{"id":486,"date":"2008-04-10T07:30:10","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T13:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/?p=486"},"modified":"2008-04-10T07:30:10","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T13:30:10","slug":"tron-memory-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/10\/tron-memory-lane\/","title":{"rendered":"Tron! – Memory Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"memorylane.jpg\"Enter the game grid and… reminisce!<\/em>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?<\/em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\uffe0 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!<\/p>\n

\"\"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\uffe0 discs I presume\uffe0 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.
\nEven 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.<\/p>\n

End of Line<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}