Tron

Tron is a 1982 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Lisberger, based on a story by Eren G. and Bonnie MacBird, and produced by Walt Disney Productions. The film stars Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer who is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer where he interacts with programs in his attempt to escape. Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, and Barnard Hughes star in supporting roles.

Development of Tron began in 1976 when Lisberger became fascinated with the early video game Pong. He and producer Donald Kushner set up an animation studio to develop Tron with the intention of making it an animated film. Indeed, to promote the studio itself, Lisberger and his team created a 30-second animation featuring the first appearance of the eponymous character. Eventually, Lisberger decided to include live-action elements with both backlit and computer animation for the actual feature-length film. Various film studios had rejected the storyboards for the film before the Walt Disney Studios agreed to finance and distribute Tron. There, backlit animation was finally combined with the computer animation and live action.

Tron (video game)

Tron is a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in 1982. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the Walt Disney Productions motion picture Tron released in the same year. The game earned more than the film's initial release. The lead programmer was Bill Adams.

Most of the 12 difficulty levels are named after programming languages. From lowest to highest: RPG, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, SNOBOL, PL1, PASCAL, ALGOL, ASSEMBLY, OS, JCL, USER.

Tron was followed by the 1983 sequel, Discs of Tron, which was not as successful as the original. A number of other licensed Tron games were released for home systems, but these were based on elements of the movie and not the arcade game. The arcade was not ported to any contemporary systems. On January 10, 2008, the game was released for Xbox Live Arcade ported by Digital Eclipse and branded by Disney Interactive.

Description

Arcade cabinet

Tron was distributed in three types of cabinets: the standard upright, the mini upright and the cocktail (table) version.

Tron: The Ghost in the Machine

Tron: The Ghost in the Machine was a six-issue comic book limited series produced by Slave Labor Graphics. It continued the storyline of the film Tron and the video game Tron 2.0.

Production notes

In 2005, Slave Labor Graphics announced its comic, Tron: The Ghost in the Machine, a six issue mini series depicting the adventures of Jet Bradley. The book had an irregular publishing schedule, spanning from April 2006 to September 2008. A trade paperback collecting all six issues was released in July 2009. The comic book was written by Landry Walker and Eric Jones, with art in the first two issues by Louie De Martinis. The artist on the remainder of the series was Mike Shoyket.

Storyline

The story revolves around a program that believes itself to be a User named Jet Bradley, son of the original Tron programmer Alan Bradley. This version of Jet is a backup copy of the real Jet Bradley, who explored the digital universe in Tron 2.0. He has been split into three distinct aspects, represented by color (red, blue and green), all at war with each other. Eventually the fractured program of Jet converges into one being, resulting in a white "User" version. The program then comes face to face with his User and is given a chance, using the Tron Legacy code integrated into his identity disk as a key, to be transferred into the real world. The unified Jet declines, as his presence is the only thing keeping the digital universe he exists within stable and his exiting would mean the "death" of everyone he knows within the computer. He releases the Tron Legacy code from his disk and restores the digital world, accepting his life as a computer program.