Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 94: Tron

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

Greetings, programs! Anthony Schwader of the Game & Movie podcast joins Jeremy to discuss games about a movie about games: Disney's Tron, and all its tie-in video game creations.

This week in Retronauts, greetings programs. Jeremy Parish coming to you from the GameGrid and with me here in a hotel room in sunny Milwaukee, Wisconsin is Anthony Schuader and Anthony you are the host or co-host of game and movie podcast. We take apart a game and a movie with every full episode and kind of break it down critically and, you know, go over all the details and yeah, get all the information on it? Yeah, and we've kind of been doing that this, the past few months with retronauts. Occasionally, we will do an episode on licensed games. And we've actually started to take the time to look into what the license material, you know, that inspired the games is all about. And so we're trying not to do too many of these, one, so we don't step on your toes, but also because we don't want people to be like, hey, that came in for a video game podcast. What's all this

movie talk? But, you know, like, you know, like. To me, at least, video games and movies are all kind of bound up together. You know, they're all part of things that I, they're all things I grew up with and things that I have a lot of nostalgia for and, you know, help shape my interests and even to some degree, like, you know, who I am. So I am, you know, trying not to abuse this, but at the same time, it does seem relevant. And I can't think of any situation in which it would be more relevant than in a discussion of Tron.

Yes. Tron is the quintessential video game and movie movie, movie, it's all these things entwined together. And so we're going to talk about the Tron movies. I don't think we're going to talk about Tron Uprising because I haven't seen it. And also it's all not really retro at this point. But we're also going to talk about the games. So for the first half, we'll talk about the movies and kind of how they reflect video gaming and, you know, a very specific part of history, of the history of video games. And then we'll talk about the video games and how they reflect their time as well.

That sounds good. Yeah. I think that Tron, I think you hit it right on the right on the head there. It really is. It eats itself as far as as movies and games go. It eats itself, you said? Yeah, it's cannibalistic, you know. One side eats the movie, one side eats the game. So it's like an Oroboros, but not? Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. That's a strange way to look at it, but I'll take your word for it.

Yeah, so anyway, Tron, of course, the Walt Disney movie released in theaters in America in 1982, directed by Steve Lisberger, who, according to your notes, did not direct much else. Yeah, he was, uh, Tron was really the movie that he made his name off of. He did some other stuff. He did like a, he co-wrote and directed something called Animal Olympics, which was an animated movie starring Gilda Radner and Billy Crystal. I feel like I vaguely remember the name Animal Olympics, but I've never seen it. But that's like, that's like SNL right there. Yeah.

It's like primetime, you know. It's absurd. Like, that's exactly what I didn't think that I would see when I clicked on his bio. And he did something else called Hot Pursuit, which is another comedy starring John Cusack. But, yeah, other than that, that's really what he's known for. Oh, you've got to mention Slipstream, a sci-fi adventure flick from 1989 starring Mark Hamill. And, man, anything involving Mark Hamill in 1989 was probably not that good. No, not at all that was kind of like the needier of his career between Star Wars and,

Batman, the animated series. So Slipstream came his way and he was like, oh, yep, I'll take it. Yeah. There are no, there are no like cat costume people to talk to for a video game. So what the heck, Steve, let's make a movie. That's right. Yeah, but Tron was very much inspired by the arcade scene of the era and just the burgeoning computer and video game industry. And one thing I've always been impressed by about Tron is that the script actually seems really savvy to some of the realities of computers and the computer industry. It definitely takes some liberties. And there are some things where you're kind of like, if you know much about computers, you're like, why is there a program named RAM? Ram is not a program. Ram is like what you use to run your programs. But okay,

You know, some specifics, some specifics aside, I feel like it's an actually a pretty smart script. And it's, it feels very much inspired by, you know, not so much inspired by it. But it feels very much like it belongs to the late 70s, early 80s, everyone wants to be Star Wars. You know, there's a rebellion against the evil empire kind of thing. It does feel a little bit like that, doesn't it? It's a classic good versus evil type of thing in a sweeping way like Star Wars, especially with the sequel there, Uprising, definitely got wifts, big wifts of Star Wars in that one as well. I didn't think so much of the Star Wars in that one, I guess with the blades, the swords.

But I mean, you have basically, like, in the original Tron, you have sort of a chosen one story. And there's actually two chosen ones. There's Jeff Bridges who's like, not so much chosen, but he just happens to be godlike. And then there is Tron, who actually is chosen and is supposed to be like the one who saves everything. But, you know, they have their glowing weapons and they have the cool vehicles. And even the villain's sark, like his headpiece kind of looks like Darth Vader's helmet. It does. Yeah.

There's definitely a lot of, like, Disney wanted to have it Star Wars. And they didn't have much success with the Black Hole a couple of years before that. That's right. And that was kind of more in some ways, like, almost like a 2001 or silent running kind of movie. in addition to also wanting to be Star Wars. So they couldn't really figure out what they wanted to do. I feel like this one's more on point. This is more of a feel-good blockbuster action flick,

but it's also kind of brainy. Yeah, it appeals to the nerdy side too. Yeah. And again, it is very steeped in the computer industry, Silicon Valley, and all of that of the era. And the golden age of arcades. I mean, the movie pretty much begins in an arcade that, oh, God, I would love to just be in that arcade.

and walk around and just, that's actually one of the least appealing things I remember from arcades. I think smell correlates of memory very well. Yeah, I don't know about that. Like the sticky soda. Oh, no, no, no. No, not the smell, but like the sights and the sounds just, you know, that kind of dark room and there's all these glowing phosphor tubes just as far as I can see

and all of them were belching out different electronic sounds. and neon across the top. Yeah, it's great. Like, Flynn's Arcade is just, it is such an emblem of that era. And I do remember back when things like that existed, I'm that old. I'm right there with you. Yeah, it's a slice of paradise, really. The sounds, now that you bring that up is definitely more important, I think, than the smell would be.

The smell's a little absurd, but I correlate that with nostalgia. But, yeah, I mean, these are, this arcade here, right in the beginning, it's, it's, it's, the big setup for basically what Flynn has done is he is programmed this game. You should mention who Flynn is. That's right. He doesn't just own the arcade. He's also Jeff Bridges. That's right.

Yeah. And Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, but also on the digital side, clue. Right. He's very briefly clue. That's actually how the movie opens is with Jeff Bridges' virtual avatar. It's basically like almost like, um, a proto second life or something where like the person, the programs you create resemble their programs in this sort of mystical digital world. This is the one part that kind of

takes liberties is like the mysticism of the computer realm. But yeah, like Clue is is Flynn's virtual avatar, basically. Yeah, created in his image pretty much. Yeah, I don't think that was necessarily like the intention of the programmers. But, but the idea was that Kevin Flynn, was a very talented young programmer hacker type, and he created a bunch of really great video games, and it seems like his company was absorbed or taken over by a larger corporation and one of the more dishonest executives in the company, Dillinger, played by, oh, crap, what's his name? The guy in stars, he's in a bunch of Star Trek stuff, David Warner, yes, played by David

Warner, uh, in, in a sort of like chillingly callous executive sort of way, like the, the quintessential rich white man. Um, he, I guess got Flynn fired and then took credit for all of his programs. And so the entire point of this movie, like the driving McGuffin here is that Kevin Flynn just wants credit for the cool games he created because he's the one who designed, you know, the recognizer program. that space paranoids, that everyone is playing in the arcades and that he's a genius at, because of course he is, he created it. But he's been reduced to just showboating with the game that he created in an arcade that he runs

while Incom and Dillinger get super rich off of his creation. Yeah, he's reduced to that, basically. And so you can tell that it's just eating up at him, really. And so he forms a plan to get inside of NCCOM. And he thinks that if he can get inside of NCCOM, he can get the program back. He can hack into that, you know, NCOM computer and retrieve his lost rights, basically, and claim the games for himself once more. So he starts the plan into action. Right.

Yeah. So Clue is his attempt to create a program that can access. Incom servers remotely, and it keeps getting flushed out of the system. So he's like, I have to go to the building itself and, you know, make this happen. So he recruits his friends who still work at Incom. Let's see, Alan Bradley and then Laura. What's her last name? I don't know her last name.

She may not have one. She may be from just like, you know, the Laura tribe. Right. So, yeah, so they still work there and they're like, okay, yeah, we'll help you break in, but we're not happy about it. Meanwhile, Flynn's friend Alan has created a program that's going to be like a security system for income and will keep tabs on the system to prevent a new one from breaking in like Flynn's been trying to do, but it will also keep things from inside the system from misbehaving. What he doesn't realize is that Dillinger has created a program called the master control program that MCP that started out as like a chess program and has just acquired other programs and has basically gained sentience and now wants to take over the world. by hacking into the Pentagon and launching missiles or something.

And he's like... He's stealing these programs from everywhere. Yeah, Dillinger's kind of... You almost kind of feel bad for the guy because he's an ass and a jerk and he's a thief. But at the same time, he's in a no-win situation because either the MCP gets shut down and everyone finds out what he's up to

or the MCP doesn't get shut down and he's responsible for like the end of the world. So that's kind of what we're up against. But anyway, Alan Bradley's program is named Tron, and that becomes sort of the, even though the movie is named after Tron, he's not really the main character, but he is like the most sort of essential character. Like Flynn is turned into a computer program somehow digitized and goes into the computer world and is basically like a god. And so his job there is to find Tron and get Tron to the MCP so he can shut down the system. Yeah, the computer actually realizes what he's doing when he's messing around with breaking into NCOM. And there happens to be, you know, a laser behind him.

And, yeah, basically activates the laser and brings him right into the digital world there. So it's sentient, yeah. And even knows what's going on in the outside world. So anyway, that's enough of the premise and the setup. But what I find interesting going back to Tron is that, like I said, it's a very savvy movie. It shows a lot of, I feel like awareness of, I feel like awareness of, the industry. You know, there's, there's some insider comments like the first time you see Dillinger talking to MCP, he's like, ah, you've seen one consumer electronic show, you've seen them all.

So, you know, that's like, that's some insider pool, inside baseball. But I'm especially, like, I look at the way income has functioned and it's very sort of Atari-esque and a little bit Apple-esque. Like, you, you know, there are all these stories. I've just been reading Atari Inc. Businesses fun. And, you know, the relationship between Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, there's always like one instigator and one genius. Like, you know, the guy who has the ideas and the guy who makes stuff happen. And there's something very much sort of captured about that in this movie, because you do meet the guy who started Incom and he's Walter, the old man, who works down in the basement messing around

with research. And you get the idea that he just kind of wants to be, you know, like hack with all these, these cool inventions and do science and stuff. And meanwhile, this company has grown up around him and he's not really getting treated fairly. He's kind of treated with contempt by the executives. It's very like, yeah, like you see some Steve Wozniak in there. You see this kind of like constant power struggle. And I don't know if that was necessarily. the intention by the writer Bonnie McBird. I don't know how inside, how much of an inside track she had on Silicon Valley, but maybe it's just like, that's how business happens all the time.

But looking back at history, like, Tron could have, like, that's just another crappy genius getting abused story from Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's a really good point that you bring that up. I think, I think it's somewhat of a coincidence. that maybe it happened or an accident, but it's funny how that parallels the stories of today with what you had said. I think a lot of the visuals in Tron, a lot of the visuals in Tron remind me of like Raster Graphics, very well-lit, straight lines, a lot of fast-looking angles, and it's exciting to look at it. It's really visually pleasing. Yeah, Tron is a really interesting movie from a visual perspective because most of the story takes place inside the virtual world.

And once you enter the virtual world, you don't leave it until Flynn and Tron save the day and Flynn escapes. So like the first 15, 20 minutes or so are all set outside in the real world. And then you spend an hour in the computer world. And there are two very different looks for these two worlds. Even the sounds are different. The soundtrack was by, what's her name, Wendy Carlos. And like when you're in the real world, it's a lot of orchestration. They even got Journey to write a few songs for the soundtrack, including the sort of amusingly named 1990s thing.

I don't associate Tron or journey with the I don't associate Tron or journey with the 90s, but okay. But yeah, like outside, in the outside world, it's all orchestrated. And it's like just sort of traditional, you know, of the contemporary filmmaking, like the direction and the cinematography. But then you go into the computer world and the music becomes mostly synthesizers, like analog sense. It's a great soundtrack. It really puts you there, too. It puts you in the visual space.

And you're like, looking at the visuals, hearing the sounds, you're like, this makes perfect sense. No, absolutely. Yeah. But there's also a very distinct look. You mentioned that the computer world looks like raster graphics, and the visual design of the film was a joint project between Sid Mead and Jean-Gerard, the French comics artist, Mobius. I don't know. I don't know either of them. They've just done a lot of cool stuff.

They're great, they're great visionary artists. So it accounts for this sort of, you know, the computer world, so the defining look to it is sort of neon. except that it's all filmed in black and white. And then the neon is a special effect where they basically drew over certain lines in the environment and on characters' outfits to create the effect of printed circuits. And that's done with like the same light effect

as, you know, lightsabers and Star Wars or laser beams. So you have this, like you go from, you know, real world full color to this super desaturated black and white world where it's just limited colors. like blue and red beams, and the colors actually sort of, like in Star Wars, you know, the red beams mean its MCP's taken over. It's evil. Whereas blue is like the good guys. And then after the MCP has vanquished, the entire world lights up and it's, you know, a more varied color scape. It's even stops being totally desaturated and color comes into the landscape.

Yeah. And another interesting thing about the, the visual design, like I mentioned, you know, Sinmead and Mobius. Mubius is especially known for the sort of organic shapes in his work. Actually, let me check and just make sure that I'm not just making up Mubius' involvement. I'm positive he worked on this, but I don't want to propagate a lie. I guess Wendy Carlos used the analog synth soundtrack, but the score was recorded using the Mug modulator synthes. The Mug.

Moog. Moog? Is it Mogue? It's Mogue. I've been saying it wrong for so long. Everyone does. Yeah. But also she did film scores for Clockwork Orange, which used a very chilling soundscape in that and the Shining as well. So that kind of makes sense there as well. Okay. So I looked it up and Mobius did work on the conceptual design for this, the landscapes and stuff. And you really see it. Bullseye. So you get this kind of like this very angular sort of eight-bit almost looking world, but then it's also very organic and fluid. It's just a really distinct look.

Yeah, the overall visual design is very appealing because it's very stylized. And something I didn't really notice until I was reading your notes is that inside the computer, there's never any camera motion. It's always like, well, I think there are a few scenes that have some motion. A little bit, yeah. But it's pretty much a static camera the entire time. The camera was actually nailed down to the floor so it wouldn't move. In fact, one of the quotes was a car wouldn't budget. Right. Not that I'm sure they were crashing cars into their cameras. But yeah, like that's a strange decision. But I think it had to do with the way that they did the, it wasn't like rotoscoping, but they did the light effects, you know, over everything. To keep it consistent and probably, I'm guessing it like minimized the amount of work they had to put into the glowing effects.

I think it had something to do with the actual hardware at the time, not being able to process. both live actors and the effects. So what they had to do then is minimize the movement between that. And then because what they're doing is layering cells over cells here and using those effects, those drawn on effects. And then, yeah, at that time, that's the way they did it. So it's because of the animation, basically. Yeah, basically.

Yeah, I mean, Disney definitely had technology for that sort of thing. You know, the multi-plane camera in Pinocchio is kind of a famous thing where you could have like nine or 12 or something layers, but it was very expensive. And also that was done with hand-drawn animations. So they had complete control over everything at every stage. Whereas this was, you know, live actors who always perform their routine, you know, each take a little differently on real sets. And, you know, when you start moving a camera through that, you're never going to move a camera the same way. Like that was actually one of the big innovations of Star Wars. Wars was that it was all computer controlled, but that was working just with, you know, props. So they could, you know, have the computer move the same way every time they did an effect shot, but it was shooting props, which could be motorized and computerized to move a certain way. You just can't do that with people. So I'm sure that's why this happens in this. You didn't really see this kind of hybrid animation, real life performance very much. Like Disney had done some of that in the 60s, and 70s with stuff like Song of the South and Pete's Dragon but it was

it was just like a dragon yeah yeah it's just a very different approach like you don't look at this and think oh Disney animation but it was just done in a different way

and this movie did make use of a lot of computer animation but not in every scene most of the computer stuff that you see in scenes with live actors is actually just like sets and hand-drawn cell effects

whereas the computer scenes are very sort of specific. And like when you see just vehicles or like that weird cutaway to the grid bugs that has no point whatsoever in the movie, like the light cycles, that's all computer generated, but you don't see people in these scenes. And there's definitely a segregation between computer and live animation. It's very surreal. That's the first thing that that came to my mind after watching it again for the first time in many, many years. Going back to it, I thought, wow, I can't really believe what I just saw. And it really, I think it looks great today even. I mean, even in that old, you know, way, like the raster graphics and everything, it really does look slick.

Yeah, I mean, it's a 1982 vision of the future, but it's a different future than what we ended up getting. And that always makes things feel, I guess, a little timeless. Like if, you know, I love it. You see stuff like in Star Trek people using their pads. And here we are. Like, we do that too. And so that doesn't seem so out of place. It's just like, oh, commonplace.

But, you know, the stuff that didn't happen in Star Trek, you know, like, I don't know, what hasn't happened? Teleportation, I don't know. Yeah, beam me out. Yeah. Like, that stuff seems, oh, sci-fi. Tron is like, what if the analog world were the future? Well, it wasn't. Everything turned digital, way more digital than it was in the world of Tron.

So, yeah, so it's all different. I enjoyed the movie. I did. I think the plot's a little weird. It's a redemption story, really. I mean, at the end of the day, it's, and I thought it ended really abruptly with, you know, climbing on the top of the roof and just one line would said. Oh, basically, like, yeah, Flynn is now an executive at the company. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a little abrupt. I think they just had to add some sort of quota to say, here's what happened after. No, Flynn didn't go to jail for breaking into income. Yeah. I mean, I guess I give them credit. They could have fluffed that end out. you know, hard and, uh, bored everyone to tears, but, yeah, short and sweet. And actually, the movie itself is only like 90 minutes. So it's, or 100 minutes or so. Yeah, it's, it's much shorter

than modern movies. Thank goodness. I enjoy it. Yeah. So when was the first time you ever saw this movie? Oh, yeah. I was, I was, uh, I would have to say I was eight or nine years old. I'm 41 now, so that's, that's, that's. So back when it was fairly new. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. So I, so I, so I, I, so I, was probably seven or eight or nine when I first saw it. So I'm 43. And yeah, I saw the, I saw the movie. I feel like I saw it in theaters. I must have. I definitely saw it a lot on home video or like on television. But I feel like my parents took me to see the movie. I'm pretty sure I saw it on HBO or TV somewhere. we didn't get the Disney channel, so it wasn't that. Right. Yeah. I was fairly, I wouldn't say obsessed to the movie, but I was really fascinated by it.

My mother owned, she had a subscription to the Smithsonian magazine. And there was one issue of the Smithsonian that had like a breakdown of how they did the computer effects. Oh, cool. And I would just like pour over that article and I didn't understand anything about it because it was all very technical. And it's funny because I recently. I recently hunted down a copy of the Tron soundtrack on vinyl because I was like, I want to listen to, you know, analog synths on vinyl. That's just such a great idea. After listening to The Stranger Thing soundtrack, I was like, I need more of this. So I hunted that one down because I have such sentimental memories of it. And the person who sold it to me, you know, was an original pressing from like 1982. They had all this like feely stuff that they had clipped and put into the sleeve. So there were like these. coupons to have a free play of

the Tron arcade game at Aladdin's Castle. What a treasure trove. There were movie reviews from I think Newsweek. The movie review is basically like, I don't really understand this, but I think it's good. This is beyond me. I'm old.

I'm so scared. Hold me. But then there was that Smithsonian article and I read it and I'm like, oh, now I understand all of this. Like I have the understanding of computers and computer graphics. to, like, get what they're talking about when they say rasterizing and all that stuff. Yeah, it's cool how you've come full circle in that way, looking back on it now. I'm sure this movie propelled me down that path.

Yeah, absolutely. If it inspired you the way you say it did, it definitely had a good influence on you in what you do today even. Well, I feel like it's a very iconic movie. It does a great job of, you know, we've talked about how it takes place in the virtual world. And it does have that weird element of spirituality where basically programmers are gods and programs are their like supplicants. And there's basically like Tron is trying to get to a temple to like pray to Alan, which is basically, you know, like basically providing I.O. So I think I think essentially like the idea is that the prayer going to the tower or whatever is just. like providing feedback on to the screen. So, you know, like everything that happens in the computer

happens very quickly. Obviously, it's happening, you know, the scale of milliseconds. Right. So I think the idea is that whenever a program goes to the tower, it's basically like providing user feedback. And then it goes away from the tower and runs through its processes for various cycles and then returns to the tower. Right. So it's a really interesting like sort of quasi-religious take on computer science and to me that's the most dated part of the movie is like the idea that computers are weird

they must be magic there's like a god inside of here what is going on inside this thing here it must be it must be deities but yeah the the religious overtones are a little odd but everything else about the movie like the it's just like sometimes watch a movie and you're like, oh, this movie was designed to inspire video games. Like some of the

Star Wars movies, the prequels, like there were sequences where I was like, they're pretty much this like this scene is supposed to be made into some sort of platform game. This movie obviously was made to create video games, but it feels really authentic. And I feel like the, the sort of iconic elements it introduces to the screen translate really well into video games. You know, You have your light cycles and you have the data disks, which are basically, like, effectively a diskette, which has all of the programs code on it. That's right. And it works like a boomerang, really. You throw it, goes into an art.

As a discette does. Oh. A disquette? Yeah, like a floppy disk. Oh. Don't you ever, no? You don't ever throw out a hunt wild game with your discets? No, no, I haven't yet.

That's something I'll have to try out. Yeah. Anyway, like all of these elements, it's hard for me to divorce them from the idea of video games because they have been a part of video games for so long. And they're in a movie about video games. Like, yeah, just the nature of this movie is to me really interesting because it is so closely tied to the early days of video games. Like I said, the arcade that you see Flynn own. at the beginning of the movie like it's very much

all the games from 1982 that everyone was playing you know your dig dugs and your Gallagas and everything except you know space paranoids because it's imaginary

but actually you know it's kind of weird that they never really made a space paranoid actually they did and it's in yeah it's in Disneyland or world I'm not quite sure about that

but there's one cabinet there and it's right next to a Tron cabinet with the Encom logo. Nice. Instead of Valley Midway. So it's like the Regget Ralph

board so they created. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. I did not realize that. But they didn't make it for mass consumption.

And I feel like that was a mistake. But other than that, yeah. It's just, um, Tron is a part of, it's almost like a part of the background radiation of video games. Like it's, it's just there. You can't,

you can't strip it away from the history of video games. It's static. Yeah, it's righteous and, uh, we'll always be there. just like the history, just like Pac-Man. Though less successful than Pac-Man. In fact, this movie was kind of not a great success at the time. No, it wasn't.

They released it twice, in fact, once, I believe in, I might be getting this wrong, but once it was like in the middle of the year, maybe June, and then they tried to re-release it in 1983 in February, and it did even worse. In fact, the arcade game grossed more than the movie, So that's a lot of quarters. That is a lot of quarters. I mean, the movie grossed 33 million on a budget of 17 million, so it wasn't a failure, but, you know, it didn't quite make twice its original budget.

So that's not considered a huge hit by Hollywood standards. And going back from what was the movie that they did right before Tron was with live acting as well? The Black Hole? The Black Hole, yeah. They actually did quite a few live acting movies back then. But, yeah, that was their other big science fiction attempt. After those two kind of flopped, they did not attempt to do another one of those for another 10 years. They had all relied on just animation for the next 10 years, and that's how burnt they were from it.

Yeah, well, Disney was just in kind of a bad way in the 80s. Like, their 80s animation was not that great either. So the fact that that was, sorry. You're going to break my heart. Sword in the Stone, Grey Mouse Detective. The rescuer is not, rescuer is down under. just not that amazing. I hate to say it. I guess it's been a while since I've seen any of those.

I've never seen Sword and So-and-So. That movie's super short. It's like an hour long. That's what I remember about it. That's a short. It's based on some, oh, anyway, this is all getting off into the weeds. But yeah, Disney was kind of in a bad way. And I guess this movie kind of put them there in a way. But I don't know. To me, it's always been sort of like this colossus.

not necessarily like a great movie in terms of directing and filmmaking, but, you know, just for what it represents and what it attempts to do, I think it's pretty fantastic. Yeah, it's just good enough in all areas. It doesn't completely excel in any of them, except for visual effects, I believe. But, yeah, the story is above average. You know, the soundscape, I think the soundscape is good, too. Yeah, the soundscape is really unique. It does, it has very iconic sound effects, too. Like, I can hear the sound of something de-reshing. Oh, yes, de-resing. And that's when people just die in the virtual space. Well, when they're deleted. Yeah, deleted. Thank you. But, yeah, like, yeah, the soundscape was great, too. I feel like, you know, it took them almost two decades to make a sequel.

Wait, no, almost three decades to make a sequel, 25 years. And I am not really a sequel. super huge fan of Tron Legacy. Like, I think it's neat that they followed it up, but it's not really the vision that I kind of had for myself of what a Tron sequel would be like. I wanted something, I guess, different than what it was. But yeah, basically their clue, the program that Jeff Burr just created, sort of went sentient, went rogue, and tried to take over the computer world, and then wanted to take his computer army into the real world and conquer that. So, okay, sure.

I loved it actually better. But, yeah, Jeff Bridges, now that you mention it, Jeff Bridges is kind of like the modern day Luke Skywalker, like the sequel Luke Skywalker, and that he's basically hidden and he's super powerful and as a hermit and kind of sacrifices himself at the end to stop the evil thing that he created. Except this happened before the Star Wars. sequels.

Yes, it did. So, yeah, J.J. Abrams totally just ripped off. That's interesting. The part where he's driven from his little cubbyhole up in the mountains there, and he comes back and basically saves

Quora when her arm gets sliced off or whatever. He has this scene when he enters the end of line club, where he just kneels down and touches the floor. and everything lights up.

And that really brought to mind just extreme power. You know how much power he has then. And yeah, that kind of reminded me of Star Wars in a way. Just like that absolute good. Here's this absolute good coming and just lighting everything up. Yeah, the sequel's premise is that Jeff, not Jeff, Kevin Flynn vanished and his son is like,

Dad, where'd you go? And it turns out that Flynn went to live in the computer world and create it like a utopia or something. He had found a miracle there. And the miracle were beings that created themselves. They had no creators at all. And he found that they all had special properties and wanted to harness that and bring them back into the real world for the good of mankind. Right. And the character you mentioned Cora, played by Olivia Wild. She was one of those miracle people, right? That's right. And she's the last of them, it turns out. I don't know. I was always interested in the idea of revisiting Tron with like, you know, 90s technology and sort of the rise of the internet.

And how would that affect things? Like, how would they adopt the concepts in Tron to reflect, you know, the modern, well, not modern at this point, but the internet of like 20 years ago. But that never happened. And the movie we got ended up being more just kind of built on the lore of Tron as opposed to sort of trying to tackle, you know, real world, real computing concepts, which is part of what made the original so interesting to me. I see what you're saying there. And like it's cool that, you know, like they updated the look and everything is more like glass-like. It's much more sophisticated. And they got daft punk to do the soundtrack. Yes.

So it's much more contemporary. temporary, but yeah, it just didn't really stick for me. But that's okay. You know, I still have the original. And of course, we have, we have all the original games. No, we do. Well, there are quite a few of them. Gamefly is the best way to buy and rent all your favorite games. Gamefly puts video games where they belong in the hands of the gamers who love them. With your monthly subscription to Gamefly.com, you can pick your favorite games from more than 9,000 titles and have them mailed directly to your door. Don't waste your money buying this year's new game titles before you know if they're worth it.

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Should we start with the original? Yeah, so how many of these games have you actually played? I played Tron and I played the discs of Tron, the extended environmental cabinet with the lighting and the shield that comes over you, the joystick. Oh, man, that was a treat. but arcade owners got really, really mad about that game because it took up so much room. Yeah, I can understand that. They're not going to make money if this thing's taking up four arcade machines.

Right. So you never played, you never played Tron 2.0 or Solar Sailor? No, neither of them. I've played Tron 2.0, but Solar Sailor has always been a mystery to me. I found out a lot about that game yesterday. Yeah, I noticed that. But why don't we talk about the original Tron first, the Midway game, because I feel like we've talked about this before. Yeah, the Midway episode of Retronauts probably, but not in the context of how it works as an interpretation of the movie,

which is to take some of the sort of action scenes from the movie and turn them into video game competitions. Yeah, little bite-sized pieces. Yeah. I think they did all right. The only thing that really didn't show up is the tank battle. in the original Tron, as far as I know. Yeah, I mean, there are tanks, but you, and I guess Jeff Bridges, no, no, he controls a recognizer.

So, yeah, at no point do the good guys ever drive a tank. Those are just bad guys material. But, yeah, basically each of these mini games, there's four mini games, and you can choose any of them, and you have to complete them all, and then you go on to the next cycle, which is harder. These are all just like interpretations of, you know, other video games. games. So, like, light cycles is serpent, basically, or snake.

Yeah, snake, right. And then tanks is, what, combat, would you say? Yeah, combat or tank, yeah. And then what, Super Breakout is the I.O. Cone? Yeah, basically, like you play as Tron trying to break through the shield outside of MCP to get to the IO Tower. Yeah, that's it. And then the bricks kind of rotate around the tower itself. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, I never could beat that one, though. I never figured out the technique for that. And the game is interesting because it has this. Oh, and the fourth event is the gridbugs, which is, I guess, I don't know. Oh, it's so weird. Yeah, it's like. It's like tectites from Zelda, how erratic they move, and they also reproduce. Right.

And then you just kind of have to shoot them and get around them. And then there's only two ways that you can enter the center from the left and the right. and you have to kind of carve a path through these grid bugs and then get to the center so you can go wherever you need to go. Yeah, and this one I can almost never beat either just because of the way they're so erratic and they respawn. And, you know, once you complete the first cycle, then you have to, you know, fight more. And I don't know how it's possible. Like, there's so many of them. But the controller, the arcade cabinet is really interesting because it's very beautifully designed.

It has that kind of Tron look to it, including this huge plastic, transparent plastic controller. It's just like just a great piece of arcade hardware design. But the control system is like a joystick and then there's like a spinner and you can rotate how you aim. So that's especially handy in like the gridbug scene where you're basically like moving with one stick and then using the spinner to control the direction that you fire your arm in, or you fire, I guess, your disc in. Yeah. And also, it's good with the tower, the super breakout one, because you control where your arm shoots, basically, the discs. And that dial is kind of like an arcanoid dial, right?

Yeah, it's a rotary dial, which you saw in a lot of, you know, like Pong. Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah, so it's, you know, kind of an arcade tradition, but it's something that never really made its way into Homes. outside of some specialized controllers. So that never translated well. But it really does feel like an early attempt at doing a dual stick shooter. Like I guess Robotron 2084, I want to say, was around the same time. And it did like the dual stick thing.

Whereas this didn't quite quite have that, you know, that knack for it. So instead of use the spitter and it's less intuitive, I think. Yeah, it's one step below that Robotron perfection at the time. So I have a little bit of trivia about this one here. This game has 12 difficulty levels, and each of the levels are actually named after programming languages, like RPG, Cobol, Basic, Fortran, Snowbowl. And it goes on and on. Pascal's in there, JCL, user. So what are these difficulty levels? Are they just more things attacking you?

Well, each time that you complete all four of the games, like you said, the game kind of what cycles over, but is harder. That is your second level of difficulty, and each level of difficulty is actually named after one of those programming languages. How do you know the names of them, though? Where does it say that? It was, I believe I got this from Wikipedia, actually. I can't imagine ever making it to the 12th difficulty level. No way, no way. Like, at the second difficulty level, you have to fight like three tanks at once in the tank game.

So I'm assuming that the 12 level is like 30 tanks. I don't know. Yeah, it'd be impossible. I don't ever want to see that. I do want to see it, but I don't want to have to play it myself. There it is, right there. It doesn't sound fun. A good speed run.

You mentioned something about the snake segment, the light cycle segment being called Matrix Blaster. Is that something referenced in the movie? I don't know if it is or not, why they would call it that. light cycles games. I think that's a direct reference, but I don't know about Matrix Blaster. I don't think anything in Tron has ever mentioned Matrix Blaster.

Around the same time, there was a Tron game for Atari 2,600, which there's, I don't know, the arcade game is pretty abstract and a little challenging in that sense, but it makes sense, like you recognize stuff from the movie, whereas Adventures of Tron for 2600

is just weird. It's another one of those Atari 2,600 proto platformers where there's a whole lot of stuff happening, and it's all very like sort of stripped down and abstract, like I said, and you're just like, what are all these things I'm doing? What is my goal here? Yeah, it's very simplistic graphics. You're in this single colored room with four walls around the edges there, and doors open up, and all of a sudden we have little block-shaped humans or, you know, whoever, coming at you, shooting at you. No, those are recognizers. Oh. They're like the little, you know, the space paranoids, except they're tiny. They're trans-ized.

Oh, they are. Okay, yeah. They're the cutest little space paranoids. But you have to destroy them anyway. And you can also shoot the doors to jam them up. And that's something that's odd. If you shoot two doors that are directly across from each other, you can access a bonus world. I don't know.

You would have to find that on accident. think. I imagine. Yeah, there's almost something kind of Mappy-ish about this, but I think Mappy was a 1983 game, so it's probably just a coincidence. I've not played Mappie in a long, long time. Well, anyway, this was, what is this trivia you found about this game? Something about Bitcoin? What? This game is responsible for Bitcoin? No, no, no, no, no. One of the lead designers, Hal Finney, he later in life went on to be an early Bitcoin supporter.

user, and he was a part of the first transaction from Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. That's very interesting. I wonder if he sold a copy of this game. Okay, so the goal is to capture the bits on each floor while avoiding the space paranoids. Sorry. Yeah, there are seven bits that kind of fly from left to right on top. You have to jump to get to, to capture them, basically. And there are also elevators on the left and right sides. So you have to go to each one of the four floors that you have, capture the seven bits. And once you do that, you pass into the middle-like I-O tower thing, and you work to the next level where it becomes progressively harder. Yeah, so I'm not really sold on that one. But I do think Deadly Discs is pretty amazing,

the other arcade game, which apparently was originally going to be a part of the Tron Arcade. game, but the programming wasn't finished in time. That's right, yeah. But it's just as well because this game stands on its own and is much more polished and much more focused than the original tron. I mean, if you want to look at it in

terms, like really reductive terms, it's basically Pong, in that you are, you know, a person on one side, throwing projectiles at a person on the other side, but there's so much more to it than that. And it's really a surprisingly sophisticated game. It has,

Because, like, each level ramps up in complexity. I think there's, like, 12 different stages. Yes. And it's just you versus another guy. It's like Tron versus Sark, I guess. That's right. Yeah, you can bounce your disc right off the wall and, you know, have it careen back right back to you. You can bounce it off the ceiling.

Right. Yeah. So it takes its cues from a scene fairly early in the virtual world in the movie where you see the game grid, which is basically video game gladiators being forced to fight each other, whether or not they want to be warriors. And they play,

it's basically High-Eye. And, you know, they have like these hooks on their arms and they throw balls and ricochet them off the ceiling and try to catch them. And they're

playing on these discs, which consist of concentric rings. and if the ball, if they miss the ball and it hits a ring, then one of those, those rings in the disc vanishes, so it creates a gap. That's not something that's really carried into the game, I think, like the specific ring. No, not the rings. But later, in later rounds, disks will disappear. But basically, you start out with a single disc, like you're on a disc and Sark is in the distance on a disc, and you're just throwing balls at each other trying to hit each other. And then the second level, there's two discs, then three discs.

Then the disks are like uneven. Then the disks start moving up and down. And then they can vanish and so on and so forth. And yeah, like you said, you can ricochet and do a bunch of cool stuff. Yeah. And also like later on in the levels, you can push the rotary controller up and down to aim up and down too. I think that's that begins in like level six or four. But yeah, you get.

get kind of this three-dimensional type of control that was really unique. I know that Next Generation said, in retrospect, that this is one of the first games that really attempted, one of the first games that really attempted to 3D space and got away with it. Yeah. It's a very nice looking game despite the sort of limited graphics. And there's a lot happening at any given time because Sark has a lot. a lot of different powers.

Oh, yeah. And you have to kind of figure out which ones do what. Like he has this kind of very slow attack that will seek you out and you have to avoid it without falling off the disks. So it's very challenging and very diverse in terms of what it does within this play space. Yeah, with what you said there, you can defend against some of his attacks with a, like a shield, basically. but those special attacks, like that slow one, you cannot defend against.

So you must find a way to maneuver around that and be better than Sarkis. Because he's got the clear advantage here. As you clear each level, he's just going to keep getting harder and harder and harder. So the biggest gap in my Tron fandom is Solar Sailor for Intellivision, a game that I've heard about many times for the years, but I've never played and I don't really get. it's one of those extremely abstract games that I think requires like the overlay on the Intellivision keypad or something to really understand. So I, you know, I tried playing it on an emulator, basically,

and I tried watching videos. And both times I'm just like, uh, so it seems like you made some really extensive notes. So why don't you walk us through what the heck this game is? Oh my gosh. So I don't blame you about this. When I first saw it, I thought, what is going on, but this game is really complex. It goes in two phases. In phase one, basically you control the solar sailor as it glides upon these energy beams and you can aim and

fire a disc at enemies that are. It's maybe worth mentioning what a solar sailor is. A solar sailor is a vessel that can travel along beams of energy to get where it needs to go. And it could could contain cargo, could contain programs. Right. It's something in the game, or in the movie itself. It's something inside the computer world. Yes. It doesn't actually seem to have anything to do with the sun,

but it does sort of resemble the sci-fi concept of a solar sailor, which is a, like a spaceship that uses large solar, not solar panel wings, but the wings basically catch solar wind. Oh, cool. And power the ship that way. So I think that's how I got its name, even though you're not actually flying into the sun with the virtual world that has no sun. Yeah, no, I didn't know about that. That's awesome.

Yeah, so that's worth kind of mentioning just as an explanation of what the heck the name means. But anyway, so yes, you're in a solar sailor and you're riding along a beam. Yeah, a beam of energy. That's the important thing is the solar sailor can only go along a beam and you have to like find junctions to change direction. That's right. Yeah, there are certain points where the beams do, uh, interesting. intersect, basically. And you can choose to go and change the beams. You can change from, you know, a horizontal beam into a vertical beam. And that also gives you energy each time that you do that. So you want to make sure that your energy is, of course, high. And, but one thing I think that this game definitely needs to, I need to clarify about this game is that it made use of the Intelli Voice, which was a device on the Intellivision that produced digitized speech. And, and, it was required to play this game because one of the things that you need to know right off the bat

is your access number and that is not displayed it's given to you by Alan Allen's voice it's supposed to be Alan's voice so you were given a goal sector number and an access number now for talking level design the levels are arranged in eight concentric rings called tracks and you start out the farthest ring out so you're you're like at Pluto, and you want to work your way to the sun, basically. So we actually are a solar sailor in this one? Yeah, I guess so. It's quite literal.

And so, yeah, you want to get to the sun, and the center is called track zero. So additionally, each track is divided into eight sectors. You always start at sector zero. Now, if you want to go right, you'll go to sector one. If you want to go left, you'll be at sector eight. So in the beginning, if you're given your goal, sector, number as two, you're going to want to go right right away. So you're going to get to your goal sector of two. And then once you reach one of those crossroads of the beams, the game stops

and you are prompted to enter the access code. Enter that correctly. You move down a level to Neptune right now. And then we do it all over again until we get all the way down to track zero, basically. I see. Isn't that also how gyrus works? You're moving from the outer planets to the inner planets? That's one of my favorite games. Was Jair is just a big solar sailor rip-off? They were like, what if we made this game, but it made sense and it was fun? Sorry, that's not very nice.

I think this is just one of those games where you have to have all the stuff you need, like the overlays and the instructions and the intel of voice module. Otherwise, it's just like, what am I looking at? It's obtuse. It's so obtuse. It's unreal how much is packed into this game, how complex it is. And something like Jiris, you're right. Simple, pick up and play, it's fun.

And I could go through a bunch of this. Like, there's another phase. Okay, so here's phase two, just to get into more complexity. We're brought to something that reminds me of Tempest, a little bit, where you control now a bit instead of the solar sailor. And you are supposed to be grasping at numbers that come at you from the middle of the screen and get larger, and then eventually they'll leave the screen. So as a bit, you need to collide into the number, and there's eight numbers at the bottom making up a binary number. The Intel voice tells you the eight, the binary, the eight digits of the binary code, and you're supposed to grab them.

and with the number pad, take the number and put it into the correct place. So if your code was 1-0-0-0-0-0-0, you capture 1, you're going to want to put that on the number 1 or the number 5. Like the space. Yeah, the actual number there. So you capture number one and then you take that number one that your bit collected and you press the number one to place it into the first spot of the binary code. Okay. I feel like the ideas here would be really clear and easy to grasp on more contemporary hardware, like more modern hardware, just like what they were trying to do, the hardware back then just didn't have the memory or capacity to really get across. So it ends up being just sort of mysterious and nebulous. Absolutely. Yeah. And it took me a good long time watching a bunch of different videos to even get what was going. going on, you know, what was going on with this.

I actually went into a television website, too, and looked at the instruction book. That's where a lot of these notes come from, actually. It's the actual instruction book, so it's, it's really nutty. Yeah, it's crazy. All right, well, that pretty much wraps up the classic games based on Tron and Tron itself. I do want to mention one other game, which actually I guess now is fair game for Retronauts

because it's more than 10 years old, which makes me feel really old. And that is 2003's Tron 2.0, which also came to Xbox and Game Boy. advance in 2004 is Tron Killer App. And this was before Tron Legacy, the quote-unquote official sequel to Tron. They decided to follow it up as a video game, which I think is perfectly fair game considering the nature of the original movie. So if any game can get away with being turned into a sequel as a video game, it's Tron. So anyway, this is a first-person shooter. The Game Boy Advance is not a first game is not a first person shooter, but it's also not

playable, so I don't recommend it. But it's basically takes place, I don't know, about 15, no, I guess longer than that, like 20 years after the original Tron and you play instead of, okay, so

Tron Legacy, you end up playing, or following the story of Sam Sam Flynn. Sam Flynn, yeah, Kevin Flynn's son. Here you play Jet Bradley. Which is Alan's son, Jethro Bradley. Oh. But in any case, the idea is kind of the same.

You go looking for, I don't know, trying to figure out the stuff that you're doing and the thing. I can't remember what the story was. But anyway, the point is it's a first-person shooter developed by monolith, which is like, hey, that's a sign of quality right there. This is, you know, the no one lives forever people, like Shogo. Like, these people know first-person shooters. And it takes place pretty much entirely, if I remember, inside the virtual world. And so it has a very unique and distinct look to it that actually still holds up really well. Like, the character models look pretty good.

And the environments are all very much in the mold of Tron, Tron Legacy. Like, they have that look to them where it's angular and neon and, you know, there's some organic. shapes and stuff, but it's all very sort of abstracted. And it does get a little repetitive after, you know, 12 levels of that. You know, you spend six to ten hours playing this game and you're kind of like, okay, I need some break in the scenery. But the look of Tron, I think, has never been rendered in video game form as well as in Tron 2.0.

It really captures it and really let you be inside the computer world. And that has a lot of appeal. So I don't think Tron 2.0 has ever been ported to any contemporary systems. I don't think it's I don't think you can play killer app through Xbox one backward compatibility

even. But the PC version would probably still work if you played it and it would probably run under, you know, like super high res at this point. Oh yeah, absolutely. I can't imagine this game costs a lot on PC. Like it's probably even available digitally to purchase somehow. So, you know, if it's still out there, grab a copy, play

It is repetitive and it's all very linear. It's kind of in the half-life mold, but not that good. But it's still, you know, if you are hankering for a Tron experience and found legacy and uprising a little disappointing, you might consider Tron 2.0. Yeah, it's probably the best one of the bunch if we're talking about it. Yeah. Like, I don't know, the original is good, classic and all that. But I don't know, the first-person shooter, that appeals to a lot of people. You've got the excellent graphics, like you said.

Yeah, and, you know, as a first-person shooter interpreting Tron, it does have, like, guns and stuff, all, you know, sort of digital shotguns and things like that. But your primary weapon is the disc. So you do have that, like, that boomering element of the disc, which I think also makes the game a little bit unique and gives it kind of its own personality. So, yeah, definitely worth looking into. And sadly, it is retro at this point. There are some other Tron games that were tied into Tron Legacy, but they're too new to talk about here.

So we're going to wrap this episode up because we have gone way past the intended length of a micro and even past the accepted length. I don't know what's happening here, but we talked a lot about Tron. And I can still talk some more, but I'm not going to. I'm going to spare you all the indignities. So this has been a Tron episode of Retronauts slash Game and Movie podcast. Yes, a crossover. my god so and they tell us about yourself and where we can find you on the internet well you can find

game and movie podcast at game and movie podcast.com it's as simple as that really we're on soundcloud and all the good places where you prefer to download podcasts come check us out i think that you might like some of the episodes and of course you can find me on the internet on twitter is gamesbite and at retronuts.com and writing various other places around i'm out there doing stuff check me out on YouTube where I do videos about the history of video games. It's very recursive. Retronauts, of course, is found at Retronauts.com on places like iTunes on the Podcast One Network. And of course, on Patreon. That's how we pay for our bills. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Subscribe for $3 a month. And you get each episode of the podcast a week early

without commercials and at a higher bit rate, which is a fine, fine deal. But of course, you You can listen to us for free, and that's cool, too. We appreciate you taking the time to listen to us, talk about a movie from 1982 for some reason, because we're old and we like talking about old things. That's right. So thanks again, old man Anthony. And thank you, everyone for listening. We'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode. No confusion

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$1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. Your yard takes a real beat. from the constant wear and tear and overcrowding of weeds leading to weak, thin grass.

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should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration. to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they're. they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.