Remember Tron?

I do … I remember it very well. For those not in the know, here’s a brief backgrounder, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Tron is a 1982 Disney science fiction film starring Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn (and his counterpart inside the electronic world, Clu), Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley (and Tron), Cindy Morgan as Dr. Lora Baines (and Yori) and Dan Shor as Ram. David Warner plays the villain, Ed Dillinger (and Sark), as well as providing the voice of the Master Control Program. It was written and directed by Steven Lisberger. Being one of the first films from a major studio to use computer graphics extensively, Tron has a distinctive visual style.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, your next question, if you haven’t watched the film that is, may be, “What does an 80s movie have to do with retro video games?”

Everything, I assure you. Tron paved the way for tie-ins between films and video games. The only difference being Tron started as a movie and ended up as a video game … several video games, actually. I even tried making one myself using the Basic computer language in a format well known to 80s book lovers, Choose Your Own Adventure.

Anyway, Tron spawned, as I said, several video games. Atari had plans to develop a real Space Paranoids game based on the movie, but these were shelved due to the video game crash of 1983. Tron wasn’t the only casualty. Atari apparently also scrapped arcade adaptations of Superman III and The Last Starfighter.

Midway, on the other hand, was a little bit successful in adapting the movie into mainstream video games. In 1982, Midway Games released an arcade game of the same name consisting of four mini-games based on sequences in the movie, including the one featuring Light Cycles. About a year later, Midway released another Tron game, Discs of Tron, a sequel that featured the disc combat shown in the movie. There are other Tron video games out there, some developed by Mattel Electronics.

Whew! At this point I’d like to leave you a bit to explore for yourselves. Meantime, allow me time to re-explore Tron by rifling through my stash of (gasp!) Betamax format video cassettes and watch the entire movie.

The Light Cycle scene from the movie Tron. Funny how technology at the time allowed the filming of such a scene using computer graphics but not for video games. Go figure.