Tron 2.0 Updated Preview

You could say that the film Tron did a good job of typifying the 1980s--it had frizzy-haired men, greedy corporations, a helicopter landing on a rooftop, and people throwing away hours of their lives each night on a new fad called "video games." It's been more than 20 years since the motion picture's premiere, and Monolith Productions and Buena Vista are now hard at work on a game-based follow-up to the movie. Tron 2.0 will be a first-person action game that will follow the motion picture closely, but will also have pretty much everything you'd expect from a first-person shooter, plus several unusual new features and gameplay modes, like the lightcycle racing and disc battles featured in the movie.

After 20 years, the world of Tron returns.

Currently, Tron 2.0 is in a prebeta state, but even at this point (just as when we last saw Tron 2.0 at the 2003 Game Developers Conference), the game looks extremely impressive and totally distinctive. There is simply no other modern-day action game that looks anything like Tron 2.0. The game takes place in a digitized world much like the one that Jeff Bridges' character Flynn explored in the movie, and it looks the part, thanks to a distinctive DirectX-based glow effect that Monolith and Nvidia have developed specifically for the game.

All the game's characters and environments are lit with this eerie glow, and the effect seems to work extremely well with the imaginative-looking levels we've seen so far. Since you play as a human being who has been zapped into a digital world, just like Flynn was, you'll explore several different computer platforms, from a PDA handheld computer and a laptop to a desktop computer and a mainframe.

You'll do this exploring as Jet Bradley, son of Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner's character from the movie). Mr. Boxleitner actually reprises his role in Tron 2.0 as an older, wiser Alan Bradley who's become a senior engineer at the same company his Tron program once opposed. Alan is abducted by an evil, Internet-based, non-GameSpot company known as Future Control (or fCon, for short). fCon has learned about Bradley's revolutionary digitization technology--which is contained in a highly advanced artificial intelligence routine called ma3a (pronounced "ma-THREE-uh") and essentially turns human beings into computer programs--and abducts Alan in order to acquire the technology. fCon has plans to digitize a group of elite hackers, turning them into creatures called "data wraiths" that will wreak havoc on computer systems around the world, stealing top-secret data and wrecking the databases of their competitors.

The ICP don't take kindly to rogue programs...like you.

Jet catches wind of his father's abduction, but before he can figure out what to do about it, the ma3a program automatically runs Alan's contingency plan: digitizing Jet so the young man, as a computer program, can defend ma3a against computerized invaders personally. Unfortunately for Jet, he's been beaten to the punch by J.D. Thorne, a former high-ranking security officer and contemporary of the Bradleys. Thorne tipped off fCon to the digitization technology and later brokered a deal to sell it to the rival company, and he was improperly digitized while attempting to demonstrate the technology and now exists as a corrupted computer program. The corruption made Thorne insane and dangerously contagious. Of course, you'll also run into the hostile intrusion countermeasure programs (ICPs) from the motion picture. Though the red-glowing ICPs aren't evil, they're essentially the policemen in the world of Tron 2.0, and they're assigned to swiftly eliminate any rogue programs. And as Jet, you'll just happen to be a rogue program.

As you might have guessed, you'll be up against some tough odds in Tron 2.0. Your goals are to rescue your father, stop fCon, neutralize Thorne, and get back to the real world. Fortunately, you won't be alone, since you'll be joined by companions like Mercury, a female bot (a standard program, much like Cindy Morgan's Yori character from the movie) who happens to be a champion lightcycle racer, and Byte, a floating, talking, polygonal program descended from Bit (the floating, beeping, polygonal program from the motion picture). Jet will even receive help from ma3a herself, though in some cases, he'll have to be the one to protect ma3a, especially since fCon is after her digitization data.