It’s an Adventure, Charlie!

Let’s not pretend like the video game industry is that creative. While you will get seminal titles here and there (Tennis for Two, Space Panic, Colossal Cave Adventure), most games are built on the ideas that came before, remixes and reinterpreting them into something new until some new kind of game comes along. You don’t get to Super Mario 64, often considered the first great 3D platforming title that redefined a genre, without the Super Mario games before, and you can’t get to Super Mario Bros., the first true game of that series, without Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong before it, and Donkey Kong was built on the likes of Pac-Land, Pitfall, and, yes, Space Panic. Everything comes from something else.

That’s why it’s hard to be too harsh on Adventures of Tron. This is a little platforming game developed by Mattel, that was meant to be a port of Tron: Maze-a-Tron for the Atari 2600. But as it evolved during the porting process, it became something else. Something far less like Tron: Maze-a-Tron and more like, of all things, Donkey Kong. It’s obviously not the same game because details are changed and elements are simply “inspired by” instead of directly lifted. But you can’t look at the platforming action with moving elevators, rolling enemies, and everything else going on and not think, at least a little bit, “this feels like a Donkey Kong clone.”

For the era and the console, though, it’s actually a pretty decent little Donkey Kong clone. The controls are responsive, the action moves at a decent clip, and there are some ideas here that actually feel interesting and noteworthy. This isn’t a seminal title by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s hard to think that many people looked at Adventures of Tron and said, “yeah, I want to clone that game when I make my own video game.” But still, this was a stepping stone in the platforming genre that did, actually, do some things right.

In Adventures of Tron you play, of course, as Tron, the titular hero of the Tron series. They teleport into an arena composed of four floors. On each floor there are floating objects, seven in total to collect. Tron has to go to each floor, via the elevators that move upwards are set intervals, and jump to collect those floating objects. There is also one arrow that moves back and forth and Tron can touch that to float and get pulled along with the arrow across the floor. Collect all the objects (but not necessarily touch the arrow) and the way opens to the next floor where Tron gets to do it all again.

But beware, there are hazards on every floor. Enemies will spawn in to attack Tron if he lingers on the floors. Recognizers first, and then faster and more powerful enemies as the stages move on, until Tron is having to avoid tanks from all sides, shooting at him if he gets too close. There are ways to survive, though, as Tron can easily leap down a floor at any time, quickly avoiding danger on all but the lowest level of the stage. Smart movement, and quick reflexes, are the name of the game if you want to survive.

Adventures of Tron has a very simple gameplay loop. You enter into a stage, beaming in from the central pillar (which is only otherwise active when you have all the power-ups), landing on the lowest level of the stage. Then you move upwards, back and forth, jumping to collect the power-ups all so the central pillar activates and you can do it again on the next stage. Like most single-screen, arcade-style games of the era, there’s no real “end” to the game, just an endless loop of the same stages going over and over again until the player finally gets sloppy and dies. Then you can do it all again to try and get a higher score.

With that said, it’s not a bad gameplay loop. There is simple pleasure to be had in moving Tron around, collecting power-ups and avoiding enemies. Any time you get onto an elevator and narrowly avoid getting attacked, or manage to leap down to a lower floor, missing a shot from a tank, you get a little thrill of excitement. The action is fun and responsive, and there’s just enough here to keep you feeling like you’re in control and able to take on anything. It has/ a solid, basic pleasure to it.

I actually really like the fact you can jump downwards through platforms. That’s not something very common in platforming games of this era and I legitimately wonder if this might be the first title to include that in a hero’s repertoire. It’s a basic move that many later games from the NES and SNES eras integrated, making for more control options especially on tricky platforming sections, and the fact that it’s here, in such an otherwise simple game, really ups the control power and movement. It takes what would be a very basic platforming game and turns it into something just a little more interesting.

With all that said, the game does get repetitive pretty quickly. While the movement and gameplay loops are solid, there’s not a lot of meat to this adventure. You’re stuck on the same looping set of levels without any variance in the game besides increasingly difficult enemies. In comparison to Donkey Kong, which came out a year before, had more stages, and did get an Atari 2600 port around the same time as Adventures of Tron, this game feels pretty bare bones. Like, it’s not bad for what it provides, but the lack of variety does keep it from being far more interesting.

What the game needs is a second or third stage with varied platform positions. It doesn’t have to be extreme, and we don’t need anything that diverges greatly from the basic platforming on display here. Donkey Kong understood that, providing a small set of looping stages that used the basic mechanics of the gameplay to create diverse environs. Even just a second stage that could be looped in, giving Tron something a little different to do with his mechanics, would have helped a lot in making this game feel fresh and interesting on multiple playthroughs.

Instead what we have is a pretty solid first step for a platforming game that doesn’t have enough else added in (maybe due to the limitations of the Atari hardware, maybe just because corporate wanted the game out and the designers had to focus on one stage and make it great) to make it stand out. This isn’t a bad game by any stretch. It’s one of the better Tron titles, to be sure. But in comparison to what else was out there in the arcade-style platforming space, even just on Atari, this game feels like a lesser entry. Not bad, but hardly worth picking up over something that was even better.