Throw Those Discs!

Tron was huge. No, wait, let me rephrase. Tron was expected to be huge. It was the sci-fi Blockbuster of the Summer for Disney in 1982, the film that could launch a franchise for them. It featured cutting-edge graphical effects blended with even more cutting-edge CGI, put together to make people believe they’ve been warped into the realm of computers. You know, those grey boxes that sat on people’s desks and confused anyone with the weird DOS prompts. Yeah, that was the realm of the future.

Technically Disney was right, just not in the way depicted in the film. And while Tron was a financial success, making $50 Mil against a $17 Mil budget, it didn’t do gangbusters. It took years for Disney to come back around and make a sequel (which also didn’t do gangbusters, leading to even more years before a third film came around), and the franchise clearly is still finding itself. One of these days Disney may finally figure out how to make a proper, good, Tron film. We;ll believe it when we see it.

Still, while the film franchise floundered, it’s not surprising to see that the video games went on to be much more successful. Tron is a movie about a digital world, where the soldiers fight in video game-like combat. Making video games about a video game world feels like a no-brainer. Bally Midway found success with the format, releasing both Tron and Discs of Tron into arcades and making boodles of money. Mattel saw the piles of money and wanted in on that, too. They got the license for the franchise and worked on putting out three different Tron games for their home console, the Intellivision. Tron: Deadly Discs was the first of them.

Despite sharing a similar name with Discs of Tron, Tron: Deadly Discs is not a port of that arcade title. This is a wholly original game created by the programmers at Mattel Electronics, Don Daglow and Steven Sents, based on the disc combat sequences from Tron. In the game you take on the role of an orange warrior battling against waves of increasingly difficult enemies in a four-by-four grid room. Things start off easy enough, with the basic Warriors coming out of the walls, in sets of three. Your hero (named Tron in the instruction materials even if the game itself doesn’t say that) has to run around and take out these foes with his disc all while they’re running around throwing their discs back at the hero.

After the first few rounds things will escalate. The Warriors start to get mixed in with stronger Leaders, but these then upgrade again to Bulldogs (who take two hits instead of the standard one), and then eventually Guards (who don’t throw discs but have deadly, one-hit-kill staves they use against the hero). Managing your space, the disc being thrown at you, your own disc, and all the enemies as you work to clear the board leads to a very frenetic, engaging experience over the course of the game. And, of course, you’re playing for a high score with no real ending to the title, just you running out of lives.

There are things to like about this title. For starters, it does look decent. While it was an Intellivision game, which means there were only so many colors available to sprites and backgrounds, and only so much that the hardware could do in general, it looks pretty decent. The sprites are basic but more detailed than you’d get from the rival Atari 2600 and everything controls without slowdown or flicker. It might be simplistic looking, but it does convey the realm of the game well enough.

Similarly, it also sounds pretty good. There’s no music, so no theme song that plays or little in-between stage jingles. There are, however, decent sounds from the hero, the enemies and all their objects. It has that old console crunchiness to it, but it doesn’t sound as terrible as anything from the Atari console. In fact, the sound effect when your disc hits someone and they derez actually sounds pretty solid, almost evoking the sound from the films. Not perfectly, no, but it works pretty well.

The action can get frenetic, but if I’m being honest, the early stages are pretty slow. This isn’t necessarily bad as it does let the player ramp up and get used to the experience, but it does mean that if you have to go back through and play again to try and get further, the late game freneticness isn’t really balanced out at all by the early game. It feels painfully slow by comparison, maybe too slow. I don’t want it to be overwhelming in the early game, but it feels like the balance of the game maybe skews too easy early on, leading to an experience that feels very basic on first play.

Still, I do appreciate the variety and strategy that comes on. The enemies change and evolve over the course, meaning there’s more the player has to balance. You can get a fair number of disc flying and enemies charging and it can be a lot. The hero does have one advantage: they can block and reflect discs with a properly timed button press. The enemies can’t do this, meaning the hero can block and break their discs and get a leg up, putting them in a position to capitalize in a way that the foes never can.

And then there are the doors in the game. Enemies flood in from the walls, and for a time the doors they used stay open. If the hero hits those open doors with a disc it will get lodged up and not close. If two doors are open on directly opposite sides of the arena, the hero can use them to warp back and forth from the sides, which the enemies can’t do. It’s another level of strategy, allowing for better maneuvering as the game ramps up. Just know that the doors won’t stay open forever as, between rounds, an overseeing Recognizer will fly in and close the doors, one at a time, to prevent the player from using them.

Even here, though, the player can grab a leg up: the Recognizer has a weak point, the eye dome on the top of its head. As it’s sealing the doors, its eye will become vulnerable and a well placed disc throw will wreck the ship, causing it to fly off without fixing all the doors. The player has to be quick and lucky as even touching the Recognizer will instantly kill them, but it’s worth the risk for the advantage those open doors provide.

All in all this is a solid game for its era. Yes, it’s a bit basic in comparison to games we have now, but that’s par for the course for older titles. What we have to do is judge it based on its own experience and what it provides and on that front Tron: Deadly Discs does score. It might not be perfect, but it has a gameplay loop stuffed with action and strategy. The coders clearly thought through a few fun twists to the formula and implemented all they could to make an interesting and robust experience. For an Intellivision title, this is a real winner.