Tron Legacy and the games crash of 1983

Tron was one of, if not the first film to centre around computers, computing and the world of video gaming, and the first to really push the boundaries of CGI. Inspired by the game Pong, Tron was released in 1983 at the height of the first era of gaming and just before the video games crash of 1983.

Now for a brief history lesson: The video games crash or the Atari debacle as it is also sometimes known occurred in 1983 and into 1984, where consumers had lost faith in the gaming market, when the market was flooded with poor quality games, this slump in the fledging industry didn’t pick up again until the release of the Nes, Nintendo’s first console. During the crash many developers were bankrupted, but it is also referred to as the Atari Debacle, due to the monumental mistakes of Atari during this period which have left have them crawling along like a one-legged dog ever since.

It all started to go wrong for Atari with a poor quality cash in on the then popular Pac-Man, which was slated by both critics and gamers alike. This resulted in Atari selling only about half of the cartridges it had produced, and with the high publicity campaign meant a considerable loss for the company.

They then followed this disaster by shooting themselves in the other foot, where the following year Atari released the movie tie-in ET, again widely advertised and mass produced. But much like they had done with Pac-Man, Atari rushed production, in order to get the game out for Christmas, giving it a mere six weeks development, and instead of the anticipated success, they ended up with what is considered to be the worst game ever made, and videogame legend says that Atari buried all the unsold copies in a landfill in New Mexico. Atari originally had plans for a Tron game based on the Space Paranoids, later being cancelled due to the crash, along with tie-in games for movies Superman III and The Last Starfighter.
 

But I digress, we were talking about Tron, which was a visual effects landmark, and family history has it that my uncles first job out of university was as a programmer for the special effects on Tron, again I’m wondering of the topic slightly, but how many people can make such a claim, feels like something that should be boosted about.

So back to the topic at hand. Which goes something like this, given the cult status of Tron, and the integration of gaming into everyday life, it would stand to reason that Disney would eventually bring out a sequel, it may have taken nearly 30 years, but it was well worth the wait.

One of the things that I loved about Tron Legacy was the soundtrack, written by French dance legends Daft Punk (who also cameo in the film as two DJing mp3 files), combining their signature electro sound with the might of a full orchestra, and follows a recent trend of contempory artists producing soundtracks, following Karen O, of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and her soundtrack for the Spike Jonze adaptation of children’s classic Where the Wild Things are, and masters of metal Mastodon, who wrote a large portion of the soundtrack for the DC comic adaptation of Jonah Hex.

The thing that stands out about Tron legacy, is the look, you’ll never see another film that looks like this, almost nothing but black and neon’s, I mean Tron had a completely unique look about it as well, but legacy barely resembles the original, the mythology is the same, so you still have all the elements that people loved about the original, like the light bikes, disc wars and the space paranoids, but were as the look of Tron felt like a cybernetic fantasy in the vein of Conan the barbarian, Legacy feels dark and foreboding, and with its themes of genocide, and world domination its more like Schindler's List than anything else.

 To my mind Tron: Legacy gains access to that fabled and illusive club, with the likes of Aliens and Superman II, where the sequel far out shines the original.