Didja Know?

 

Tron 2.0 is a "first-person shooter" video game released in 2003 which was a sequel to the 1982 film, Tron. Bruce Boxleitner returns as Alan Bradley. In the timeline, Alan is a widower, having earlier married Lora, now deceased. Cindy Morgan (who played Lora in the film) returns in the video game as the voice of Ma3a, Alan's AI program. Though some story details of Tron 2.0 are similar to the film Tron: Legacy and its spinoffs, there are also elements which render it non-canonical in the franchise as it currently exists, such as Lora still living and married to Alan in the film; additionally, Legacy director Joe Kosinski has confirmed that Tron 2.0 and its spinoffs are not considered canonical, despite the similarities.).

 

Actress and model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos voices the character of Mercury.

 

Music was composed by Wendy Carlos, who also scored the original movie.

 

Syd Mead, the conceptual artist of Tron, contributes a new version of the Light Cycle.

 

The company Digital Eclipse made a game for the GameBoy Advance called Tron 2.0 Killer App (sort of a parallel game to the Xbox version of Tron 2.0). It is different from the main Tron 2.0 game in that the story (such as it is) features the character of Tron and Mercury attempting to destroy a virus created by the Corrupter in the ENCOM system. It is unknown where this story falls chronologically, but the appearance of Mercury might argue that it takes place around the same time as the main Tron 2.0 game; this would suggest that Tron still lives even after what, for him, has been about 1000 years since the events of the original film (time progresses more quickly subjectively in the Electronic World)!

 

Also in 2003, comic book publisher 88 MPH solicited a comic book called Tron 2.0: Derezzed which was to chronicle the story told in the video game. However no issues were ever published and I believe the publisher has since folded. In 2006, publisher Slave Labor Graphics began publishing Tron: Ghost in the Machine, a 6-issue mini-series sequel to the story of the Tron 2.0 game. My study of this 6-issue series is also available here on PopApostle.

 

 

 

Story Summary

 

Since I don't own a copy of the game, a complete story summary is difficult to write but Wikipedia has a fairly complete plot synopsis:

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original story summary was at Tron 2.0. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

 

The story is centered around Alan's son Jethro ("Jet") Bradley. Since the film's events, ENCOM has been taken over by a company called Future Control Industries (fCon). After talking with his father who is kidnapped while on the phone with Jet, Jet is digitized by Ma3a, Alan's AI computer system, to aid her in combating Thorne, an executive from fCon who was improperly digitized into the computer and is now a corruption spreading like a virus throughout the system. Jet is quickly, and mistakenly, identified as the source of the corruption, and is captured by Kernel, the systems security control program.

After deciding that Jet, who claims to be a User, is corrupted, Kernel spares Jet on the recommendation of Mercury, another program tasked to help Ma3a, and Jet is sent to be used as a bot in the lightcycles game program. After winning several matches, Jet escapes the match with Mercury's help. After they find Ma3a, the server, corrupted beyond saving, is reformatted resulting in Mercury's demise. Jet escapes to the internet with Ma3a and an uncompiled copy of Tron Legacy, an update to the original Tron program written by Alan Bradley to protect Ma3a. After finding a compiling program on the Internet, Thorne appears to kill Ma3a, as the Tron code is compiled and attached to her program. During this, Jet receives a communication from Guest, the User who had assigned Mercury to help Jet. Accessing a video uplink, Jet realizes too late that Guest is his father Alan, locked in a storage closet by fCon higher ups Bazra, Popoff, and Crowne, begging him not to compile the Legacy program. Legacy activates, revealing that its sole function is to kill any User in the digital world. Jet escapes, and fCon inadvertently saves him by capturing Ma3a in a search program.

Having recovered the correction algorithms necessary to digitize a human, Alan is used as a guinea pig, and is sent to Thorne's corrupted server. Assisting the ICPs and Kernel, Jet reaches Thorne at the heart of the server and kills the Kernel before he can derez Thorne. Thorne, regaining a moment of lucidity, begs for forgiveness then tells Jet how to enter fCon's server.

Alan and Jet break into fCon's virtual server, which the corporation is planning to use to distribute Datawraiths - digitized human hackers - across the worldwide information network to give it unparalleled power and influence. After Alan and Jet crash the server, the CEO of fCon (most likely Dillinger from the original Tron movie, though this is never confirmed) orders Bazra, Popoff, and Crowne into the system themselves to deal with Alan and Jet. However, Alan, wanting to verify the purity of the correction algorithms, removes them to inspect them as the three are being digitized, resulting in a monstrous amalgam of the three, which chases Jet into the digitizing beam. Jet diverts the three out of the beam and finally escapes the computer.

 

Didja Notice?

 

The game suggests that the real world Tron arcade game was designed by Flynn based on his experiences in the original film.

The game reveals that Encom's digitization technology became unusable after the destruction of the MCP, which ran the algorithms that allowed the digitization and reintegration of physical objects. Alan and Lora begin working on a new set of algorithms to regain use of the technology, but it is 20 years later before Alan is successful.

The game also features Alan's updated version of the Tron program called Tron Legacy (no relation to the Tron: Legacy film), designed to eliminate Users in the Electronic World. An email in the game reveals that a flaw in the program causes it to target all Users instead of just unauthorized ones.

Ma3a stands for Math Assistant 3 Audio. Ma3a was preceded by two earlier versions, Ma1a and Ma2a. Ma1a was designed by Lora as an AI research assistant. After Lora's death in a lab accident, Alan designed Ma2a which had many similarities to Lora's personality, leading to rumors that Alan had somehow integrated Lora's partially digitized DNA (an email with the subject "Digitizing Technology" dated Oct. 94 reveals that Lora died in a "misfiring laser" mishap in the digitizing lab of ENCOM) into the program. Flaws in Ma2a were corrected in version 3, Ma3a.

The security control program is named Kernel. In computer parlance, a kernel is the central module of an operating system, providing constant management of memory, processes, tasks, and disks.

Alan developed the Legacy program to protect Ma3a and it was designed to eliminate any Users in the Electronic World who threaten her. It seems like a harsh step to take for a decent guy like Alan! This may be a clue that Lora's personality really is inside of Ma3a and he would therefore protect her at virtually (pun intended) any cost.

In computer terms, "legacy" describes outdated software or equipment still in use in a computer system's environment. It seems odd that Alan would use the word as part of his program name, but he may have chosen the name Tron Legacy to suggest the return of the "righteous" Tron program who defeated the MCP and freed the denizens of the Electronic World from the MCP's enslavement.

During his adventure in the Electronic World, Jet (and Mercury) receive communications from Guest, a user in the real world (who is later revealed to be Alan himself). The term "guest" is used in many operating systems to temporarily identify an anonymous user logged into the system.

The sniper rifle seen in the game called the LOL is named for the web-speak acronym LOL which means Laugh Out Loud.

The character skill called Megahurtz which allows the character to amplify the amount of damage inflicted to opponents is named after the computer term "megahertz", a unit of measurement of the clock speed of a microprocessor.

Two of the viruses seen in Tron 2.0, Durandal and Ra*mpa^ncy, are references to the 1994 Apple Macintosh game, Marathon.

The resource hogs exploder.exe, ImageShop5.0.exe, inlook.exe, netscope.exe and reelplyr.exe are parody names of real world software programs (Windows) Explorer, PhotoShop, Outlook, Netscape, and RealPlayer. Another resource hog name, pine30.exe, I have not been able to reconcile with a real program.

During the game, the player must find permission bits which are keys that allow the player to proceed to the next level. "Permission bit" is a term used with Unix and Linux operating systems regarding the permission levels of users.

In the game, off-duty programs are known to relax at the Progress Bar. In operating system terminology, a progress bar is a graphical representation of the progress of a task such as copying files from one location to another.

The main villain of the game, the CEO of fCon, is never revealed, but it is hinted that it is actually Ed Dillinger; an email in the game has the CEO speaking of regaining control of the company (ENCOM) he used to run. This could also make it Kevin Flynn or Walter Gibbs, but it seems unlikely given the diabolical nature of the CEO.

An email seen in the game with the subject of "Worried about my job!" ends with an Encom employee saying, "Btw, can I have my stapler back?" This may be a reference to the 1999 film Office Space in which one of the characters entreats others for the return of his red stapler which he paid for himself.

The game reveals that about 1000 subjective years pass in the Electronic World for every 20 years in the real world.

Spooler.exe is an ICP (Intrusion Countermeasure Program) in the game. Probably the name is a reference to spooler services that run on most operating systems and in some programs. For example, the print spooler service (spoolsv.exe) used by the Microsoft Windows operating system. (There is also known to be a spooler.exe process associated with the WIN32.RBOT backdoor trojan, but this worm was not discovered until 2004, after the Tron 2.0 game had already been released.)

The game refers to the tanks as being "read-only", which means they cannot be derezzed. The term is derived from the computer term Read-Only Memory (ROM) which applies to prerecorded instructions on a computer chip that cannot be (easily) erased and which is retained even when the computer is powered down.

Much more information about the people, places, and things of Tron 2.0 can found at the Tron Wiki.

 

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