Tron 2.0

"Tron 2.0" redirects here. For the film sequel to Tron, see Tron 2.0 (film).

Tron 2.0
Developer(s)	Monolith Productions
Publisher(s)	Buena Vista Interactive
Designer(s)	Frank Rooke
Series	Tron
Engine	Lithtech: Triton (enhanced version of the Jupiter engine)
Platform(s)	PC (Windows), Mac, Gizmondo, Xbox
Release	(Win) NA: August 26, 2003 DE: August 26, 2003 PL: September 11, 2003 (Mac) NA: April 21, 2004 (Xbox) NA: November 2, 2004
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer

Tron 2.0 is a first person shooter computer game developed by Monolith Productions. It is a sequel to the 1982 motion picture Tron. The PC version of the game was released by Buena Vista Games on August 26, 2003. The Mac version was released by MacPlay on April 21, 2004.

Bruce Boxleitner reprises his role from the original movie as Alan Bradley. Cindy Morgan, who also starred in the original movie, voices a new character Ma3a, although Lora Bradley (now Alan's wife) is mentioned by name. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos provides the voice of Mercury. A new Light Cycle design was contributed to the game by Syd Mead. The game explained the Tron arcade game, which appears in-game, and film as based on Kevin Flynn's experiences inside ENCOM.

The idea of Tron 2.0 was originally explored as a movie concept, but it was eventually decided to focus first on making it as a game. The film Tron 2.0 was eventually announced and began filming in April 2009.

Plot

The game's protagonist is Jethro "Jet" Bradley, Alan Bradley's son, who is currently working at ENCOM as a video game programmer. He and his father maintain a strained relationship - Lora, Jet's mother, has died in a lab accident, and Jet has little aspiration to be more than a video game programmer. All this affects his studies, and he has had his brushes with the law after hacking the university servers. ENCOM itself has seen better days - The MCP's defeat set back the company's digitization research almost back to square one, Kevin Flynn has already left the company, and Walter Gibbs' son, Gibbs Jr., is planning to sell the firm to a rival corporation, Future Control Industries (fCon).

At the start of the game, Jet is passing time playing an arcade game in the lobby while Alan is in the lab. His newest AI, Ma3a, warns him that a virus has entered the system, but before he could act, he is startled and hustled away from the telephone. Jet, on the other side of the line, quickly rushes down to the digitizing chamber, only to find his father missing. Before he could turn to help, Ma3a digitizes him.

Inside the computer, the Intrusion Countermeasure Programs (ICP), led by the Kernel, are busy battling the infection, and notice Jet's arrival. Thinking that he's the cause, he is detained and about to be de-rezzed when another program suggests him to be thrown into the light-cycle arena. Jet survives the first two levels, and in the third, he faces a legendary adversary named Mercury, who never lost a race. During the race, however, Mercury destroys part of the arena and tells Jet to escape through the debris. Mercury, a female-looking program, explains that she was sent by a user named Guest to help Jet, and the two retrieve Jet's confiscated disc. The ICS then decides that the fight against the virus is futile and commences a complete reformat in the system. Jet manages to rescue Ma3a before the drive is cleaned, and they escape to Alan's desktop PC, but Mercury stays behind.

Ma3a shows Jet a video footage from a security camera - Alan was abducted by three executives of fCon (attorney Seth Crown, CTO Esmond Baza and HR executive Eva Popoff), under the orders of fCon's CEO (hinted to be Ed Dillinger) because of his newly developed correction algorithms that aid the digitizing process without the MCP's presence. Guest contacts Jet and mentions TRON, and Ma3a finds various emails mentioning "TRON Legacy Code", which was intended as an update for TRON, but was never finished due to lack of resources. The code was stored on an old mainframe, which Jet repowers, and visits.

There, he meets an old program called I-No, who aids him with recovering the legacy code. Ma3a and Jet leave the mainframe, while I-No prefers to stay behind, noting that such an old program has no place among modern software. After leaving the mainframe, the two end up on the Internet in search of a compiler program that can turn the legacy code into an actual program. Jet also meets an early version of Mercury, who doesn't recognize him. When visiting a local joint called the Progress Bar, they find a high-level compiler who starts working on the code. Jet then receives a call from Guest, who turns out to be Alan Bradley himself, frantically pointing at a text on a chalkboard: "DO NOT compile the legacy code!DO!NOT!" It is too late, however, Ma3a is already getting integrated with the new code, though the process is interrupted by J.D. Thorne, ENCOM's disgruntled Director of Corporate Security, who, after not getting a promotion to Vice President, has played a vital part in ENCOM's acquiry by fCon, and has unleashed the virus on the ENCOM network. He himself has been digitized as well, but became a monstrous green fiend due to the absence of correction algorithms. Jet holds Thorne off from Ma3a while the code compiles, but as soon as it finishes, Ma3a turns into a huge monster, defeats Thorne and chases after Jet. Before she could de-rez him, however, fCon's Seeker program grabs her.

Jet, with the aid of Mercury, frees Alan from the storage room he's been locked in, but when Alan wants to eavesdrop on the main chamber door, Baza finds him and Alan is digitized into the computer. Inside the ICP is still trying to fight the infection, and this time they aid Jet in defeating the viruses. He finds the Kernel about to de-rez Alan and a weakened Thorne. After defeating the Kernel in a pure-discs battle, Alan and Jet go to the dying Thorne, who confesses his treachery, and tells them that the fCon servers are only accessible through a wireless dial-up connection through his PDA. Jet goes into the PDA, retrieves the phone number, and changes the firewall settings so Alan can enter. They also encounter the Data-Wraiths, computer hackers specially trained by fCon who voluntarily enter the computers to perform illegal tasks, and uncover that fCon wants to unleash a "mobile server" carrying Data-Wraiths, so they can infiltrate any other computer on the Internet.

After derailing and crashing the server (literally), Alan and Jet go to retrieve Ma3a. On the way, Jet encounters another light cycle battle where he is grossly outnumbered by his opponents. Alan manages to recover a recent copy of Mercury, who immediately recognizes Jet and takes out half of the adversaries. In the real world, Crown, Popoff and Baza decide to enter the system themselves, and order the local tech to digitize them. The tech, however, notices only after the process that the correction code was removed - Alan was busy dismantling Ma3a inside, and removed part of the code for debugging purposes. Alan leaves the server and materializes in the real world, but Jet is suddenly faced with the digital version of the three fCon executives, who merged into one huge disfigured monster.

After Jet defeats the monster, Alan and him download Ma3a and Mercury to a portable hard drive (among with the three fCon execs) and, ignoring the threats of fCon's CEO (present in the form of a ubiquitous security camera), leave the laboratory for good.

Environment

The game, just like the movie, is set "inside" a computer in the same sense as the original movie. It cheerfully uses and abuses computing conventions; players will find themselves in the flaming red environment of a firewall and the minimalistic white one of a PDA, battle viruses while fleeing a format, and wield a sniper rifle known as the LOL, additionally amplifying the damage with a skill called Megahurtz.

Programs in the systems also bear various names - ordinary programs have ordinary first names such as Frank_381 or Brian.exe, ICP programs have names resemblant to system tools such as servwatch.exe or sssys.dll, viruses have garbled names such as HA-HA-HA-0X0->??? or 0XFFOOXXOR (one of them is called Durandal, while an other is (Ra*mpa^ncy), two obvious references to Marathon), resource hogs are named after parodies of popular software such as reelplyr.exe, netscope.exe or ImageShop5.0.exe, major viruses have script names such as viral_launcher.pyc and viral_pickup.pl, and Data-Wraiths, being in essence digitized humans, feature email addresses such as AndyG@fcon.net or GeoffK@fcon.net.

The leveling / experience point is represented as software versioning, skills are subroutines Jet must earn, but depending on the environment he's in, he can only arm himself with a given amount that fits in the memory. If struck by viruses, subroutines can get fragmented or infected, and cannot be used before Jet defragments or disinfects them. If Jet encounters a program unknown to him, he can port it to his own system. Communication between programs is done via IO ports.

Jet can also find and read emails in certain systems, which reveal partly the game's backstory, but also provide insight to Jet's and Alan's relation: Alan, while proud of his son's programming talent, is increasingly distressed by Jet's attitude, which causes Jet to endanger his studies and strain their relationship - one email is sent to Alan by the local police chief to notify him that he left his wallet at the police station while signing the release forms for Jet after he hacked the university server.

Ports

In addition to the Mac, the game was also ported to the Xbox with significant changes to the single and, especially, the multiplayer modes. The Xbox version is entitled Tron 2.0 Killer App. Changes to the single player mode include optional jumping sequences, and overall console-tailored controls. The real changes were made to the multiplayer modes. Added is up to sixteen player multiplayer disc arena, light cycles, or overRide modes for system link or Xbox Live. The new overRide mode allows for first person mayhem with the ability to ride light cycles at any time. There is also a version of Tron 2.0 Killer App for the Game Boy Advance that has different story and gameplay from its Xbox counterpart. A version of the game was planned for the Gizmondo, but was canceled during development.

Gameplay

The single-player campaign takes place entirely inside the computer world (though some cutscenes are shown around the ENCOM research laboratory). The goal of each level is generally to complete tasks and find keys ("permission bits") which allow access to the next level. Some conventions which don't make much sense in other first-person shooters, such as the ability to carry a half-dozen weapons or to heal instantly with a medkit, are much more appropriate to this setting.

The design of the game's levels is linear; there are no choices about how to proceed or about what to say during the interactions with other characters. The levels are abstract as the ambiance seen in the movie, not to say surreal: they feature energy bridges and gates, neon-glowing contours, vibrant colors, floating boxes and tiles, teleports and deep chasms. However, some conventional physics apply: Jet will be harmed if he falls from a height (or killed if the height is great enough). He can also be crushed by certain moving objects in the digital world.

Jet starts out with the same disc weapon seen in the movie. In time, he obtains other weapons (not surprisingly similar to the ones found in other titles): a shotgun, a submachine gun, a sniper rifle and grenades, each reworked to fit the computer world reality. Ammunition for these new weapons is energy, which Jet can collect at various points during the game (an exception is the disc, which uses no energy in its basic form). The in-game names for these weapons are, respectively, rod, mesh, ball. The other weapons are upgrades of these basic weapons (called "primitives").

Jet's abilities are customizable, as his in-computer program earns "build counter" upgrades - when earning a level, Jet 1.0 becomes Jet 1.1, and so on. He acquires new abilities, and also the aforementioned weapons, in the form of "subroutines" held in "archive bins" scattered around the levels, and he has a limited number of memory slots in which to "install" these subroutines onto his person. Subroutines start out as alpha-grade software, but can be upgraded to beta and gold statuses, which both take up less space in memory and become more effective.

As he moves through the levels, Jet must engage many lower-tier enemies. Although none are particularly powerful, they usually show up in gangs, making them more of a threat. Among the regular levels, there are some with boss enemies that add to the thrill of the game.

Interspersed with the first-person-shooter levels are several light cycle races. As seen in the movie, these races are actually arena duels in which each light cycle attempts to destroy its opponents by driving them into its jetwall. The arenas contain 'improvements' (such as speed zones that affect the cycles' speed), more complex layouts with walls and other artifacts (instead of the "empty box" as seen in the movie), and power-ups that can be collected during races. In addition to Tron's regular light cycle, Jet can also gain access to the super light cycle that sports a more modern design and offers more speed. Tron 2.0 initially required the player to win the light cycle races in order to advance the campaign. Consumer feedback revealed that many felt the computer-controlled light cyclers were impossibly precise in their controls (turning at angles a human could not, for example), forcing players to wait for the enemy lightcycles to destroy themselves. As a result, the vendor released a patch eliminating this rule.

The additional lightcycle mode contains no campaign; instead, the player is presented with a choice of several light cycle arenas.

Multiplayer

Tron 2.0 offers some multiplayer scenarios, both in campaign mode and in light cycle mode. Internet and LAN play are available, although the vendor does not recommend that the light cycle mode be used over the Internet due to its generally high lag.

Legacy

Despite several positive reviews, Tron 2.0 failed to meet sales expectations. As a result of not meeting sales expectations, both a possible expansion pack and a sequel (which was, apparently, tentatively titled Tron 3.0) were cancelled while still in the planning stage. It was rumored that one of these additional games would have been set in the early 1980s, when the storyline of the original motion picture Tron took place.

A four-issue Tron 2.0 comic book series based on the game was going to be released by 88 MPH Studios, but was cancelled before the first issue was completed due to licensing issues with Disney. However, Slave Labor Graphics is now producing a Tron comic book sequel series called Tron: The Ghost in the Machine.

External links

• Tron: The Ghost in the Machine comic book by Slave Labor Graphics (SLG). Issue #1 was released on 4/26/2006
• Gamasutra technical article about the glow effect
• Tron 2.0 retrospective
• Tron2.0 on MobyGames