Hacker Cinema
Tron
1982 · Film · 96 min
Part of TRON Collection
Directed by Steven Lisberger
Science FictionActionAdventure
When brilliant video game maker Flynn hacks the mainframe of his ex-employer, he is beamed inside an astonishing digital world and becomes part of the very game he is designing. In his mission through cyberspace, Flynn matches wits with a maniacal Master Control Program and teams up with Tron, a security measure created to bring balance to the digital environment.
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206 comments on Hacker News
I liked the old LEGO up to around the 1990s or so, give or take. When I look at LEGO nowadays, of course they have some of the old spirit still in place, but in other areas they are just overpriced now and addicted to maximizing cash influx. This was a bit different in the pre-1990s era. 1990s already got more commercialized but I still would say it was somewhat ok. Then something shifted and I am not sure what. The creativity seems to have been degraded. I saw some huge LEGO sets for several hundred euros as collectors edition. And I understand that he had fun building it with his kids, but to me this was no longer LEGO. The most fun I had was assembling my own pieces back when I was young. For instance, after seeing the old movie Tron, I built a few of the objects in the "matrix", in particular those floating T-like thingies. These were quite easy to build via LEGO. I did not need instructions, I just experimented until it worked. I think this was the biggest selling point of LEGO, to be able to build things on your own. When I look at those huge expensive sets, that seems to have shifted. I get it, different portfolio and what not but this is also corporate fluff. It changed what LEGO is, and IMO it changed it to the worse.
There have been a few movies that each revolutionised CGI in their own way. The Last Starfighter, flight of the navigator, tron, jurassic park, toy story, Terminator 2
I just don't get why we need to argue about something — the right to general purpose computing — which has been answered decades ago?
The user must be the administrator of their own device. Whether that's a laptop, desktop, PDA, mp3-player, smartphone, tablet, cyberdeck, netbook, or any other kind of computing device.
The user must be able to overrule any and all decisions. That's the definition of ownership.
Like, this was the reason why GNU was founded, and before that was the plot of the movie TRON.
Pretty sure “fusoridae” had a prominent role in the original Tron movie.
What's funny is that ridiculous movie scenes (like MCP in tron and "these are not the droids you're looking for") seem MORE explainable over time.
EDIT: those weren't guns, they were walkie-talkies
As I pointed out to the OP on Mastodon, I very much believe that it was a reference to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where they filmed a big door, and the original laser sequence from the first TRON movie.
LLL also made an in-house video when they were filming the original movie - https://www.spyculture.com/dept-energy-invent-making-video/
I think Tron 1 has the shallowest plot! Guy goes on an adventure to take credit for his game. The idea of MCP vs the users is good (and still topical!), but a lot of the other stuff - nods to religion, romance...they feel like afterthoughts. The point was the graphics. And that's fine! I like the movie.
Legacy, on the other hand, has a ton of depth to it! The father/son stuff. Living under the weight of expectations. The nature of perfection. Being open to the unexpected. Resistance by withdrawal. Flynn in End of Line Club - God entering the room - was probably the coolest moment in the entire franchise. And of course the visuals and soundtrack were good. The plot's a little stilted to start, but once the movie hits Flynn's arcade, it takes off. Finally, I should note that the way it was able to walk the line of being a sequel and a reboot and something new entirely is remarkable; people absolutely do not give it enough credit for that.
I liked Ares as well. People seemed to not like Leto and the fact that they rebooted again (and the fact that Tron is not in a Tron movie), but I thought the visuals were good, the soundtrack really grew on me, and there are some ideas to chew on in there as well. Think of it as a big-budget TNG episode where Data's learning about being human. Having just watched Ex Machina, it's actually an interesting companion film: both involve an embodied AI brought into existence by a megalomaniac tech bro, but Ares and Ava take very different paths based on the nature and actions of Eve and Caleb. Dillinger is a bit mustache-twirly but I think he captures the way that corporate pressures can lead people without a strong moral compass down a bad road.
Anyways, 2 and 3 are really good and I just wanna stick up for them.
Now add VR support and we can visit this museum and be like in a Tron movie. You can even charge a fee anyone entering musium usin VR ;-)
I found some more details about this, for anyone interested. It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input, when it was actually quite a laborious process.
"Tron’s offices were trailers in the Disney parking lot, recalls Chris Wedge, then an animator for MAGI, who worked on Tron’s light cycle sequences. “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"
"Tron’s distinctive glowing circuitry was achieved through a technique called backlight animation, which involves making a negative of each frame and hand-painting the glowing areas. There were 75,000 frames to do; more than half a million pieces of artwork."
"Star Wars and Alien both feature 3D wireframe graphics projected on screens. Only a few companies could produce such images, each of which had their own room-sized computer and their own custom-built software. The process was still cumbersome. “We had to figure out how to position and render objects 24 times to make one second of perceived movement on the screen,” says Bill Kroyer, Tron’s head of computer animation. Tron’s animators had to map out the CGI scenes on graph paper, then calculate the coordinates and angles for each element in each frame."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/05/tron-steven-lisberger-interview
The Hunt for Red Octangles is a 3D blimp-reconnaissance game using Three.js that turns real-world locations into 'Grid' type maps from the movie Tron. You can jump to almost any city in the world (Manhattan, Paris, London, or even your own neighborhood) and the game will procedurally generate the 3D buildings and road networks using the Overpass API.
The Tech Stack:
Three.js: For the 3D rendering and searchlight effects.
Overpass API (OSM): For fetching building footprints and road vectors.
Photon API (Komoot): For the geocoding/search functionality.
The original Homeworld team was casting spells!
I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense.
That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.
Mr Beast isn’t the internet. He’s a TV show host. And there’s been exploitative TV shows for decades. This isn’t a format Mr Beast invented.
As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).
The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.
The fact that it was written on a mechanical typewriter isn't very relevant as even today some writers prefer writing on those, in that time they where obviously still quite common (and more accessible compared to computers).
Modems where expensive but so was a computer, however perhaps people where able to experience the technologies through their workplace or schools investments.
The ideas of Networking/big networks & cracking/hacking/phreaking where not strange in this time. Actually it was probably in the right place to write fiction about. Since most people where not familiar with the terms but had perhaps heard them on the news, advertisements or similar media. Allowing them to reason/dream about networks and the potential of connectivity while the interfaces and had not quite solidified into examples you could easily point at.
For reference the movie Tron came out in 1982. And CBBS was around since late 1970s. And not to forget people in the 1980s where quite comfortable with the phone network. Pagers and early mobile devices (phones/laptops) became available, there was a certain hype/energy about what the "connected" future might hold. A few years later saw the explosion of the BBS scene and technologies like Fidonet where developed and accessible for the computer enthusiast at home.
The point being that while "things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist" they didn't exist in the capacity we see today. The seeds of the technologies was there even in everyday media channels and it is not strange that a science fiction writer would extrapolate from that.
I feel that way. I liked Tron when it was in theaters, Tron Legacy just felt so... Sony with its weird sexless glowing eroticism. Definitely Legacy did not prime me to be interested in a new Tron movie.
I'm the opposite of the author here. I loved the original Tron, I was bored out of my mind by the sequel (Legacy).
As far as I could tell in Legacy, Sam Flynn just shows up and has no reason to be any good at doing anything in the Tron universe, he just is. His father could have left his swanky cave and just done whatever it is he did, at any time ... to end the film. No rhyme or reason to anything.
Interestingly enough the author kinda describes the same problem in Ares, rules aren't clear why anything happens. It just does sometimes, except when it doesn't.
Ares isn't dong well, and Legacy did, but I kinda wonder if the emptiness of Legacy meant that anything next was dead on arrival. Fans already saw that, couldn't think of why they'd see it again if there's not much too it...
Tron is a fantastically difficult franchise to write for. It is, in my opinion, the most alien franchise in Hollywood. It's unusual for alien worlds in Hollywood to have different physics, but the grid does. Its residents are not human, and while some basic connections to humans are necessary for the audience to care at all, the programs on the grid are not humans. Very different motivations, very different needs.
And now that Hollywood executives have all but open contempt for writing, I had no hopes of them writing a decent Tron film. And they didn't. Even Legacy really kind of squeaked out decent quality (if not spectacularly perfect in every way) in an era where the writing was already degrading; I recall not expecting much from that film even then and being pleasantly surprised. Now it's just hopeless to expect them to be able to write something as foreign as the deeply alien grid residents in Tron when Hollywood writers hardly seem to be able to write about anything that isn't just their own personal interpretation of some family trauma they directly experienced, or their previous night's dinner politics conversation translated to screen with some one genre or another's conventions smeared over it like a bad makeup job.
Thank you so much for saying this! The moment I saw the trailer and read the premise I immediately lost faith in the product.
I am not the biggest Tron fan but I have such a soft part in my heart for the movies because the original film has such a unique take on how computers work because back then they weren't mainstream that you end up with this weird mishmash of science and fantasy that you don't see anymore. Meanwhile, the sequel had this amazing production design and the remix version of the album has a permanent spot in my workout playlist thanks to all the techno artists they brought aboard.
Shame that the execs in Disney seem to be so clueless and just keep burning hundreds of millions to make these over-budget star studded films that no one is going to watch, at least in the case of marvel it makes sense but who in the world was clamoring for Tron? You need to take creative risks and shying away from the digital world isn't it.
I was visiting my old university town when I noticed they have a movie theater now. I went in cause I wanted to support it and the only session at the time was tron. I left as soon as my pop corn bucket was empty. What a mess!
I love Tron, and NIN. I can't even figure out what the movie is about from the trailers. All the other Tron's I head a good idea of what the movie was about. This one, zero clue... and I have no interest to go to a theater to find out. Will watch once it comes out for home.
"One MCP server for AI to handle thousands of tools" I wonder if they intended to refer the Tron movie where the Master Control Program(MCP) handles thousands of programs.
Tron in 1982 also got a PG rating. Quite controversial in my mother's circle of parenting friends. "How can Disney release a PG movie like that?" said one parent.
You're right; also, apparently, Gibson said he hadn't seen Tron as late as March 1983, and he finished a draft of Neuromancer before that August https://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/free-article/neuromancer-the-birth-of-an-sf-classic/ . (Though this also confirms that he had seen Tron stills in mid-1982, though that's still well after both "Burning Chrome" and the Jacked In outline (both 1981)). OTOH the similarities to Blade Runner have never really been hard to explain: if you cross film noir and hard-boiled with New Hollywood and '70s malaise fiction then it's natural to end up with something a bit like Blade Runner and so also Neuromancer, while on the other hand there are of course huge differences between the two as well.
This made me nostalgic for GLTron. After a round of that, I decided to look for a more up-to-date lightcycle game but, surprisingly, there aren't any that capture the look of the 80's Tron movie with a similar level of faithfulness.
Armagetron was roughly contemporary with GLTron, but has a zoomed out perspective that doesn't capture the claustrophobic feeling of not knowing what's on the other side of that trail you're next to. There are also games based on the lightcycle sequences from the newer TRON movies. I have nothing against them, but they're not the same thing.
Seems like an underserved audience might possibly exist for this sort of thing.
> I am sitting here behind my Ryzen monster but still yearn for those days.
That so true... At that time computers were new and the media didn't get them at all. You went to the movies and saw Tron and Wargames.
For the younger here: this meant it was dreams on steroids. No experts wondering if it would happen or not, no big corps... Just pure freedom.
(but, we didn't have the web, the LSP, memory was almost non existent, no package manager (hell, no packages at all), you had a few thousands pixels at most, colors if lucky, floppy disks were suddenly forgetting your beloved code, hard disk ? you had to sell your home to get that! friends to talk about your passion ? Nope, nobody --- but the dream, kids... the f**g dream)
In the seminal SF movie Tron (1982), MCP stood for "Master Control Program", and it has already been firmly established that "Master" is a problematic word we must expunge from our repositories.
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
Hacker culture was quite mainstream in the 80's, already. This was a refactoring of it. War Games and Tron and other movies got there first.
I think that's the reason I don't have the affinity for this movie that many do - it created incorrect stereotypes which still persist today.
Wish I could take you all back to Slashdot for a few moments in the late 1990s to see all the similar trash that was HYSTERICALLY being bloviated by young, mostly not American, straight-up socialists who were following around a disgusting dirt bag living off MIT tenure and later, a dude who got rich writing a PDF download about giving away your code in a cathedral or bazaar (/s). The "open source" movement even bled into pop culture appearing in a boardroom scene in Disney's "Tron" movie. The Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China and especially the Republic of India thank them all for giving EVERYTHING THEY HAD to them as fast as it could be downloaded.
The arguments against "open source" back then are no longer valid. That ship sailed (or should I say sunk?) They commoditized the art-science while driving engineering wages down, killing the country's competitive edge that every male and several females in my family for generations literally fought to create and now, train AI models that write and deploy apps based on single commands issued by get-rich-quick-schemers or even other AI models. https://youtu.be/mpWe5C58y40
PS: Published my first "public domain software" in mid-1980s on the DECUS mass magnetic-tape duplication service that ran at every convention (bet you thought I was going to say "Fred Fish Floppies" lol.)
Tangential cultural reference ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tron_characters#Master_Control_Program The Master Control Program (MCP) ... is the main digital antagonist of the first Tron film.
This reminds me of the concept of “user” as presented in the 1982 Tron movie, where users were regarded as sovereigns with god-like powers by the software (“programs”). The notion of “user” in the article is almost the reverse. We should return to that older conception.
But it is partly "just the times". There's a dividing line in 1977 called Star Wars. Before Star Wars it was much more common for science fiction films to use long establishing sequences of especially space technology. For a 1960s audience when the actual moon landings were fresh to mind, the long, slow ballet of space was very palpable and appreciable. Star Wars changed a lot of things for scifi, including reducing some of those establishing sequences to their quickest and most basic. It is harder to appreciate something like 2001 on this side of Star Wars. Scifi movies have been trying to mostly be "the next Star Wars" for almost every decade since, with few exceptions, many of which don't always do well in the box office (Tron is a cult favorite, but early theatrical audiences found it slow; Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often considered a bomb by Star Trek standards for being a pre-Star Wars sort of movie released two years after Star Wars; Gravity and Interstellar both got accolades in somewhat recent years for mostly sort of getting away with pre-Star Wars scifi pacing, but partly got away with it from Brand Name stars and directors and a focus on IMAX tech and spectacle).
2001 didn't feel out of place versus scifi movies of its time. It feels slow and ponderous post-Star Wars.
To answer your other comment: yes, the MCP from Tron was named after the Burroughs/Unisys OS. Bonnie MacBird, the screenwriter for Tron, is the wife of Alan Kay, who served as technical consultant, and she dropped references both to himself (Alan Bradley) and his areas of interest (Kay loved the Burroughs architecture and in particular its tagged-memory features) in the script for the movie.
Interesting to learn the real MCP was nearly as hostile as its fictional namesake.
Tron was a mix of CGI and not-CGI. The not-CGI stuff, w/ all the photographic technique, was pretty wild. The CGI, in contrast, was not as wild.
I believe this was the documentary I watched a couple of years ago re: the making of Tron that went into a lot of detail about the effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbgHMrLPQrE
Not sure about Tron but here are a few details [1] about the Foonly F1 used on that film and how it was later used for Flight of the Navigator:
> They had pushed for Triple-I to build the DFP, the first (that I know of) high-resolution digital film printer for motion pictures. This was the next generation PFR, using an 8" CRT which had fast-decaying phosphors so that it could be used for scanning in film (using photomultiplier tubes built into a special camera) as well as printing. The imagery was amazing
> Since the Foonly only had enough disk storage to hold the frame being computed and the frame being printed, the numbers worked out like this: 30 seconds of film at 24 frames per second works out to 720 images each computed and printed at 6000 x 4000 pixels.
[1] http://dave.zfxinc.net/f1.html
How was CGI output with enough scaling to look good on film, when the Spectrum only had composite output?
Similarly, with early CGI like Tron, what was the render/target resolution for film?
The Long Goodbye (R. Altman) Akira (Otomo) Cinema Paradiso (G. Tornatore) In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai) Tron (S. Lisberger) Stop Making Sense (J. Demme)
I rewatch many movies quite often. But the ones that really stand out, in no particular order...
Wargames Jurassic Park Evolution Unstoppable Lord of the Rings Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 Alien 1, 2 and 3 Back to the Future Ghost in the Shell (basically all of it, mostly seasons 1 and 2) The Martian Tron 1 and 2 Anything by Miyazaki, but Howl's Moving Castle even more so
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
As far as I can see, the whole history of art is a long argument about whether something can be called art or not. It's always art
As a recent example, Tron was disqualified for a visual effects Oscar because it was all done on computer and therefore seen as cheating, instead of being recognised aa both an incredible achievement and a precursor for the next 40 years of filmmaking. [1]
Imagine the howls when the first film with significant amounts of AI effects is released.
[1]https://www.slashfilm.com/1177735/why-tron-was-disqualified-from-being-a-visual-effects-oscar-nominee/
But Disney financed and distributed Tron. It wasn't made by a Disney Studio, and most of the animation was outsourced to a Taiwanese studio because Disney wouldn't lend any of their own talent. So I think it's fair to say that Oliver & Company is the first Disney-made film to use CGI.
And the film OP mentioned Oliver & Company:
>Eleven minutes of the film used "computer-assisted imagery" such as the skyscrapers, the taxi cabs, trains, Fagin's scooter-cart, and the climactic subway chase
I think Tron wins in terms of CGI
> "This was the first Disney movie to make heavy use of computer animation. [...]"
Tron came out 1982, six years before Oliver & Company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron
Disrupt has a nice track with samples from Dark Star called Bomb 20.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2r59XMMvM
The whole album Foundation Bit is full of samples from movies like Blade Runner, Tron, THX 1138 (George Lucas) etc.
A real gem if you like electronic/reggae.
Yes this. This is what I've been trying to explain to my friends.
When Tron came out in 1982, it was disliked because back then using CGI effects was considered "cheating". Then awhile later Pixar did movies entirely with CGI and they were hits. Now almost every big studio movie uses CGI. Shunned to embraced in like, 13 years.
I think over time the general consensus's views about AI models will soften. Although it might take longer in some communities. (Username checks out lol, furry here also. I think the furs may take longer to embrace it.)
(Also, people will still continue to use older tools like Photoshop to accomplish similar things.)
Wow this is new to me, but is it true? Sources seem conflicting (on mobile, didn't watch and only did a brief google skim).
Edit: it seems to be false.
https://www.tampabay.com/trons-original-trailer-made-more-sense-than-the-movie/2329316/
> TRON is also a debugging command in the BASIC programming language, meaning "TRace ON." However, movie producers swear they didn't know this when naming the movie and just picked the name from inside the word "electronic."
Wikipedia agrees.
This just confirmed my principally suspicious attitude about trusting videos as sources.
DIY Perks' Interrotron[0]
Btw "Tron" the movies are a reference to the BASIC debugging command TRON/TROFF for trace on/off.
[0] https://youtu.be/2AecAXinars?si=fK2Vd1Q2e73IZ3Bq&t=663
> Turning Flynn into, like, the Che Guevara version of Steve Jobs has some historical weight. In the original Tron, Flynn was a brilliant creative nudged out of a company he built by monolithic suits. Incredibly, this became the Steve Jobs origin myth after the movie's release, when the Apple board demanded his resignation in 1985. Jobs was still alive in 2010, and his Silicon Santa routine reflected a mainstream burst of rampant optimism about computer technology. The world will never feel that optimism again. And you should be alarmed, maybe, by the fact that the young Kevin Flynn preaching about humanity's bright techno-future looks like an unfinished deepfake.
Tron Legacy. Such a good film. My kids and I watch it a few times a year. I tried watching the original from 1982 and it just felt so... dated? Perhaps I'm spoiled like most people from all the great CGI and effects.
> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users, or that manipulates them, or that turns them into the product.
> There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable
Feels like one of the main plot points of Tron. (1980s Disney movie where programming was a major plot point.)
Very far, yes, but also in a fast moving field.
CGI in films used to be obvious all the time no matter how good the artists using it, now it's everywhere and only noticeable when that's the point; the gap from Tron to Fellowship of the Ring was 19.5 years.
My guess is the analogy here puts the quality of existing genAI somewhere near the equivalent of early TV CGI, given its use in one of the Marvel title sequences etc., but it is just an analogy and there's no guarantees of anything either way.
In the movie Tron, a user is this worst thing a program can encounter.
> Greetings, programs! Oh, what an occasion we have here before us. Because your rumors are true. We do indeed have in our midst a User!
(Can't find the 1982 quote, but this one from some 2010 redo gets the point across)
> Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie!
That might be due to movie accounting. There are times the producers of the movie have an incentive to make sure a movie has little or no profit, even if it does okay at the box office. For example when someone other than the producers will contractually get a percentage of the net proceeds of the movie.
It's not a great example (I have no idea about his specific motivations), but one example of how to tweak those knobs is when Kubrick's films had to use special equipment that was literally only available from a single company. A company that Kubrick happened to own, and could decide how much it charged the production. You can see how anyone involved in the production who had a piece of the film's net would have the size of their piece impacted by however many millions went to Kubrick's company.
(there's a play in which greedy producers joke about how "there is no net!" but I can't for the life of me remember much about it beyond that joke)
Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie!
These cabinets are so rare, I have to wonder how it wound up on the curb. I'd imagine there's no way it's a happy story, unfortunately. Someone apparently felt that was worthless.
I worked at iii in the late ‘70s, and my desk was in the cubicle next to the movie group’s. I loved looking over the divider to look at the latest pictures from Westworld (Yul Brinner with a photogrammetry grid) or Tron, or a teapot. Fun stuff.
> OP gives sober perspective of regular Joe, who didn't have VR as a wet dream since early childhood
Yes, the average Joe doesn't care about this stuff. That's why Ready Player One grossed 600 million dollars at the box office[0]. And why we've had movies like Tron since the 80's. And hypothetical tech in movies like Iron Man display AR/VR capabilities we dream about. Clearly the average Joe doesn't concern themselves with AR/VR or care about it becoming a reality. /s
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)#:~:text=Reception-,Box%20office,in%20order%20to%20break%20even.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
Purely on visuals side of things:
- Tron released in 1982: one of the first movies with extensive use of CGI
- Terminator 2 released in 1992 with first partially CGI character and realistic CGI human movement
- LOTR in 2003 had it's own important firsts like AI driven CGI characters in massive battles
There have been advances since, but not comparable to TRON to LOTR jump. Another important factor is that a lot of effects were practical and not CGI and those will always age well.
> it makes you think what else is not accurate?
The answer is: all of it! 100% of Stranger Things is inaccurate, because it’s fiction. ;)
This is true for all subjects, not just computer hacking. This includes non-fiction documentaries too… there’s nothing you can watch anywhere that is “accurate”, except maybe live video feeds. There are always incorrect details.
Accuracy, of course, is not the primary goal of TV show producers. They like to slip in these somewhat period accurate-ish tidbits for the enjoyment of those of us looking closely at the tangential details, but the Amiga in the show has no bearing on the story, it’s just a prop. I’m sure if you looked as closely at all the other props, you’d notice many that are inaccurate for the time & location: lamps, furniture, clothes, cars, houses, etc. It’s not possible to shoot a large production and get every single detail (and it would be unaffordably expensive to even get very close.) To me, going to the trouble of recreating the Amiga screen seems like a lot of effort to put into a prop.
So here’s a question for you: would you rather they used fictional computer brands and fictional screen shots? Would that make it more watchable for you? Can you watch computer sci-fi when it’s not trying to include period props, like Tron, for example? I do have my own line for where inaccuracies will pull me out of a show and prevent me from suspending disbelief, but generally as a computer nerd who lived through the 80s, I like a lot of the ‘hacking’ pop culture, even when it’s extremely cringe (looking at you, “Hackers”).
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
A good watch indeed. Mechanical film production is all but dead. It's all a digital pipeline now.
Curiously, all the new technology has failed to make the creation of VFX movies less costly.
We made "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" 20 years after Tron, and the results were also a movie ahead of its time. I guess that happens when you push the technology forward in a big way. Takes a while for audiences to catch up.
I ran into this last week by way of following links away from the story on HN re: Wendy Carlos (who composed and performed the soundtrack to Tron). It was a good watch.
The physical aspects of the production (so many layers of Kodalith plates for every frame, massive work in rotoscoping, multiple exposures using animation cameras to get the distinctive look, etc) are astounding to me. Film production, from a mechanical perspective, must be so much easier today.
Didn’t realize she did the soundtrack to Tron. Amazing music in that film.
I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film production I can't believe it was even made.
One day I looked up the soundtrack at the local record store and bought it..."Composer Wendy Carlos" huh, never heard of her and couldn't find anything really other than contributions to Clockwork Orange and Hooked on Bach and not much else. I moved on.
Later, when there was more Internet to be had, I decided to look up Wendy and was shocked to learn she was trans. It started me down a journey of reflection, challenging my upbringing, and reexamining many "truths" that I had been taught. Along that journey I learned about the tragedy of Alan Turing and other stories.
Wendy's music planted a seed that significantly transformed my inner life, much for the better. It helped me develop significantly in my thoughts on freedom, empathy, justice and the kind of future world I'd like to live in and leave behind.
In 1982 it took a lot of daring for a Disney exec to green light bringing her music to their audience. This was during an age of great an unjust moral panic on a variety of topics.
for reference: I remember my mother receiving a letter from her pastor outlining why "Back to the Future Part II" was the work of Satan and they should never allow it in their household. The central argument was a table that counted the number of time the seven dirty swear words were mentioned in the movie, challenged its rating, and attributed the low rating (PG I think) to a conspiracy by Satan worshipers to corrupt God's youth. This was 1989.
Still love the original theme from Tron.
As much as the Tron (2010) movie's score had a "cool" factor it lacked the heart and soul of the original.
If they ever do another one I'd like to see the original Carlos' Tron's leitmotif woven back into it.
Yeah, I agree. Limiting to one is tricky, when years like 1982 are famous for having multiple amazing films (in this example all released in the summer)
You're right that "Greatest Hit of that year" is going to wildly swing in quality, and you could miss other films that are arguably the better film.
Take that 1982 example again, the writer chose E.T. .. an amazing film by all accounts, but ignored Bladerunner, Empire Strikes Back, The Thing, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, Wrath of Kahn etc etc...
Sure not all these films are equal, but the metric of highest grossing film might work fine in the older years.. but I'm going to say that lately, that metric doesn't work anymore. And it doesn't work because honestly, was Spiderman the best film from last year?
I may be mistaken, but the film Tron looks to have been inspired by this section from a 1940s Busby Berkeley film: “The Gang’s All Here”
This has been edited as a video for the song Soft Core by Tamaryn:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AnZDaK9Vy0Y
The Gang’s All Here, and yes that’s Carmen Miranda: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZp-s4wIc_s
Having read the responses of the guy that generated these, the prompt is as simple as
production still from 1976 of Jodorowsky's TRON, 20 ASA 35mm --v 4 --ar 3:2
production still in version 4 doing most of the heavy lifting, with the year and film propeties giving a bit more vibe, and of course the overarching theme of TRON in the style of Jodorowsky. Add some extra words to differentiate scenes, such as light cycle or disc or computer. Add wide aspect ratio, and that's it. So it's 99% Midjourney. Mind blowing.
The headline doesn't mention AI art, but it doesn't really imply that it's actually Jodorowski's work either. "Jodorowski's Tron" might have, but "Fantasy Jodorowski's Tron visualizations" strongly implies that this is some other artist's idea of what a Jodorowski Tron movie from an alternate universe might have looked like, which is pretty much the case.
There was nothing deceptive or clickbaity in the title, is what I'm saying.
Would definitely want to watch it! That synthetic style (synthetic, as in "put-together" as well as in "created by technology") nicely picks up the expressionist high-contrast b/w that was so great in the original Tron's composite images and applies its attitude to the other visual dimensions as well.
If Jeff Bezos were to fall in love with that look and indulge in another of his "it's my money and I want to see it!" film hobbies, I wonder if a well-funded team like that could actually pick up the look and make it a movie reality? Or would they inevitably fail to capture the magic and churn out yet another interchangeable cgi rumble?
This is fantastic. I want to watch the movie!
What do you think are the odds that we'll see a feature length AI powered "Jodorowsky's Tron" film within say.. the next 20 years? Some shepherding by humans allowed of course.
Can you explain the connection?
Only huge multinational corporations can fund the production of movies like Dune and Tron today, and if anything it seems like this phase of ai art is surprisingly scrappy/democratic/grassroots and not hidden behind a billionaires lock and key.
I did exactly the same thing and had a similar experience.
I think this is broadly applicable to most, probably all stylized movie user interfaces. Minority Report, Tron and Star Trek come to mind. They look really cool on the big screen and are inspiring but once you get home and try to actually use something like it in real life for something productive and it's an impediment more than an inspiration.
> "Software freedom" fighters should understand that things happen based on some user base need.
I wish that were true. However, I think the movie Tron (1982) sums this up very nicely.
From the movie Tron:
> Dr. Walter Gibbs: That MCP, that's half our problem right there.
> Ed Dillinger: The MCP is the most efficient way of handling what we do! I can't sit here and worry about every little user request that comes in!
> Dr. Walter Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for!
> Ed Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for.
We are now moving toward a world where all computers have a "MCP". No, it is not to solve user problems, it is to do the business of the corporations that designed it.
> first true Cyberpunk movie
Tron, Brazil, Videodrome, Metropolis, Terminus, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, etc etc etc
Tron may have been the first movie I ever saw in a cinema. My parents took us to a drive-in. I remember having the crap scared out of me by the face of the MCP up on that enormous screen. I wouldn't learn about its ancillary awesomeness -- the primitive CG, the use of the Super Foonly, the fact that the MCP is named after the OS for the lauded Burroughs architectures (now Unisys ClearPath)... Like it or not, as much of a dreamlike mishmash as Tron is, it is bound up tightly with the history of our profession and an important piece of our lore.
That everyone inside the computer is wearing some type of headgear helps too. Many sci-fi movies feel dated due to the use of contemporary hairstyles. This is somewhat true of Tron in the real world scenes but once in the computer, it does have a very timeless aesthetic.
I think I'm jaded, but even when I saw Tron originally, I was only modestly impressed with the CGI. It felt very wire-framey (similar to the Star Trek II genesis sequence) to me, even if (as you say) it had curves and filled polygons.
After some time working in computer graphics I realized that what I really needed/wanted was renderman and an entire team of animators/technical directors, circa 2010. So, basically subsurface scattering, monte carlo sampling, many light sources, rich models and textures. Obviously, none of that was really accessible at the time Tron or Star Trek II was made, but those movies opened the path for the necessary brain and money investment to make the Pixar rendering computer and the rest is history.
Much as I personally like the Wendy Carlos Tron work, I've got a feeling it didn't resonate with Disney audiences and that really hurt the film at the box office. The visuals were really slick but the music was very jarring and sometimes discordant for people used to saccharine soundtracks...
https://www.wendycarlos.com/+tron.html
Recent and related:
Tron changed cinema, predicted the future of tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32033622 - July 2022 (107 comments)
TRON was technologically notable because it was the first wide-release film to extensively use high-res CGI. Getting high-res electronic images transferred cleanly to film was still being figured out. I remember reading in an effects magazine about how they cobbled together a workflow to get images from the 4096 line frame buffer onto film.
When Tron was first released I was in a grad level computer graphics class at a university in the USA midwest. I convinced our rather stuffy professor to take the class across the street to the "Cinema Twin" and watch the movie. In those days computer graphics consisted of mostly pen plotters and Tektronix vector displays - pretty dry stuff, lots of theory in the class but not much interesting output was generated. To say the collective minds of the class were blown away by the movie would be an understatement. In its own way it showed the future of CGI and what the this domain could look like. If you haven't seen it lately, give it spin - it holds up well.
In 1979 my high school friends and I used to play a game on paper that was essentially "light cycles". We used a sheet of graph paper and took turns extending our previous walls (each drawn with a different color using a fancy four color pen) by one more square.
None of us has access to computers back then, though our science fair project that year was a microprocessor based video game (using the Signetics 2650). We ran out of time to implement our own games, but "cycles" would have been our second right after "pong".
I did not think of having a character at the leading edge of the wall until I watched "Tron", however. And then I did implement it like that on my TI99/4A including the movie's theme music.
While I couldn't find the name of the paper version of the game we played, it seems that there was already a two player arcade version in 1976 called "Blockade" by Gremlin.
It's not that Star Wars was the first movie to use science-fiction for mythological or religious themes but Star Wars is the first I know of famous for being inspired by Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell claimed all myths follow the same formula which he called the monomyth.
You look at the poster of Tron and it's Luke Skywalker imagined as a computer program with the pose and lightsaber glow from the Star Wars poster.
If you buy Joseph's Campbell's claims that all myth follows a formula then adventure film making is about casting a Luke Skywalker Monomyth figure in a difference setting (wild west setting, computer setting, crime ridden urban setting, samurai setting etc.) and just telling the same story over and over and claiming you are doing something spiritual.
I don't particularly buy that view of filmmaking but I see the director's comment about Shamanism in that context seeing as Tron seems to borrow a bit of inspiration from Star Wars.
Tron:Legacy is one of my favorite movies. I probably like it more than the original. At the very least, I watch it more often than the original. It's funny though: when I saw it in the theater the first time, I thought it was dragging a bit towards the middle, and was getting a little restless and wondering if this was really the Tron successor I wanted. But then I watched it again later and enjoyed it even more. I've only grown to appreciate it more and more with subsequent viewings. Go figure, right?
I kind of like Tron but that statement from the director isn't something I buy.
There's no spirit world in Tron's plot- the plot is literally about a guy getting zapped into a machine. If it was the director's intent to depict a "spirit world" or "shaman" , he did a poor job of conveying it. Other movies like "Return to OZ" do a much better job of opening themselves up to non literal interpretations by having ambiguity between the "real" world and the "fantasy" world.
What I really get from Tron is it is basically Star Wars with "galaxy far far away" replaced with "CGI computer world". The Tron poster is heavily copied from this famous Star Wars poster:
https://www.starwars.com/news/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-original-star-wars-poster
Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" influenced Star Wars. So calling your Hollywood formula "mythic" in some fashion was presumably fashionable on account of the success of Star Wars.
I kind of like Tron but the plot is very simple, and very literal. It doesn't really come to life the way Star Wars does, or open itself up to interpretation like more symbolic films.
If the director really wanted us to see the film as shamanic, he probably shouldn't have used such a clunky plot device as a laser beam that makes someone enter a computer.
> Does Tron require more disbelief than any other mainstream sci-fi? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Would be interesting to hear what sci-fi movies seem more plausible. 2001 is even stranger and also anthropomorphizes computer programs. In many ways 2001 seems like it was probably a large influence on Tron.
Than any other? For sure. There is a lot less room for imagination when it comes to the inner workings of a computer, something we as a society know a great deal about. It's not hard to think of sci-fi settings that require less disbelief, simply by virtue of taking place somewhere/somewhen very remote to us personally.
Does Tron require more disbelief than any other mainstream sci-fi? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Would be interesting to hear what sci-fi movies seem more plausible. 2001 is even stranger and also anthropomorphizes computer programs. In many ways 2001 seems like it was probably a large influence on Tron.
I like your positive take on Legacy, I will need to watch again. Also thanks for the notes on Uprising, I haven’t seen it and now will watch. I did love the original and it’s why the sequel felt flat to me, even though it was absolutely beautifully rendered and the music was awesome. I’m probably being a hypocrite relative to my first paragraph, but one of the things that bugged me about Legacy was the added real-world physics in the computer world, e.g., recognizers blowing dust & smoke. This is a bit ironic, I know, but that cause me to have trouble suspending my disbelief during Legacy. The computer world in the first movie was a mysterious different place that operated on different physics, clearly it was all magnetics and light or something, right? Adding jet engines breaks the premise of the computer world and makes it less mysterious and therefore more boring to me. It does add visual detail, and as a former CG artist, the movie is gorgeous and took a lot of hard work, but just missed the mark for me in terms of why the first one was good. Oh, and the “now that’s a big door!” gag was eye-rollingly goofy, that one also pulled me right out of the movie.
Tron is probably my favorite movie of all time! A fun adventure movie that's amazing to look at through the entire movie thanks to the immense effort put forth by the entire team, even if the story goofs up in a few places. If you have the time, watch The Making of Tron documentary where they go over (and show) some of the processes they used and show them as well!
One thing I can't get over in regards to the sequel (Legacy) is how it changed the aesthetic of the computer world from nice bright neon on white and vivid purples to all black and neon blue or orange! Legacy is jam packed with CGI but it's still less visually interesting to look at (in my opinion) because of the lack of color. Not to mention it moves away from the "power to the users/believers" angle of the first film to try and take a philosophical stand on everything that amounts to meaning nothing.
Tron is a truly unique movie in everything it did, and my greatest sadness is that nothing that came after it has the same look and feel as the original. The closest we get is the world they had in Kingdom Hearts 2...
Absolutely agree. Tron is in such a weird place for me in that neither movies were particularly great or rank very high in my list of favorite films, yet they both have had a profound impact on me. I quote and reference them all the time and they continue to inspire me artistically and thematically. I'm forever grateful for what they have contributed to pop culture and my life.
End of line.
Anthropomorphize computer programs and invent a BS way of injecting a real human into a computer and Tron is what you get. It's complete nonsense! However, if you can suspend disbelief, Tron is a seminal film that has echoed through all of cinema for decades and is a helluva lot of fun to boot. It is the 80's in a single film. It oozes style and is a groundbreaking technical tour de force that must not be missed by any serious fan of movies.
The sequel is an epic Daft Punk music video that far surpasses "Interstella 5555" and, for that reason alone, is required viewing unless you absolutely hate Daft Punk. There's a cartoon series, Tron: Uprising, that is excellent even though it was cancelled after one season. (It stars Elijah Wood, in case you needed another reason to check it out...)
Tron may not be the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, but each instalment of it has been a truly novel treat. It's may be style without much substance, but what style! I eagerly await my next dose!
Loved the movie as a kid; it changed my life (even though it took me a few times of watching it to fully understand what was happening.)
The sequel, "Tron Legacy", was a fun action movie, with a great sound-track but it's computer world felt "smaller" than the 1982 original and it didn't deliver on the deeper themes.
I would still watch either one today and am hoping for a third. Until then, there's always riding light cycles at Disney World: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2022/07/celebrate-the-40th-anniversary-of-tron-with-a-new-look-at-tron-lightcycle-run-in-magic-kingdom-park/
I really like your attitude, but I have trouble with regards to scary scenes / events (also cause I know some scenes/movies/series made a lot of impact on me as kid like the werewolves from Ghostbusters). I remember the original Tron as more peaceful / less violent. Interstellar didn't contain violence IIRC, but Inception does. The woman goes batshit crazy. I'd also like to add Moon and The Matrix. But again, be careful with suspense and children. Moon's ending was a bit lurid.
As for the point being, the movie is from 1982 and was on about a battle between sysadmin/ML/AI and users, its also a homage to a community which did not exist back then in the same effect it does now (the FOSS community).
Bad CGI is often just bad cinematography. The ability to have a camera anywhere goes to some animators and studios heads, and so the viewer sees something different than normal framed shots. Avatar was really bad for this. The first Tron film had good cinematography.
Tron was not a visionary movie. It was a dumb movie. I watched it in theaters when it came out. It didn’t make sense on any level. It’s not consistent with anything computers do or what information means to a computer.
It is a movie made by ignorant people who mapped a standard plot to a fictional concept of computing which resulted in nonsense.
It was painful to watch.
> Even the CG was horrible.
There wasn't any. From TFA:
> first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself
Few people realise that in 1982 there was no CGI. Tron is mainly rotoscoped [1] but also a composite of creative effects and techniques.
Tron is a remarkable movie for a different reason most people miss today. It was seminal in defining the aesthetic of computer graphics to come by "faking it till you make it".
Without the actual technology for model wirefame and rendering at the time, the visual directors (Steven Lisberger and Donald Kushner) used a combination of drawn animation (Jean Giraud), special lighting and costume, and actual CGI overlays from the "Super Foonly F-1" PDP-10 [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tron§ion=5
The interesting thing about Blade Runner and almost all modern sci-fi and cyberpunk is that they all took their influence from one single comic, The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O'Bannon and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
Dan and Moebius were working on Jodorowsky's Dune. During a slow period, Dan was bored and started drawing a comic. Moebius saw this and offered to rework it a bit. Their collab appeared in Heavy Metal (Metal hurlant) magazine. Ridley Scott used this comic as visual inspiration for Blade Runner. William Gibson even credits this comic for Neuromancer. Other movies influenced by this comic, or the art of Moebius include Tron, Heavy Metal (based on the magazine comics), The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. And, of course, pretty much everything else that came later such as The Matrix or video games like Deus Ex.
It's crazy to think about all the what-ifs with Jodorowsky's Dune. If he did not bring Dan and Moebius together, we wouldn't have Blade Runner (or a vastly different one). If Dune didn't fall apart, Dan wouldn't have gone and written Alien. If Alien didn't happen, Ridley Scott may not have known about Dan O'Bannon or Moebius, and never have done Blade Runner.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also influenced by Moebius, according to Miyazaki. Look at Azrach (again, Metal hurlant magazine) and the similarities are obvious. The French were really ahead in illustration and animation at one point, and don't often get the credit they deserve. Go and look at what René Laloux was doing with Fantastic Planet, Time Masters, or his short films. Some of this stuff still blows my mind.
There's an interesting interview with Syd Mead about his work on Blade Runner here: [1]
Mead also worked on Tron (among other films) and George Lucas made the AT-AT based on Mead's art.[2]
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6VPT-Ug-gF4
[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Mead
OK, now that I'm actually awake, I'll try to finish answering per the OP's request:
Briefly mention the reason for the attribution. Or in other words write your heart out about why you love your field and why you love "the" books.
For starters, the 3 books mentioned are the only three that really stand out to me as having specifically related to my interest in computing. But it's not fair to say that I credit them solely with sparking my passion for computing. In fact, despite being an avid reader who reads a number of books that most people would probably find ludicrous, I would probably credit more of my interest in computing to other factors. Those would include TV shows I watched as a kid (Whiz Kids, Knight Rider, Automan, Max Headroom, etc.), movies (War Games, Tron, and years later The Matrix), magazines (in the 90's I was constantly devouring issues of PC Magazine, Byte, Computer Shopper, and suchlike), and early exposure to text adventure games and so on.
I'd also credit some books that sparked my overall interest in science / technology / engineering, if not computing specifically. Like a book on electronics that I borrowed from the high-school library over and over again until the cover was falling off (literally), a biography of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, etc.
All of that said, the three books do stand out as having been influential to me. Here's why:
The Soul of a new Machine - Kidder took a story that a lot of people would probably find very dry and boring, and made it into high adventure, involving a fascinating cast of characters. It's easy to read this book and come away with the feeling that creating a new computer is The Most Important Thing Ever. For my high-school aged self, that was profound.
Neuromancer - one of my first exposures to the idea that computers were more than just fancy calculators, or utilitarian tools, and rather a gateway to an entirely different world. No, an entirely different kind of world. The idea of "cyberspace" and the adventuring that could happen there... wow. Ever since reading Neuromancer I think I've secretly, on some inner level, been hoping for the day when we achieve VR or simulations that are that immersive and engaging, to the point of truly feeling like you're entering another world. Watching The Matrix definitely amplified that.
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - there are parts of this book that are of dubious veracity, especially some of the parts about Mitnick. Nonetheless, for me at age 24 or so, reading this was my first introduction to the idea that there were specific subcultures associated with computing, and frankly some of the exploits that these characters engaged in seemed rather exciting, if not even enticing. Who read this and didn't want to change the Class of Service on a friend's phone to "payphone" so they would pick up to dial and get the "Please deposit 25 cents for the next 5 minutes" message? C'mon, admit you. You all did.
Love it. For me that movie was TRON. I was 6(?) years old and I knew computers were for me.
An excellent film, should be part of any computer science curriculum or at least some homework. Never noticed or knew that Hollywood went into such details with the "Easter eggs" back then so next time watching it will look out for them.
As also mentioned here, its up there with War Games, Tron and The Lawn Mower Man when considering the biological & chemical knowledge we have at our fingertips today.
(Not the OP)
I can’t say it was ground breaking, as I was a kid at the time, but it was one of the great movies of my childhood. I remember watching it many times over. I do remember the characters seeming less real, and I still knew they were puppets. But this was also the era of Sesame Street, so a movie by Jim Henson that had puppets was kinda normal. I think the fact that my parents talked about it so highly probably answers your question more — it was something adults appreciated. Ultimately, to me, the Dark Crystal wasn’t a great movie because I feel the story was there to service the technique, even if the technique was masterfully used. Maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it.
Tron was much the same. At the time, you knew it wasn’t great, but it was still new. Like the targeting computer CGI for the Star Wars trench run, the effects weren’t great. Even at the time, it was a little spartan. But the effects moved the story, and worked well enough to not be a distraction (and you had never seen anything like it before). Tron was just as much about what it foretold as much as the CGI that was available at the time. But in contrast to the Dark Crystal, I liked the story behind Tron more.
I would say that both were groundbreaking for how they pushed techniques of movie making forward. The world creation in both were amazing and they both set a new bar for future movies to meet.
Hrm. As a nerd growing up in the rural midwest (b.1972) (hundreds of miles from a significant population center, there were some entertainment concepts that were born (Tron, Max Headroom, Knight Rider) that were pretty neat to a 12-17 year-old. 8-bit computer mags were fun to collect--the 8-bit market had some distinctive architectures (z80, 65xx, 8088) that made it fun to try to create similar programs for different systems; some mags would publish the source code for a game or utility for multiple systems in the same issue--it was fun to try with our own code.
Other than that, the 80's were shit. The economy tanked. Rural America embraced Reaganomics during the campaign. Didn't turn out to be such a good deal for most of us, BUT...
We Gen-X rats were fed Superior Bullshit.
The 80's had the Star Wars Project. It is worth looking up--basically, we (the US) ran a (supposedly) successful con on the Soviet Union. Around $61 billion dollars was spent to incite a false tech race with the hope of siphoning Soviet resources into research that neither country had a hope of viably creating. The Reagan admin's winning card was having the money to cover the bluff (that money was doled out on legal contracts with not-altogether-clear film footage of some pieces of in-flight ICBM interdiction tech being dropped every few years).
How much that project contributed to the end of the USSR? Dunno. But it was cool!
Oh, and the Internet was wee. Most nerd comms were done by way of "borrowing time" on one of the corporate X25 networks (chat with a few primitive bulletin-board type systems) or by BBS. I don't know if that actually contributed to the 80's un/pleasantness, but they were fun (as long as you could dodge the bill).
The 80's might also have been the last complete decade that no one was arrested for letting their kids play outside by themselves.
Possibly Burroughs MCP[0] from 1961, currently Unisys ClearPath MCP.
Not to be confused with Encom MCP[1], which was defeated by Flynn and Tron in 1982.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP [1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
Absolutely, yes color frame buffers and CRT display was widely available. The Cromemco S-100 bus computers were used for television news weather visualization and for engineering applications.
Hmm. I think perhaps the limit was on resolution and color depth. The movie "TRON" was done with slide recorders, and now I have another rabbit hole to dig out of!
(The BYTE Magazine article that had me thinking of high end graphics at the time, and the use of film as output, is from November 1982. I was in 8th grade and read every page of these monstrous, 400-page times. Like the Sears Christmas catalog, every month.)
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n49/mode/1up
(I could just go ask the old Cray-1 that's a block up the street from here, but he is now a museum display and doesn't talk much.)
Missing from this list: the Foonly F1, used to create the animations in Tron (1982) and later to render the spaceship in Flight of the Navigator (1986) - of note as the first use of reflection mapping in a motion picture.
I highly recommend this video on the making of Flight of the Navigator. Apart from being highly entertaining, it also goes into stunning detail on all the special effects, in particular how exactly one goes about putting CGI into film in the 1980s (as the narrator points out - Final Cut Pro hadn't been invented yet!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
You're probably right but we already have the example of Hatsune Miku. Sure she's an exception but the software isn't there yet. At someone point someone will make a truly hit movie or TV show with 1 or more main synthetic characters.
I'm sure when Tron came out lots people said "practical effects will never disappear". And yet with few exceptions they mostly have.
Holy crap, I had no idea that the screenwriter for Tron was connected to Alan Kay. Thanks for that tidbit. Sounds like she became romantically connected to him after meeting him while researching the movie. Neat.
I'd love to see her original script before it got ruined. Sounds like her and Kay were pretty bitter about it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030109182549/http://www.tron-sector.com/Articles/article.asp?ID=13
I love this! When I was around 10 or so I remember watching War Games and then rushing to my BBC Micro Model B and trying to write a program that would draw a wireframe map of the USA and Russia and have missile trails fire between them. I got as far as drawing a bad map but still have fond memories.
Movies, no matter how bad, do have the potential for inspiration.
TBH I still enjoy watching Hackers and War Games.
Also see the original Tron.
I hope the best for VR/AR, and the worst for Facebook
It's funny, Tron was one of the most memorable movies of my childhood. Later I watched Star Trek with the Holodeck, read Neuromancer and Snow Crash, dabbled with VRML, played with the SGI CAVE at university. I ought to be hugely excited by the progress in VR. But... I'm just not. Because Facebook and friends are not doing it because it's cool or because it will be useful to humanity, to them it's just another siphon to hoover up and monetise your personal data by steering you into purchasing and voting decisions that benefit them, not you. After literally decades of anticipation, I doubt I will bother to participate in VR.
The only time I ever used the GameStop trade-in program was when my parents gave me a copy of the Tron Movie videogame for Christmas (didn't save the receipt), the next day I immediately walked to GameStop, traded it in, unopened, for the 5th anniversary edition of Oblivion that I had seen my sister playing a couple days before.
On the one hand, 20 to 40 dollars in monetary value was lost, on the other hand, nothing of value at all was lost.
The moral of the story is: don't double down on a failed proposition, get yours before its too late.
From the beginning of Byte magazine until about 1984 are really fun to read. The ads were probably annoying at the time of release, but not they are fun and interesting to read. I like the 1983 issue with imaging where they are talking about movie effects for "Tron" and "Revenge of the Jedi".
I wished they would of had more UNIX in the issues, however it was usually unaffordable. But a fun look, at least for me, to the history of computing. And who does not like an ad for a 8MB, $3999 disk drive subsystem.
> "the tell-tale signature artifact of simulation is not the spiky glitch, it's the smooth, shallow, facile surface"
Notably, this has been true for visual content from the beginning, compare the original "TRON" movie. It had been especially true in times, when smooth gradients and perfect lines had been a luxury, which were hard to achieve in analog media technology, and became the tell-tale signature of computer generated visual content. After an intermezzo in the uncanny valley and with embraceable pixels, we seem to be right back where we started. – It's somewhat logical that what is true for visual content should also be true for textual content.
[Edit] We may add a definition: "Interesting" is the artful deviation from the smooth and perfect.
Hollywood computer movies are the worst, between the tropes and the stereotypes they are just Weird Science without the road warriors and Bill Paxton. The original Wargames is probably the least campy and most watchable of the bunch. From there you take he express elevator straight down to absurd and fantastical stuff like Tron and Colossus: The Forbin Project. Anyone remember Disney’s The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? Yes, computers are magic and touching one gives you all their super powers - like doing hard math and making perfect hoop shots.
There's also an amazing full length Daft Punk music video that sometimes is considered a sequel to the 80s film, but you'll likely want to watch the spin-off cartoon for a lot of the necessary plot.
In the plot of the cartoon the titular character (program) Tron is assumed dead, and then corrupted by a corrupt system. I can only assume this is why his name is being bad mouthed by some sort of crypto-currency scheme, as Tron was a good program, a security program built to defend the users and would never stand silent on for-profit exploitation of users.
Thank you for this, I did not know about Syd Mead, but just flipping through the images on that page it's clear how influential he was. Wikipedia lists pretty much exactly the associations I made:
> Mead worked with major studios on the feature films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, The Spirit of '76, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland and Blade Runner 2049. George Lucas created the AT-AT for his Star Wars saga based on art by Mead.
This is in no way to diminish his work, but the impression I got (and that I'm trying to confirm/debunk, given the wikipedia article doesn't really address this) is that his art really transposes the society of its time into the future. That is, he almost exclusively addresses the technological advancement, while keeping the societal structures largely intact. For example, that's why the retrofitted houses give the impression of still being inhabited largely by working class people, while the ski resort and leisure time imagery with the sports cars still seems to be a luxury only few can afford even in the future. I don't see signs of "fully automated luxury space communism" there.
This may be me projecting though, hence the question if this is correct. And again, this is not to take away from his work. They are stunning. :)
What with Jeff Bridges in Tron and Peter Cushing in Rogue One, I'd suspect in about a decade or so we'll begin seeing Disney movies with an almost full cast of deceased CG actors, complete with their own voice.
I think you have to separate out the origins of each thing here.
Scifi ideas come from authors, and come primarily from text.
Scifi book covers come from artists, and create a sort of "look and feel" that is at best loosely related to the book, but generally unrelated and may not be chosed by the author.
And then there's Hollywood. By now we're several minds removed from the scifi author and the sausage for public consumption has little resemblance to the original beast. But it definitely has a look and feel.
Think of the early scifi pulp, and although the ideas may be timeless and strong, people picture bug eyed monsters holding damsels wearing brass clothing, and spaceships that stand upright on fins with a ladder leading down the side.
Similarly scifi of the 70's might conjure up images of planetscapes with multiple moons and floating islands in the sky.
I suspect the Tron look is a period theme derived from the state of computer graphics when the movie was authored.
That design looks like straight from the Tron movies, which perhaps is just the aesthetic and associated nostalgia Tesla is aiming for here.
> there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment.
They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
Movies for the large audience must always entertain, but you can entertain different ways. It's hard to describe what the 'Cinema' way is but it's easy to recognize when it's absent.
Here is a short list of things that make blockbuster movies not Cinema:
1. CGI and the visuals are technically pretty, but coming from the same standard tooling or pipeline. You can recognize that it's just more of the same. Examples of something creative: The Fifth Element (1997), Immortal (2004), Sin City (2005), Tron, ..
2. Action scenes are made from standardized sequences, postures and phrases. 5 minutes of action rarely matters for the plot and it's not fun to watch.
3. Dialogue and characters are extremely stereotypical. Power fantasy with some jokes and funny lines.
Some movies are just a part of a format. It requires talent to stick into format and not bore the target audience. Just provide what they want better. Changing director does not change the overall format. Directors are the to perfect the execution, not create something new.
I always had heard that first 3dDone was Tron but that the first one to arrive to theaters was Star Trek, the wrath of Khan, I was told that the explosion of the Genesis was the first one full computer generated scene in films.
I know this may sound weird but only the first 15 minutes of the movie and a few other small scenes were CGI. Most of the movie used old school film effects and hand-drawn cell animation. But the CGI in Tron was mind blowingly advanced for the era including the first CGI facial animation.
Very interesting!
I'd always thought Tron was the film with the first CGI, I've just been reading https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/history-cgi/ apparently it wasn't the first film to use 3D CGI either. Although Tron did make extensive use of 3D CGI.
If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion.
Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone).
Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys).
The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...
In the movie 'Tron', it was important to the programs to learn that the users exist so that they would free themselves from the tyranny of the MCP, and communicate with their users again.
After all, 'The MCP forces programs that resist to play in deadly games'. That sounds familiar.
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I'm so happy something like this exists. I absolutely love TRON and anything that relates to it. I was really sad that Disney didn't push for a third movie.
TRON is Bitcoin Idiots, LLC, more or less. Yes, they're dragging the name of your favorite computer movie through the mud, just like Zoë Quinn did with Crash Override Network. Can hardly wait to see what kind of grift WarGames, Inc. or WOPR, Inc. will be.
TRON has one thing going for it - its name evokes a well known movie.
That's literally it
What is TRON? I've tried reading official materials but there seems to be a lot of contention and misinformation swirling around this company/product.
Does this mean any kind of change in downloading an ISO of fedora or whatever? (Yes, I'm that boring and don't download movies or games via torrents, mostly I just watch stuff on Netflix or similar)
In 1982, Hollywood did make a good video game movie. The title of that movie is Tron. [0]
It's just that it was about a video game that didn't exist at the time the film was made; the Tron video game
> is based on an early draft of the film's script [1]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(video_game)#Differences_from_the_film
EDIT: convert HTML tags to markdown-compatible glyphs.
It's ugly. It looks like a prop from Tron, and that movie was a flop.
Nice TRON-esque theme. TRON as in the classic arcade game/movie not the TRON crypto currency.
Tron wasn't just the movie ... there was software embodied as a video game so in my opinion, you can't argue that you're in a different business. domain.
Late to this game...
Galaxy Quest
V, but the original miniseries from the 80's
Close Encounters
Dune, this is controversial I'm sure!
Starship Troopers
The Day After Tomorrow
The Fifth Element
Terminator I
Alien
Aliens
Tron, oh god I nearly forgot this one from the 80's!
You made me really happy with this comment. Tron was a big movie for me in my youth and a big reason why I was drawn to computers and ultimately programming. I also came to love synth and electronic music (Art of Noise etc.) around the same time and have always thought the Tron soundtrack to be amazing, especially the credits track. But I know nothing about music theory, I'm just glad it's good music. Thanks.
I heard as an aside that the London Philharmonic parts of the soundtrack were commissioned and recorded because Disney didn't have confidence that Carlos would finish her work on time (or at all, the relationship was a little strained), and using both was a decision made only afterwards.
The Tron score did a wonderful job blending early synth sounds with an orchestral backdrop.
It also has a odd and memorable theme that moves around using augmented triads yet isn't octatonic nor based on a whole-tone scale.
There's also a nice moment at the beginning of the credits-- where the theme previously wandered through harmonies quite rapidly, here it gets anchored to a single key with a fairly lush orchestral accompaniment. Then that leads in to a massive pipe organ solo doing the chromatic version of the theme for a final time, then to more fitting electro-orchestral credits music that cycles chromatically through augmented triads. (I think there's a reference to this music in the NES metroid game somewhere, I think it's Ridley's lair)
Anyhow-- the strange orchestral changes and lyrical melodies are the kind of thing that make you stick around for the credits. It's all very simple in a way, but extremely effective, too.
Contrasting that-- I almost laughed in the new Star Wars movie when at the climax the brass just loudly ascends up root position minor triad. It's like being served a steak with a side of a stick of butter.
Edit: I guess I should have written "spoiler" about the loud arpeggiation of a minor triad in the Star Wars movie.
Gollum was definitely a benchmark, maybe even still. Then there's Avatar and Cesar from the Apes movies. But we've yet to get close with actual humans. What started with Final Fantasy we still have that "uncanny valley" in things like Tron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Side note: I can't find an article but I believe Gollum was one of the first times deaf movie-goers could actually read a digital actor's lips.
The article indicated otherwise:
'At the same time, Disney might not even include all of its own content in the service. Iger said of Marvel and Star Wars, “We’ve also thought about including Marvel and Star Wars as part of the Disney-branded service, but there where we want to be mindful of the Star Wars fan and the Marvel fan and to what extent those fans are either overlapped with Disney fans or they’re completely basically separate or incremental to Disney fans.”'
If the only way I could stream new Marvel movies would be to go to Disney directly, I might pay per movie, or if it were cheap enough, I'd pay $7 for a single month of service to get that new movie or watch the original Tron re-engineered to look incredible in 8K one day when I'm 80 years old and have an old 8K monitor. But, I feel safe in my decision not to pay for a streaming service of only Disney content; I'm not a Zac Efron fan, though I did think Radio Rebel was Debbie Ryan's best movie.
The original TRON movie came out in 1982 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
In 2010 there was a sequel movie Tron: Legacy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/
"Thematically it's unlike anything Asimov wrote."
Again, as everyone seems to miss, it is a pitch-perfect Zeroth Law story, and to my mind fits in squarely into his Robot stories about the perils and limitations of the entire idea of the Three Laws. It is definitely an alternate timeline from the other ones, but that's not hard to believe. I find myself wondering if everybody read the same Asimov as I did. Or have only I read the later Asimov stories? If it was so accurate by accident, then they did a good job being so accidentally accurate.
Yes, Susan Calvin is wrong, but by adaptation standards that's nothing, and Asimov's characterizations were always paper-thin anyhow. I guess I find it less horrifying that Susan Calvin is wrong than some fans because "old, ugly, cerebral, and misanthropic" is pretty much her entire character. It's not like she's some fully-fleshed out character masterpiece with a multi-story arc, reasons for her characteristics, relationships with other characters in the universe, stories of her own, foibles and weaknesses to match her quirks and strengths... she just... likes robots, hates people. Asimov doesn't do characters.
I really feel like for both movies I mentioned, that's it. That's what an Asimov adaptation is going to look like. Those are the best you can possibly hope for. To the extent you still don't like them, a perfectly viable opinion as I do not deny my tastes can be a bit quirky even by HN standards (I like both the Tron movies and Star Trek: The Motion Picture too), then I would therefore not suggest agitating for Hollywood to dip into Asimov's works any more, because it's not going to get any better than that.
The sequels had some better set pieces. Even though the CGI doesn't quite hold up, the Burly Brawl and the Freeway alone are better than anything in the first. Even the "war scenes" from Revolutions that a lot of people find boring/drag on are better action pieces.
But the big reason I like the sequels more than the first is the "overdoing the philosophical and religious mumbo jumbo" and the "too much boring and confusing dialog". While I will admit the scenes could be better written, I hated how seriously the first movie seemed to take its philosophy and religious mumbo jumbo, and the sequels go out of the way to overdo it and over-explain it seemingly precisely because it isn't actually that serious (it's a set of control systems and metaphors spiraled out of control, just like you would expect from a computer system; it's more like the real world than Tron in this where program names get picked out of a hat from old legends and ancient deities and broken metaphors) and doesn't really mean anything and is almost entirely broken (by design). That's essentially the point of the much maligned Architect scenery chewing, but I think the Cake and Limbo scenes better articulate it.
The sequels even mostly agree that the "battery problem" is a problem and probably a lie. It's a complaint I have with the Animatrix that it takes the battery thing seriously, whereas the sequels seem to hint that even that is a lie the machines spread to control and confuse. (Then again, from the view of the sequels, the Animatrix is likely legends, folklore, and propaganda.)
Blackhat should probably be on there for being about only one to get hacking right in recent times.
"Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay."
Had no clue his wife wrote it or portrayed him. That's neat! Brings in some irony given Tron character is fighting the slavery of MCP but Kay told me here on HN he loved Burroughs B5000. Also implied its lead creator, Bob Barton, was a genius and revolutionary overturning all the bad software, hardware, and engineering that came before it in one fell swoop. As in, the movie could've just as easily had MCP as the hero. ;)
This doesn't appear to be so much a curated list of much-watch movies so much as a list of all movies about hacking ever.
Here is my curated list of movies ever hacker and cyberpunk enthusiast must watch:
* Sneakers
* Ghost in the Shell
* Tron
Why is Tron there? Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay.
Plot and story are very important. To me the most enjoyable movie of the year is usually the best script winner. Almost never the best movie winner.
But there's this thing called cinematography. And when it is done well, it adds another layer of enjoyment to the movie viewing experience. 3D is part of cinematography.
So, yes, plot is important. But if you are watching a movie instead of just reading a book, it is usually because the added elements are worth it.
And I say that as someone who usually reads the books as well.
3D is fun, and films like Avatar and Tron and Pacific Rim are totally worth in 3D.
Star Wars, 1977 (the Death Star diagram), The Black Hole, 1979 (the wireframe model of the titular black hole-- drawn on a plotter!), etc. By 1986 we'd already had two entire films based around CGI-- Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984).
I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately.
On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.
"You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.
Depends on the time of day! Morning - classical or ambient to not fatigue the brain while tackling tougher problems: Baroque style classical, ambient: Mysteries of the Deep, FAX (Pete Namlook), Boards of Canada, film score (Tron, Hans Zimmer etc), Fez game score by Disasterpeace
Afternoon - techno, to get the adrenaline flowing again: - any live mixes from Adam Beyer, Berghain residents, Nicole Moudaber, Nina Kraviz, etc etc
Night - Trance - really to keep the motivation going, any older A State of Trance episodes (pre 500) will do to add some melody to the grind
That's it, every day :)
ahead? This 3d representation of computer operations has been a staple of “hacker” movie art direction since the 80's. Tron, WarGames, Jurassic Park.
I can still remember my first exposure to video games.
It was during my dad's (second) wedding. My grandfather told me he had something to show me. He brought me into the bar at the reception hall, and sat me down in front of a Space Invaders machine with a stack of quarters. The rest is history.
Just thinking about this now, I'm re-experiencing the darkened environment of video arcade, with weird electronic noises from every direction. I had a few quarters in my pocket, and I was trying to decide which machine to spend them on. The movies War Games and Tron may be iconic, but their portrayals of video arcades really didn't match my own experiences.
Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie.
The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself.
Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!
What about
Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/
Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/
Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/
Disney most likely took the name from the TRON command which is/was a debugging feature in BASIC [0]. The site itself also (whether conciously or not) make no mention of the movie. "Tron" could also be an shortening of "Electron" but without the hassle of an apostrophy, e.g. 'tron-club. I could be talking bollocks though :)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_command
One story I've heard is that the original Tron was responsible for a lot of this. They originally tried to use computer graphics for many of the movie's effects, but it proved to be way too expensive and time-consuming using the technology of the time. So they ended up hand-animating and rotoscoping most of it. The hollywood studios deemed the CG a failure and were scared off of it for a number of years following. So computer graphics didnt get as much adoption as it would have otherwise throughout the 80s.
Also many, many movies still use practical models in addition to CG. It's just that now movies can blend both techniques to use whatever is most appropriate for a given shot. What is rare now are movies that use no CG at all.. even things like Mad Max which are touted for their practical effects utilize a TON of CG work.
In 1982 (several years before DOOM), Ken Perlin invented an algorithm meant to produce random numbers that more closely resembled a human's interpretation of "random" numbers (versus those generated by computers). Humans, it seemed, tended to choose a lot of different numbers, whereas random numbers from a CPU actually produced lots of repeating sequences. His work in the field was vital to developing the first 3D shaded graphics in a Hollywood film (Tron), for which he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement.
Perlin Noise is still used to this day for generating clouds, natural-looking terrains, and other textures that are pleasing to the human brain.
Python implementation: https://github.com/caseman/noise/blob/master/perlin.py
Excellent talk by its creator: http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/
Some context, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Applications_Group:
> Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/Synthavision) was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at MAGI by Robert Goldstein.
> It was one of four companies hired to create the CGI animation for the film Tron. MAGI was responsible for the most of the CGI animation in the first half of Tron, while Triple-I work mainly on the second half of the film. MAGI modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.
Some context, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Applications_Group:
> Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/Synthavision) was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at MAGI by Robert Goldstein.
> It was one of four companies hired to create the CGI animation for the film Tron. MAGI was responsible for the most of the CGI animation in the first half of Tron, while Triple-I work mainly on the second half of the film. MAGI modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.
It's pretty cool to click on the link and be able to run a ray tracer on your phone. Maybe more exciting because you get the drama of it taking a couple seconds to render.
Ironic that compute has come so far yet real time movie quality graphics are still only a dream.
We have GPU based ray tracing, and if you stuff a 44u rack full of them it becomes more tolerable, but still nothing approaching 24fps for complex scenes and effects,
This has a lot to do with the content being more complex compared to say, what was done for a movie like Tron. But it's more than that. How many other problem domains could eat 5 orders of magnitude of performance increases and easily make use of it for everyday consumer applications? That still might not even be enough to get us out of the uncanny valley.
Video is great! Still it's weird, I can even show somebody a setup with Synergy running, and until the moment they move their own mouse cursor over that hard boundary at the end of their monitor, it never seems to click...and weirdly people are kind of resistant to it.
I almost think the next Tron movie needs a character named Synergy that bashes down arbitrary walls between systems to really get the idea out there ;)
The funny thing is, Disney probably would do that, despite it being almost criminally stupid. Given that they (supposedly anyway) intend to continue the Tron franchise with more movies, anything that helps create / sustain interest in Tron is a Good Thing for Disney. The smarter thing for them to do would be to contact the author of this, and say "Hey can we hire you?" or something of that nature, instead of sending threats.
I didn't know quite what the headline meant - there was at least one TRON arcade game - as in, a coin-operated game - that had a totally different concept and which is now mostly deservedly forgotten:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/discs-of-tron
There was also a TRON arcade game that was a mismash of mini-games, one of which was the light-cycles:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10204
I see from Google that indeed many, many people refer to this "use moving wall to make the other guy crash" style of game as "TRON" now, but TRON actually just put a brand name on a game genre that had been around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_%28video_game%29
A home game circa 1977, years before TRON:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/surround
"Snake" to TRON could actually be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, example of a big-budget studio movie adapting a video game concept. Doing so surprisingly directly.
Now, of course, half the movies that come out of Hollywood seem to have action bits that are vaguely video-game inspired.
I agree. Networked computers were totally part of the popular imagination. Job's quote is after Wargames, Scanners, Tron etc.
The part of Job's quote that can be said to be innovative is he said "for the home" when most at the time were assuming "for the office".
I recently watched a BBC Horizon documentary on microprocessors filmed in 1977 and was very impressed with how they described the world we live in today. They clearly stated the exciting bit was enabling information networks so I don't think the possibilities of internet-like-things was ever in much doubt.
The Matrix is probably my favorite movie of all time. I've watched my DVD copy so many times that the DVD is wearing out (eg, has scratches, etc.) and I just had to buy a new DVD of it.
Otherwise, I like Hackers a lot (despite the unrealistic aspects), as well as Anti-trust. War Games is another of my favorites. Also, Tron and Tron:Legacy.
Swordfish is also entertaining in its own way.
That's listed in films under 1980s.
Master Control Program, the main villain of the film Tron (1982)
WOPR (acronym for War Operation Plan Response, pronounced "Whopper"); War Operations Plan Response (addressed as "Joshua" by its creator), the NORAD nuclear war simulation computer from the film WarGames (1983), portrayed as being inside Cheyenne Mountain
Huxley 600 (named Aldous), Interpol's computer in Curse of the Pink Panther used to select Jacques Clouseau's replacement, NYPD Det. Sgt. Clifton Sleigh (1983)
A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the attract mode seared in my memory).
> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a small arcade of its own.
For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where everywhere. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.
It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.
The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It was actually like that.
My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30 people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of their quarter.
>"Tron: Legacy to me is some interesting ideas coupled with a movie length absolutely fantastic Daft Punk music video, while the original excited me for the computer graphics and the ideas it presented."
Spot on.
The key with Tron: Legacy is appreciating it for what it is rather than faulting it for lacking things which it never claimed to have.
I loved the Tron sequel. I can't quite imagine making a comparison like that though - both Tron and the sequel were extremely light on story and works primarily with the combination of concept and art. In both cases the story itself is enough for about a 5 minute short.
Tron: Legacy to me is some interesting ideas coupled with a movie length absolutely fantastic Daft Punk music video, while the original excited me for the computer graphics and the ideas it presented.
Wonderful. I was a child when I saw this movie the first time, and it's one of the things that piqued my interest in computers (besides having access to an Apple ][).
Too bad the sequel was even worse than Tron's. Don't watch it if you haven't yet.
For some reason I keep thinking "Google" when I read about this. It seems very Google like somehow... didn't they do something similar to this before (albeit at a smaller scale)?
That said, this does seem like it's a bit, erm, big, to be a simple recruiting initiative, even if it is recruiting for the NSA or something. I'm leaning towards some movie / game promotion angle. There was at least one TRON reference in there, so maybe all of this is leading up to a TR3N announcement?
I read that Lance Williams invented this technique in 1983, but I remember seeing a documentary on Tron where they had to come up with a technique during the lightcycle race to reduce the Moire effect on the grid and I could have swore that they invented mipmapping to do that, even though it was a year earlier.
I think the documentary The Making Of TRON is more interesting today than the actual movie. Definitely worth seeking out if you're a fan of the original.
Tron was mentioned, in addition to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series and Escape from New York.
Here is a Tron inspired DP helmet I made for Glastonbury 2011, was fun to make though took a good couple of months. I'd say around 70 hours and cost about £70. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB9GHWFZUjE&feature=youtube_gdata_player - link to build pics and a load of me wearing it at various music festivals: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35189064@N04/
Was a real buzz to wear, organised a flash mob with about 40 other robot wearing types, ended up on a Glastonbury documentary.
If you have any questions about making props like this give me a shout. I started out knowing nothing, but ended up making everything from my own vacuum former to learning to solder.
I've been asked a few times when I'm out wearing it, to make one, but I'd be looking for around £1000 due to the man hours and the extra effort to make someone else's more perfect. I had thought about learning to slush cast to make a few for friends to wear this year, but I really don't have the time I'd need to make the as awesome as I'd like. Also there are the obvious copyright issues!
depends on the movie - old favorites, can help set the mood (your brain already knows whats going on-screen).. documentaries where you don't have to look at them all the time seem to be good too.
Anything new and action oriented will probably will make you loose your attention track.
Sometimes my brain is musiced-out and I need something else in the background. Some that I know by heart: Star Treks, Real Genius, Tron, War Games, Hackers, True Stories, Koyaanisquatsi, Slackers, Clerks. Working at home the idle/predictable conversion in the background sometimes helps.
One more Tron movie please.
Opinions are a very nebulous thing, there is no "right or wrong" in the subject. So while I disagree with all of those points (for reference: when I grew up Tron was in the same class of movies as the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies, I can't even begin to count how many times I watched them), those are nevertheless legitimate points for you.
From a slightly different perspective here are the detailed and technical case studies from the movie's VFX designer Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz:
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Opening-Titles
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game
In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!
Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.
'User' only seems depersonalizing because of familiarity. Use 'customer' as habitually, and it too will eventually seem generic. And then, expect posts about how 'customer' compresses our understanding of these people to an economically reductionist relationship. (The 'euphemistic treadmill' is a related concept.)
Ultimately, an attitude can make up for the word choice. For example, if you say 'user' with the same reverence as do the software agents in the original 'Tron' movie, you'll be paying the users way more respect than 'customer' grants.
I worked in an arcade as a young man and must admit that this exact thing is a back-burner dream of mine. As mentioned in some other HN posts, certain scenes from the Tron movies only fuel the fire.
Coincidentally, if you ever find yourself in Portland, OR stop by Ground Kontrol. 4 player Ms. Pacman, good beer, live DJ and the whole upstairs is wall to wall pinball machines. When I die, this is my idea of heaven.
Movies perhaps. I don't recall when I saw Wargames... but at least a few years after it came out. I didn't get to the theater much so it would have been on VHS. I didn't see Tron until I was an adult. (gasp)
The 80s.. hmm how about Jeff Bridges character in the movie Tron? Or the star character in the movie Wargames? If you've seen either of those, the main character being male could have been an influence (the movies certainly were for me). It wasn't until '95 that Angelina Jolie was in Hackers. Besides such movies, the other role models in popular culture would be the archetypical Einstein (Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future), etc. In the west, engineers aren't held in as high esteem as eg China (where the president is an engineer), at least not until recently (with Zuckerberg as the modern archetype).
There are historical female role models: Madame Curie, Grace Hopper, and Ada Lovelace probably the top three (and for a modern one, how about the founder of Adafruit? and so on and so forth). Showing their wiki pages to any young females, if the topic comes up, is a helpful contribution IMO.
Jeremy Renner, who plays Clint Barton ("Hawkeye") in the Avengers, claims he undertook extensive archery training in preparation for his role. Then, on set, they had him do things that "looked cool" rather than "were right" so it didn't really translate as he had expected.
He also said he sustained an archery related injury while filming which A) shouldn't happen if he'd had the proper training and B) would also affect his ability to use proper form while shooting.
I've been working to make a conscious effort over the past decade to willingly suspend my disbelief at the movies and just enjoy the entertainment for what it is trying to be, rather than what it is failing at. I've enjoyed movies much more the times I've been successful at it. Other times, like the "I guess we'll just make the new OS free since a copy of it leaked on the internet" scene in the new Tron, I couldn't get over, and I let it completely ruin the movie for me. (I found later that if I just start about 20 minutes into the movie and enjoy it as an awesome Daft Punk music video then I really love Tron: Legacy).
The stupidest little nitpick that I have, which shows up in nearly every movie and television show, is that someone makes an outgoing call, gets hung up on, and then the foley team adds in a new dial tone. I don't know why I continue to let it bug me, but I do. Joss Whedon complained in one of his commentaries (Joss Whedon does the best commentary tracks, by the way, check them out sometimes if you care about this stuff at all) that he always has to go back and cut out about 70% of what the foley artists try to add to every scene. Sounds exhausting, for everyone.
While not exactly what you're looking for, I find myself going back to http://nanocrowd.com quite often for movie recommendations.
They don't do TV shows, but their niche categories are usually pretty solid.
It works well if you can give them an example of the type of movie you feel like watching. For instance, I wanted to watch a cheesy, nerdy, thriller earlier tonight, something along the lines of Hackers and it suggested The Net, Antitrust, TRON, Live Free or Die Hard, The Matrix, Swordfish, etc. Exactly what I was in the mood for.
I've been listening to the soundtracks of shows and movies remotely related to coding. e.g Tron and Battlestar Galactica.
What if a hundred million people paid US$ 1 to help James Cameron make Avatar? Would you pay US$ 10 to help making a sequel to Tron with the creative freedom a Disney movie would never be able to enjoy? Just plug Kickstarter into Facebook and you have the tools to do it.
Without Disney overhead, I doubt it would cost US$ 170 million.
In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble…. In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. -- Josh Nimoy
Source:
http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178
P.S. I love the word "greeble":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble
The story is predictable, but, come on... It's like Star Trek (pre-2009 at least). You know it will probably not live up to your expectations, but you just have to see it anyway.
BTW, the original Tron movie has its fair share of problems.
It's a very ambitious goal to visually depict the world our computer programs see in ways non-trained humans can relate to it and to build an interesting story out of it.
I would, most certainly, fail in this task.
> it doesn't match up with the timeline.
A couple seconds later in the movie, the hero is disintegrated by a laser cannon behind his back, scanned and transfered to virtual reality environment where programs break apart when they hit hard things. Suspension of disbelief is a requirement.
OTOH, I am quite surprised Disney got to name its first Tron villain the same as Burroughs mainframe OS. It's worth noting MCP's sidekick name sounds a lot like MARC (the Menu Assisted Resource Control).
While the graphics are technically well done, I was offended by this movie. Prior to seeing it, I'd decided that, for me, the real 'test' of whether I could consider this a genuine sequel would be in the landscapes...
Tron came out in 1982. Ken Perlin won an Academy award for his work on the procedurally generated textures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise) used in the movie.
The Mandelbrot set (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set) got widespread fame in August 1985, with that famous Scientific American cover. Tron just missed that graphical opportunity! So, I figured, any true student of CGI involved in the sequel would relish the notion of putting some sort of tribute to Mandelbrot into the scenery (here are some examples: http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-generation/heightfields-using-meshes/).
How mistaken I was... Yes, I'm really bitter about producers and artists who don't care to know anything about the history of their art. And they had the presumption to call it 'Tron Legacy'??
What I love most is seeing how they go about thinking and producing the effects used for computers used by characters in the film! From the films that do it really poorly to the films that attempt something realistic, I always wonder who's in charge of it, how they think about it, what tools they use to create it, etc. For the films in which it's poorly done I always figure it's the assistant FX designer's kid who has 4 months experience in Flash. For the good movies I always wonder if they grab the DB administrator for all the film assets and ask him some nerd questions :)
From the article:
In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.
It's utterly fascinating to me that people have jobs like this.
It's not new. The way I see it is as in the film industry, it's a reboot. It's shinier, it may lack the depth and revelation of the original, but what it lacks in that area it makes up for in special effects and ease of consumption.
Consider Sendmail vs Exim, or Tron vs Tron:Legacy.
Both are essentially the same thing, but one is infinitely easier on the eye.
I've greatly enjoyed some 3-D movies. My impression is that the current systems do better when the dynamic range in value isn't very strong. "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" tried to do all sorts of transmitted light effects that are tempting but don't quite work. Other films, like Avatar, Tangled, Tron, and the 3-d conversions of Toy Story 1+2 and work a lot better.
Last weekend I was playing with some 3-D glasses, black paper and colored pencils, trying to draw stereoscopic images by hand. The first thing I realized is that you've really got to get conventional perspective right... It has to tell a consistent story or your brain is going to really rebel.
The game reminds me of Kurves, and is also similar to the racing game in the Tron movie. Maybe the inspiration comes from Tron?
Anyways, the Kurves game (http://flashkurve.com/) has a similar concept, it is maybe less complex, but much more addictive.
On a gameplay side, I prefer the Kurves game. It is a bit slower, also is heavy multiplayer, but is more addictive and fun to play.
On a technical side, they are both nice. The Kurves game is made in Flash and works as expected, and the HTML5 game is also awesome from the technical side. I may be wrong, but I think that it is still quite easier to develop in Flash than JS.
JS+HTML5 seems to be ready to _compete_ with flash also on basic games. I wonder whether we will see some games with OpenGL compete with the 3D Flash games (or Shockwave).
I saw a Chrome cinema ad before Tron (UK as well).
This is in line with my pet theory on why Disney even bothered with a sequel to the original Tron.
They claim Tron became a 'cult classic' and hence a sequel was a good idea. It's a 1982 movie, how did it suddenly explode into popularity in the later 90s/early 2000s? The widespread file-sharing of the movie, of course.
I don't have a citation to back me up here (hence my 'pet theory'), but here's your data point of one - I downloaded Tron from a 'shady' source a few years back, and became part of the 'cult following' it has.
Can I just say, as one of the (many) people who would like to purchase the original Tron:
Quit with the "added value". Sell us the damn movie!
/downloads. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/files/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg
(side note: why can't you pause on the FBI warning? What if I really wanted to read it? Can't rewind either...)
First a BASIC command (which is the only TRON I personally know), then a movie, then a kernel, and now a scheduler. Too much name overload.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_command
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(film)
The picture of society he paints appears to be a standard scifi plot. From Wikipedia Tron article: "Sark then informs everyone that they can either renounce their belief in the Users and join the MCP, or they will be forced to play games that result in their eventual elimination." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(film)#Plot
Here's hoping. I do want it to work. I'd love a new, good Tron movie.
Movies are as much (or more) a visual medium than an intellectual medium. Visuals are every bit as important as ideas. But visuals are the easiest part to convey in a trailer, and the lightcycles are the coolest visual element of Tron.
It's kind of like how in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, they kept the Viper launch tubes because it was an awesome visual, and they had the scanny-red-eye Cylons. It didn't keep them from cutting to the heart of the ideas of BSG (survival and escape from a mechanical, inhuman enemy) but the visuals were just as much at the heart.
Let me put it this way--if there was a Tron movie that was perfectly true to the ideas of the original, but without any lightcycles at all, that would be just as wrong as making a Tron sequel that's all about lightcycles.
Well... I think I'm underwhelmed, though I'm not quite sure.
(Later edit: IMHO, Scriptor's comment invalidates much of this, though I'll leave it for posterity's sake. Thank you.)
Tron 1 wasn't about "lightcycles". If you honor the original movie and understand it, it should be clear that lightcycles are just part of the local landscape because of the lightcycle game, along with the other stuff there. Another contemporaneous computer system would have more local flavor; modern computer systems have yet more richness to draw on.
If Tron 2 is just the standard Hollywood mishmash rehashing of old themes with no particular comprehension of what made the original special, count me out. Tron ought to be something that can be made into a universe as rich as Star Trek, honestly, if you take the core concepts from the first movie and just run with it, but if you're going to get stuck on "remixing" the peripheral concepts, meh.
I might be wrong, and this might be in a "game" context, though it still seems pretty abusive of the lightcycle context.
There was a sort of 'unofficial' 'hackers 2' with Skeet Ulrich playing Kevin ("My kung-fu better than you kung-fu!") Mitnick in Takedown (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/) - the story following the book of the same name by Tsutomu Shimonura. Also, I think they recently screened 'Wargames 2 : the dead code' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/) over here in the UK. Don't forget Tron! Ah.. just hearing the sounds of the video arcade at the beginning...
You're right. I remember when those movies came out. Even 1991's "Don't tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" follows that pattern.
Ironically, Tron was this way also. Flynn sought to run the big tech corporation instead of that arcade. Now, I'd rather be running that arcade than working for the big corporation.