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Tron (arcade game)
Encyclopedia
Tron is a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway
in 1982. It is based on the Walt Disney Productions
motion picture Tron
released in the same year. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the science fiction film. It features some characters and equipment seen in the film, e.g. the Light Cycles, battle tanks, the Input/Output Tower. The game earned more than the film's initial release.
In 1983, Midway released the sequel arcade game Discs of Tron
, which was inspired by the disc throwing combat sequence of the film. Another sequel followed in 2003 with the computer game Tron 2.0
. On January 10, 2008, the game was released for Xbox Live Arcade
ported from Digital Eclipse and branded by Disney Interactive.
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy, the arcade game makes a brief appearance, but is displayed as being manufactured and distributed by the in-universe company ENCOM International instead of Bally Midway. It is also displayed as such on the "ENCOM International" promotional website for the film.
: the standard upright, the mini upright, the cocktail (table) version and a sit down enclosed cabinet. The upright cabinet is designed as film tie-in
. It has, as a special feature, two blacklights and fluorescent lines painted on, resembling the blue, red etc. circuit lines from the film Tron. In a darkened room or arcade the lines glow. The sit down enclosed cabinet is the rarest of all the cabinet types. The sit down plays a part in the 2010 Tron: Legacy movie. Walt Disney Pictures searched for 3 years with no luck until they found a video game collector in Slayton, Minnesota who rented his sit down game to Walt Disney Pictures.
All cabinets feature an 8-way joystick for moving, with one button for firing or speed control, and a rotary dial for controlling the direction of the fire (a setup also used in Kozmik Krooz'r, another Midway game). The game can be played by one player or by two alternating players as the controls are made for only one player at a time.
", "RPG", "COBOL
", etc. All four segments of one level must be completed before continuing on to the next level.
in the game results in a cheat option. When the player's tank is not touching the white line in the corridors, it can not be hit by the enemy's fire, but it can still be rammed by enemy tanks.
Recognizers do not fire at the player's tank at all but move at high speed, relentlessly converging on the player's location, and each still requires three shots to be destroyed.
, BASIC
, FORTRAN
, SNOBOL
, PL1, PASCAL
, ALGOL
, ASSEMBLY
, OS
, JCL
, USER.
magazine.
Midway Games
Midway Games, Inc. is an American company that was formerly a major video game publisher. Following a bankruptcy filing in 2009, it is no longer active and is in the process of liquidating all of its assets. Midway's titles included Mortal Kombat, Ms.Pac-Man, Spy Hunter, Tron, Rampage, the...
in 1982. It is based on the Walt Disney Productions
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
motion picture Tron
Tron
-Film:*Tron , a franchise that began in 1982 with the Walt Disney Pictures film Tron** Tron , a 1982 science fiction film by Disney, starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, Dan Shor and David Warner...
released in the same year. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the science fiction film. It features some characters and equipment seen in the film, e.g. the Light Cycles, battle tanks, the Input/Output Tower. The game earned more than the film's initial release.
In 1983, Midway released the sequel arcade game Discs of Tron
Discs of Tron
Discs of Tron is the second arcade game based on 1982 Disney film Tron.-Description:While the first Tron arcade game had several mini-games , Discs of Tron is inspired by the Jai alai sequence in the original 1982 film in which Kevin Flynn is forced to play against Crom, leading to Crom being...
, which was inspired by the disc throwing combat sequence of the film. Another sequel followed in 2003 with the computer game Tron 2.0
Tron 2.0
Tron 2.0 is a first person shooter computer game developed by Monolith Productions. According to Tron creator Steven Lisberger, Tron 2.0 was the official sequel to the 1982 film Tron, but was later declared non-canon by Tron: Legacy director Joesph Kosinski. The PC version of the game was released...
. On January 10, 2008, the game was released for Xbox Live Arcade
Xbox Live Arcade
Xbox Live Arcade is a type of video game download distribution available primarily in a section of the Xbox Live Marketplace, Microsoft's digital distribution network for the Xbox 360, that focuses on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent game developers...
ported from Digital Eclipse and branded by Disney Interactive.
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy, the arcade game makes a brief appearance, but is displayed as being manufactured and distributed by the in-universe company ENCOM International instead of Bally Midway. It is also displayed as such on the "ENCOM International" promotional website for the film.
Arcade cabinet
Tron was distributed in four types of cabinetsArcade cabinet
A video game arcade cabinet, also known as a video arcade machine or video coin-op, is the housing within which a video arcade game's hardware resides. Most cabinets designed since the mid-1980s conform to the JAMMA wiring standard...
: the standard upright, the mini upright, the cocktail (table) version and a sit down enclosed cabinet. The upright cabinet is designed as film tie-in
Tie-in
A tie-in is an authorized product based on a media property a company is releasing, such as a movie or video/DVD, computer game, video game, television program/television series, board game, web site, role-playing game or literary property...
. It has, as a special feature, two blacklights and fluorescent lines painted on, resembling the blue, red etc. circuit lines from the film Tron. In a darkened room or arcade the lines glow. The sit down enclosed cabinet is the rarest of all the cabinet types. The sit down plays a part in the 2010 Tron: Legacy movie. Walt Disney Pictures searched for 3 years with no luck until they found a video game collector in Slayton, Minnesota who rented his sit down game to Walt Disney Pictures.
All cabinets feature an 8-way joystick for moving, with one button for firing or speed control, and a rotary dial for controlling the direction of the fire (a setup also used in Kozmik Krooz'r, another Midway game). The game can be played by one player or by two alternating players as the controls are made for only one player at a time.
Gameplay
The player in the role of Tron has to beat four subgames, each at 12 increasingly difficult levels, with each level named after a computer programming language, such as "BASICBASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
", "RPG", "COBOL
COBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
", etc. All four segments of one level must be completed before continuing on to the next level.
I/O Tower
This segment of the game mimics Tron's quest to enter the Input/Output tower from the motion picture. In the arcade game, the player must destroy large numbers of Grid Bugs with Tron's disc and clear a path to the flashing circle, which must be entered before a timer runs out to complete the section.MCP Cone
This area imitates Tron's final battle against the MCP. The game's interpretation has the player destroying a multicolored wall in front of the MCP cone and getting by the wall, into the cone. A 1000 point bonus is awarded for completing the level, and an additional 1000 points is given for destroying all blocks of the wall.Battle Tanks
The Battle Tanks subgame is not strictly based on film events, but the tanks are taken from there. The player must guide Tron's red tank through a maze and destroy several blue tanks or red recognizers controlled by the computer. This must be done without taking any hits from enemies. If the player drives into the purple diamond in the center of the maze, the tank is warped to a random area of the maze. A bugSoftware bug
A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
in the game results in a cheat option. When the player's tank is not touching the white line in the corridors, it can not be hit by the enemy's fire, but it can still be rammed by enemy tanks.
Light Cycles
This game is well known and associated with the Tron franchise. The player must guide a blue Light Cycle in an arena against an opponent, while avoiding the walls and trails (walls of light) left behind by both Light Cycles. The player must maneuver quickly and precisely in order to force opponents to run into walls. The enemy cycles have a fixed behavior pattern for each level: if the player can find it, the opponent can be defeated every time on this level. The Light Cycles were supposed to look like motor cycles with your head merging into it but in the film they could not due to a low budget.Recognizers
These floating vehicles, colloquially referred to by the public as "stompers" for quite some time, take the place of the tanks at higher levels in the tanks game. The designation "recognizers" was used very sparingly in the film and many viewers might have therefore been unaware of the proper name. In the film, the Recognizers were the vehicles that attempted to stop the light cycles from escaping the game grid by "stomping" on them, and one of these vehicles was also the type of machine that Flynn "resurrected" with his user powers.Recognizers do not fire at the player's tank at all but move at high speed, relentlessly converging on the player's location, and each still requires three shots to be destroyed.
Level keywords
Each of the 12 difficulty levels has a different keyword. They all relate in some way to computing, and most of them are programming languages. The keywords are, from lowest difficulty to highest: RPG, COBOLCOBOL
COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
, BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
, FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
, SNOBOL
SNOBOL
SNOBOL is a generic name for the computer programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4...
, PL1, PASCAL
Pascal (programming language)
Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...
, ALGOL
ALGOL
ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...
, ASSEMBLY
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
, OS
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, JCL
Job Control Language
Job Control Language is a scripting language used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem....
, USER.
Development
The lead programmer was Bill Adams. The original high score in all of the games was programmed with his initials "BA". He also included his children's initials.Differences
The video game's story was based on an early draft of the script for TRON. In the game, the light cycle the player controls is blue and the enemy light cycles are yellow whereas in the film the colors of the opposing players are reversed. The Grid Bugs played a major part as an enemy TRON has to fight whereas in the film they are briefly mentioned and run away. The MCP cone was rewritten as the MCP's tower in the film but remained in the game with the same premise for the player to breach it. The tank level is based on the tanks in the film. Sometimes the enemy tanks are replaced by faster, non-shooting recognizers through a trick in the game.Reception and criticism
Tron was awarded "Coin-Operated Game of the Year" by Electronic GamesElectronic Games
Electronic Games was the first video game magazine published in the United States and ran from 1981 to 1994. It was co-founded by Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel, and is unrelated to the subsequent Electronic Gaming Monthly.-External links:* *...
magazine.
Records
The world record high score for Tron was set in December 2010 by David Cruz of Brandon, Florida. Cruz scored 11,125,999 points based on Twin Galaxies rules and settings for the game.'Sequels
- Discs of TronDiscs of TronDiscs of Tron is the second arcade game based on 1982 Disney film Tron.-Description:While the first Tron arcade game had several mini-games , Discs of Tron is inspired by the Jai alai sequence in the original 1982 film in which Kevin Flynn is forced to play against Crom, leading to Crom being...
(1983): an arcade game which was originally intended as a fifth segment of Tron but was left out because programming was not finished in time. In it, the player engages in disc throwing combat, similar to the film sequence. This did get limited release in arcades and stores in New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
, New YorkNew YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, and other areas.
- Tron 2.0Tron 2.0Tron 2.0 is a first person shooter computer game developed by Monolith Productions. According to Tron creator Steven Lisberger, Tron 2.0 was the official sequel to the 1982 film Tron, but was later declared non-canon by Tron: Legacy director Joesph Kosinski. The PC version of the game was released...
(2003): first-person shooterFirst-person shooterFirst-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
computer game sequel with a new Light Cycle design by Syd MeadSyd MeadSydney Jay Mead, commonly Syd Mead, is a "visual futurist" and concept artist. He is best known for his designs for science-fiction films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron...
who had also designed them for the film.- Tron 2.0 Killer App (2004): a port of Tron 2.0 as videogame to XboxXboxThe Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console...
and Game Boy AdvanceGame Boy AdvanceThe is a 32-bit handheld video game console developed, manufactured, and marketed by Nintendo. It is the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001; in North America on June 11, 2001; in Australia and Europe on June 22, 2001; and in the People's Republic of China...
with significant changes to the game. The Xbox version features new multiplayer modes. In the Game Boy Advance version there are Tron and Discs of Tron included.
- Tron 2.0 Killer App (2004): a port of Tron 2.0 as videogame to Xbox
- Space ParanoidsSpace ParanoidsSpace Paranoids is a first-person shooter arcade game designed and released in 2009 by 42 Entertainment for the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International. The controls are a joystick and a track ball. The game is designed to look and feel like the game seen in the film Tron...
(2009): arcade game with joystick and ball controls, created by 42 Entertainment for the 2009 San Diego Comic Con. It has also made an appearance at Disney California Adventure's ElecTRONicaElecTRONicaElecTRONica is a nighttime event at Disney California Adventure Park, part of the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. Located in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot, ElecTRONica premiered on October 8, 2010...
event beginning in 2010.
Other
- Videogame series for MattelMattelMattel, Inc. is the world's largest toy company based on revenue. The products it produces include Fisher Price, Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels and Matchbox toys, Masters of the Universe, American Girl dolls, board games, and, in the early 1980s, video game consoles. The company's name is derived from...
's IntellivisionIntellivisionThe Intellivision is a video game console released by Mattel in 1979. Development of the console began in 1978, less than a year after the introduction of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. The word intellivision is a portmanteau of "intelligent television"...
console:- Tron: Deadly Discs (1982): based on the disc throwing combat in the film Tron. It has also been released for Atari 2600Atari 2600The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in October 1977 by Atari, Inc. It is credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor-based hardware and cartridges containing game code, instead of having non-microprocessor dedicated hardware with all games built in...
. - Tron Maze-a-Tron
- Tron: Solar SailerTron: Solar SailerTron: Solar Sailer is a game that was released by Mattel for the Intellivision in 1982. The game is one of four released for the console that required the Intellivoice module...
(1982): required the IntellivoiceIntellivoiceThe Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module was an adapter for the Intellivision, Mattel's home gaming console, that utilized a voice synthesizer to generate audible speech...
module.
- Tron: Deadly Discs (1982): based on the disc throwing combat in the film Tron. It has also been released for Atari 2600
- Open-sourceOpen-source softwareOpen-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...
computer games released under GNU General Public LicenseGNU General Public LicenseThe GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
via download for multiple platforms:- Armagetron AdvancedArmagetron AdvancedArmagetron Advanced is a multiplayer game in 3D that attempts to emulate and expand on the light cycle sequence from the film Tron. It is available for Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, AmigaOS 4 and OpenBSD as free software released under version 2 of the GNU General Public...
: based on the Light Cycle game from the film Tron. - GLtronGLtronGLtron is an open source computer game based on the light cycle portion of the movie Tron. It is released under the GNU General Public License and is available on multiple platforms.-Gameplay:...
: based on the Light Cycle game from the film Tron. - KTron: another game based on the Light Cycle game from the film Tron. KTron is one of the KDE GamesKdegamesThe kdegames package contains games written for the KDE. kdegames provides games in a number of genres including card games, arcade games and board games.- Arcade :*KBlocks - A Tetris clone*KBounce - A JezzBall clone for KDE...
distributed as part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE)KDEKDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
( kde.org/applications/games/ktron/ ). - WTron: a clone of KTRON for the Windows platform ( wtron.sourceforge.net ).
- Armagetron Advanced
- A legally licensed Tron game is available for the Tomy TutorTomy TutorThe Tomy Tutor was a home computer produced by the Japanese toymaker Tomy. It was architecturally similar- but not identical- to the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, and used a similar 16-bit CPU. The computer was launched on the UK and European markets in late 1983...
computer, but it was only released in Japan and is unrelated. In the USA, however, for copyright reasons this game was retitled as Hyperspace.
External links
- Twin Galaxies High Score Rankings for Tron
- Tron - homage site with descriptions of the game
- Coin-op Classic ... Box-office Bomb! - article covering the development and release of the game
- Tron 2.0 - Community Links
- Twin Galaxies Interview with TRON Champion David Cruz
- Flash version of game on Tron Legacy website