Now You Too Can Be Bored By the Grid

Disney’s Tron was ahead of its time. It had fantastic effects (for the era) combined with cutting-edge CGI that all made for a film that looked like nothing else that had been released up to that point. Even now it stands as quite an achievement in graphical effects, and few films have been able to pull off the kind of look and feel that Tron had over four decades ago. It truly looked like you were viewing something from a different, digital world. Fans of the aesthetic absolutely ate it up.

The problem with being cutting edge is that it’s hard for even your own people to keep up. Tron promised a world where every person could be a digital warrior on the Grid. But when it came time to make tie-in video games for the movie, it was hard to make anything that looked as good. Hell, it was hard to make anything even in the same realm at all. Bally Midway got the license rights to make an arcade game based on Tron and the best they could come up with was something that kind of, vaguely, reminded you of the film if you squinted at it just right. It wasn’t the same.

Tron, the arcade game, is broken into four portions. Your little icon sits on a hub, a representation of the Grid, and you can pick one of the four zones to enter. Each zone is a mini-game to play, from Lightcycles, to a Tank Assault game, a clone of Berzerk, and a bit of a Breakout-shooter hybrid. The player has to clear all four games, and then they’ll be taken to the next hub to do it all again, just a little harder. And then again. And then again. Like most arcade games, Tron looped over and over until either you lost all your lives or you reached a point where the game couldn’t handle the programming anymore and gave you a “kill screen”.

Of the four games, Lightcycles is the one most obviously tied to the film. The characters in the movie ride lightcycles, so you get to do that here in what is, in effect, a territory control game. Your bike, and the bikes of your enemies, have colored lines that come out behind them. Those lines are uncrossable; if a bike runs into one of the light walls, they die. It’s like Snake or other games of that nature, just without a collecting aspect. Survive longer than the other bikes and you win. It’s not really thrilling, but I give credit that it at least feels like the programmers watched Tron for this one.

Next, the Tank Assault section called, naturally, Battle Tanks. This is another standard game trope, although it doesn’t really have anything to do with the film, Tron. You drive one tank, and up to five tanks drive around a flat maze trying to kill you. You have to kill them before they get you first. I found this game to be particularly frustrating as the joystick-based controls of the game don’t align well with controlling a tank around a maze consisting mostly of right angles. I died frequently and often wished I didn’t have to play this game at all.

I/O Tower is effectively this collection’s Berzerk clone. You have your plucky little blue hero and you have to shoot at bugs that appear on the grid, all while trying to get towards the central I/O Tower portal at the center of the stage. This is easier said than done as the stage is packed with enemies that constantly respawn and you are, of course, still fighting the wonky controls of the joystick. I found free firing and randomly running worked just as well as doing anything else in the game as actual strategy didn’t really seem to matter.

Finally, MCP Cone is a weird mix of shooting and Breakout. The central cone is protected by a colorful shield, which rotates slowly. You have to blow your way through that shield with your little blue dude and find a way to get up to the cone beyond. This was honestly the easiest of the four games, as the shield wasn’t too hard to get past. Aim your guy up, shoot at an angle against the rotation of the shield, and you can get through more often than not. It’s so easy that it’s somehow just as disposable as the really tough games in this collection because it swings too far in the other direction.

I get that this is an early arcade game and there was only so much the programmers could do, but I feel like this Tron title is a real wasted effort. Part of that is because it takes random scenes (or implied sequences) from the film and builds them out into a randomly assigned hub where you pick and run your way through the scenes. There’s no order to it, no motivation behind decisions. Everything is simply about scoring as many points as you can in four brief games, over and over until you run out of juice.

I think it would have been better if the four games told something of a loose narrative. You end up in the grid, go from lightcycles into a tank chase, head to the I/O Tower, and then hit the MCP Cone. On a loop, with a building momentum, that would be better than the pick and choose approach. Then the game could have also included some little cut-scenes, a la Pac-Man, to tell a bit of narrative and make the whole thing feel more interesting and cohesive. That would go some way towards making this feel more like Tron.

Of course, better games would have also helped. Lightcycles isn’t bad, but it’s short and brief and could have benefitted from a bit more fleshing out. Battle Tanks is shallow and boring, a clone of a game we’d already seen (even in 1982) many times before. I/O Tower is a lot of action noise without any strategy, while MCP Cone is too easy to be worth playing. More focus on each of these games, more time to make them interesting and original, would have helped a lot.

Or, perhaps, maybe this shouldn’t have been a mini-game collection. One larger, more fleshed out experience would work better since, certainly, the programmers would have had time to really focus and get a single game working so nicely. Just doing a game on the Battle Grid, or Lightcycles into Deadly Disks, back and forth, could have given the true Tron experience with better presentation and more grace. This arcade title doesn’t have that.

Honestly, nothing in this game aside from Lightcycles feels like Tron. Not only are all four games slight, they also barely resemble the source material in any real way. This is a hatchet job of an arcade game, clearly rushed out to meet a deadline without a ton of care put in to make sure the game looked right or played well. And yet it was successful because players at the time were desperate to play in the world of Tron. I guess if you were alive at the time you maybe could have found the enjoyment necessary to play all day on this game.

I’m not from that era, when I could stand at a Tron machine, sipping a soda, pumping in quarters. I came later, and going back to this game now, I’m just not impressed. Successful or not back in the day, I see the seams. The game feels shallow, empty, like another corporate licensed product rushed out to meet a deadline. Maybe gamers liked it then but it absolutely isn’t worth playing now.