One path randomly led to a maze-like tank battle, another the lightcycle arena, a third to a strange portal guarded by insect-like spiders (why weren’t these in the movie?), and the last one to the MCP cone itself. You used a cool-looking ergonomic joystick (not fun for lefties) and a dial that spun Tron’s arm. You fired￠ discs I presume￠ to do damage to the enemies. Wendy Carlos’s score filled your ears. The music was a real standout for it’s time and it still sounds great today.
Even better, if more obscure, is Discs of Tron (available for download from Xbox Live Arcade (provided you have an Xbox 360). It’s a great game that basically recreates the scene from the movie where Bridges fights a program on a series of concentric rings. You use discs here instead of the Trac-Ball-like weapon from the movie. Once again you have control of your character with a joystick and you target with a dial. Aim it behind the bad guy, send your discs, dodge and deflect his, and jump from platform to platform. It’s a game of chance and skill, rebounding is the best tactic, and it’s a real pity you can’t play it in 2-player mode.
End of Line
April 10th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Disks of Tron was one of my absolute favorite college vacation time (and quarter) wasters … our group of friends would go to our old fave arcade once or twice a week and have a blast. The game appeared as a bonus in the Tron Killer App GBA game a coupe of years ago – but the controls didn’t really work.
The original Tron game I also liked, and I have even played both as recently as Dec ’07 at Disney Quest. My ‘mad skillz’ have waned, but they are still loads of fun.
These highlight a general problem with arcade translations – many games are really dependant on the original controls.
As for the movie – yeah, it doesn’t translate well to the current generation, and doesn’t watch all that well these days. But it remains cool much as The Last Starfighter’s full CGI space scenes remain cool …
April 10th, 2008 at 8:54 am
GamerDad,
I just watched Tron the other night for the first time in about 15 years. I was surprised how well it stood up, at least the section within the MCP. Yes the CGI are simple and very dated. But I felt like because of the simplistic graphical style it still held up okay. The corporation and arcade storyline outside the computer showed their age and lost their relevance. But the concept of a sentient computer limiting freedom and controlling lives is still a core ethical question within Science Fiction.
The computer animation feels specifically stylized and binary now. And since it is not replicating an actual environment has the freedom to be more abstract. The ending is left blank either by choice or by default. 25 years ago the lack of an ending and epilogue could have felt like an abrupt end. Today, the lack of an epilogue serves as a classic Science Fiction cautionary tale, expressing both hope and uncertainty for mankind’s future.
Granted I’m childhood memories shape some of my impression, but for those that haven’t seen it in a while. It deserves the 96 minutes.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Loved Tron. I’m a huge fan.
It has Frisbees, it has black-light lit neon colors… it has computer games… can I get more of my favorite things into one move? I think not.
The movie is admittedly kinda dorky nowadays, but has held up surprisingly well for having such a technology-heavy theme. I showed it to my local youth group last year and had some favorable responses. (Not anyone’s first choice, but they thought is was “cool” in a unique/artsy/weird/retro sort of way…)
I’ve been looking into building my own stand-up arcade machine for a little while now, but the lack of a rotating dial controller is one of the big reasons holding me back. (If I were to buy an old arcade game Tron would be one of my top choices…)
April 10th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
/me looks over to his 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.
I love Tron. Sure, part of it is nostalgia because I went to see it on my 9th birthday with my mum, but by that age I was already enamored with computers. The movie is a landmark in computer graphics (despite much of the famous stylized imagery actually being hand-drawn) and certainly had an influence on my ten years in the computer graphics industry.
As far as the games go, I was never overly fond of the original arcade game, I actually preferred Discs of Tron. Thus the game I wanted for my Intellivision was Tron: Deadly Discs. Unfortunately, the store gave me the wrong game – Tron Maze-a-Tron. After my initial disappointment I decided to keep the game, and it ended up being one of the first games to give me the satisfaction of completing it. Likewise, Tron 2.0 is one of the only console FPSeseses I’ve ever actually finished.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Tron still is great! I agree with the several comments about the computer graphics being stylistic enough that you don’t want or expect it to be Halo 3 (or even Civ 3!) 3-D type realism. And though the arcade bit is definitely enough to draw some confusion from ‘kids nowadays’, it definitely fits into the whole nostalgia genre that is so big nowadays. The ‘evil corporation’ bit is definitely still relevant (I know! I work in the telecomm industry!), and the soul-less computer take over is more relevant than ever!
My favorite part of the movie was the jai-alai battle(s) that introduced us to Tron the person(/avatar), but in the arcade game, the only piece I could really get the aiming figured out on was the MCP cone. The light cycles were cool and the first couple of races were easy enough, but oh man did I get crushed quickly after that. Plus I never had very many quarters to blow on arcade games anyway (insert world’s smallest violin here ;-)).
P.S. Evidently computer game geeks dream of electric light cycles!