Tron 2.0 Game

Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes "Gamespot has an article about the new Tron 2.0 game in the works to accompany the movie. It looks like they are being very true to the original, the new light cycles are even being designed by Syd Mead, the same guy who designed the old ones. You will get to visit locations from the movie, as well as play around inside desktops and PDAs." IGN has another article on the game. Watch out for the gridbugs.

It's About Time

Us older gamers have been waiting for this, especially with all the sequels and reviving of classic titles... any mention of a movie sequel as well? Nah, that would be too good....

ah, the life of a bit: yes... no...

Cool.

There once was a movie called Tron
with blinkenlights flashin' off/on
Bruce Boxleitner resisted,
Jeff Bridges assisted
Twas the triumph of brains over brawn

For a free alternative

The game reviewed looks impressive, but if you can't wait, then try the free Armagetron
(http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/)
for a 3D light cycles game with "moviepacs" for making the players & grid look true to the orig movie. Network play is v.addictive.

j

Re:For a free alternative

There's also glTron [gltron.org], another Free light cycle game. Runs on *nix, Win32 and MacOS X. It's perhaps not as feature-full as Armagetron, but if you want a pure light cycle game, it rocks :-)

Greetings programs!

I think the beauty of releasing a game like this now - with the way graphics cards & systems have advanced, you can actually make the in game graphics as good as (if not better than?) the original movie graphics.. should be a lot of fun :)

Linux?

Now, if there's a game that would justify making a Linux version - this is the one!

Are they planning it?

Why wait for the light cycles

The light cycle game already exists.

Here. [gltron.org]

And with a version for just about every OS.

Tron is a Disney product...

...and we all know what Disney thinks of the rights of end-users, don't we?

There are countless games out there worthy of your entertainment dollars/pounds/yen. Do the right thing, boycott Disney, and buy one of those other games instead.

If you have to buy this game for nostalgia reasons (hey, I have fond memories of wasting countless childhood hours playing the original Tron arcade machine too) then wait a month or so after the game's release and buy a second-hand copy.

Syd Mead is the vision of the future...

"Futuristic" as a style was practically created by Syd Mead. I understand he's pretty old, I'm glad he's still around and am realy looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

Tron? In A Game?

I did enjoy the Tron movie very much, but I must admit that I'm skeptical of whether or not it can be turned to a game. It seems, really, that the movie was a technical masterwork, but not long enough to give a developer following the plot much to follow. Essentially, the plot could be summed up in three sentances:
1. Man goes into evil computer
2. Man fights evil computer's minions & evil computer itself
3. Man wins
Of course, there was cool CGI while that was going on, but the movie itself did not seem to be very long (at least, to me), and the "cool graphics" defense might not fly with this game anymore. Does anyone know whether they will be adding extra features or levels to enhance the playability? Not to say I won't play it, extras or no, but I think it might be better to have the game's plot diverge a bit more.

Dad, the textures suck!

Dad, the textures suck!
No, son, it is supposed to look that way. Big blank surfaces rendered in at least 1600x1200 32 bit colors on a GF4. Note 2ghz P4 reguired.
Just look at how many shades of grey(heh) and blue they have crammed into this game.

Interesting gameplay

How cosmic, I was actually reading about this article earlier today and now it's mentioned on Slashdot. Anyway reading the article I noticed some very interestings things about the gameplay. The most interesting of which was that of the classic Tron disc as the primary weapon for the game. As the game progresses you get upgrades for the disc, or as they refer to it "sub-routines", and they will let you do crazy stuff like guide the disc around corners, get it to fragment in mid-air and so on. Then there is the fact the disc can double as a shield. Should definitely make for some very interesting multiplayer games I reckon.

However there is one let down to date, and that will be lack of light cycles in multiplayer (refer to quote) but in all it should pretty exciting and innovative. I definitely recommend reading the article, it lays down the premise of the very well.

One thing we won't see at this point are lightcycle multiplayer games however. This is something they really wanted to do right from the start, but have found that the current networking technology available just wouldn't be able to handle the mode. Lag issues would just cause havoc in a game that would need extremely fast reaction times from all parties.

Return of a tech cultural phenomenon

It's slightly disturbing that geeks have their own cultural phenomenons. It's even more disturbing that I'm old enough to recall their introduction. What a blast. I'm not usually a fan of games based on movies but this one looks to be interesting, not so much as a game but as a precursor to a vary promising movie. It looks to be a blast.

--CTH

The name of the sequel has been leaked out!

Naturally: "troff"

...Specialist from the Visual Basic department at Microsoft didn't want to respond on the announcement on slashdot.

tron 2.0 movie

for all of u who read PCGamer, u should already know this, but here it is for all others. the tron 2.0 movie isn't gonna be produced for sure yet, they're just considering it. they don't even have a full script yet as far as the article goes, but this one guy is considering to direct it and they say that it's not too unlikely that it will happen.

--tzan

Movie Website still active, also

Very simple teaser website at this link [tronkillerapp.com]

Discs of Tron

Tron was a cool arcade game, but Discs of Tron was, perhaps, one of the coolest games ever made.

Discs of Tron was basically taken from the movie scene with Tron fighting Sark in the arena with balls of energy. They each stood on discs of energy and the goal was to knock your opponent off.

Some called it 'the frisbee game'.

The arcade game was amazing. First, the controls. On the right (or was it left?) you had a joystick with a trigger button and a thumb button. Trigger throws an energy ball, button goes into blocking mode.

On the left, you had a twisty knob that spun freely and used an optical sensor to detect motion. It could also be pulled up and pushed down. It was used to aim your energy ball throw.

Aiming was incredibly precise. Combining the two, you could do strafing shots unlike anything possible in a FPS -- by spinning the knob in time with moving the joystick, you could set up a set of three energy balls in the air that crossed sark's disc in a gridded fashion.

You could also set up amazing rebound shots off the wall and, in later levels, the ceiling. As well, in later levels the discs would move and, if hit by a blob, disappear.

The whole implementation of the game was freakin' perfect. It was so well done.

There were 1,000 of what was called the 'environmental unit' configuration of the cabinets made.

You literally stood inside the environmental unit. It had six channel surround sound-- stereo front, stereo rear, a center channel near the control deck and a bass channel in the rear of the cabinet that you were leaning against.

Totally immersive, especially for 1985 or so.

The implementation was interesting; two Z80s + a totally custom TTL based video computer to handle the 3D vector style (it wasn't truly vector and not everything was vectorized--- there were filled areas) graphics.

Totally kicked ass.

No fucking way

I saw the Gamespot review a couple of days ago and for a moment got excited but when I saw that Disney Interactive is the producer, I'm going to avoid this one like the plague. In light of the crap [slashdot.org] that Disney has pulled recently, Disney is boycotted by my family. Just so you'll know, I believe that IP has its place in our society for the most part but Disney and their ilk [slashdot.org] have stepped out of line and it seems they're only going to get worse.

I love Tron as it was one of my most favorite movies while growing up (and still is) but Tron 2.0, either as a game or a movie, doesn't exist to me.

At last..

I remember seeing the movie Tron, and I thought, how cool it would be if I had computergraphics like that in my computer (an Amiga 1000 at that time). And now, with the advancement of tehcnology, I can have.. without the need for a Cray Y MP! Sometimes technology is so beautiful, it brings tears in my eyes..

Yah. tron 2. yah

fuck yah.

Video games is my life. I want some 3d light cycle action.

3d light cycles I hope.

Tron and Robotech were the shit after transformers.

Oh sweet irony

I think it's kind of ironic that when the movie was made, they specifically limited the environments inside the computer to a few basic colors - greys, blues and reds - and to simple geometric stuctures (mostly), to make it a "believable" computer interior. And now with the game coming out trying to mimic the movie, the designers will have to stick to that style, even though it is well within the capability of todays games to present a much richer and more detailed world. So it's like an old, perceived, limitation of the computers that is coming back to haunt them.

Anyone remember Windjammers?

It was sorta like the disc game that was in the original Tron... Imagine if they did something like that for the new Tron 2.0 game. It would be so sweet! Even as a minigame

How about that...

Turning TRON into a video game, now that's just crazy

No Mention of the Sequel

No mention of the movie sequel [imdb.com]? I mean, come on, it's Disney... why would they be invovled if this wasn't part of a movie tie in, right?

I Can't Believe It!

All of this talk of Tron, and not one person mentioned http://bomns.sf.net, my site where you can download two DOS versions of Tron with source code and all! Gee, with the seven hits we get every month, you'd think that EVERYONE would know about it by now.

More on Syd Mead...

Syd Mead also was responsible for much of the design of Blade Runner, and did some work as an artist on Aliens. He has produced work for a couple of video games too...I think Beneath A Steel Sky and one of the Wing Commanders...

2003!

Wow. So, not only is Tron 2.0 (aka Tron Killer App [imdb.com]) going to be in out in the fall of 2003, but The Matrix Reloaded [imdb.com] (aka The Matrix 2) and perhaps The Matrix Revolutions [imdb.com] (aka The Matrix 3) will be as well.

2003 is going to be a kick-ass year for geek movies.

A Simpsons quote:

"Okay, has anyone here seen the movie 'Tron'?"
"No"
"No"
"No"
"No"
"No"
"Yes... er I mean no"

Really cool Tron games

Does anybody else remember the Tron games for Intellivision? They were some of the best ever games for that system.

Tron Deadly Discs [intellivisionlives.com] was my favourite. It wasn't like the arcade game Discs of Tron, instead you and the enemies ran around a playfield throwing discs at each other. Eventually the Recognizer would come and you'd have to hit it in just the right spot to disable it. It was pretty easy but still lots of fun.

Tron Solar Sailer [intellivisionlives.com] was the coolest Intellivoice game. It was a pretty weird concept that I can't really describe too well, but it actually had quite a bit to do with the movie.

There was another game, Tron Maze-A-Tron [intellivisionlives.com] which I didn't think was very good. Basically you just ran around a maze doing stuff.

Of course the arcade games were a lot of fun too but for a youngster with very little money it was a lot nicer to have something to play at home.

Poor Light Cycle Re-creation

It's already been done, the best light cycle redition BY FAR can be seen here [madblast.com].

The light cycle portion is about 1:30 in.

What is the point?

Seriously... Tron was a movie that predicted, essentially, the first-person shooter. Wow! Whaddya know? Those predictions came true! Except what it didn't predict was the balance of technological advances that would occur in the process of making computer games. Graphics rendering obviously is much more advanced than they predicted. My desktop computer can render almost photorealistic scenes in real-time, whereas the TRON supercomputer had to render everything as blue-and-white lines.

And a technology that they greatly overestimated was the human-computer interface. The people in TRON are in a true virtual-reality environment, while gamers now (including those who will play this game) are still stuck using WASD and a mouse.

So my question is, what's the point of taking a step backwards in graphics, and failing to take a step forward in HCI? I think it would be more "faithful" to the spirit of TRON to bring the story up-to-date, with modern graphics, and just pretend to have a better interface. For the same reason Sam Raimi (rightly) brought Spider-Man up-to-date with biological web-shooters etc. There's no reason to accentuate the miscalculations of the past in a modern adaptation of an old tale.