The public's boundless fascination with electronic games has already spawned a vast array of accessories, ranging from the usual T-shirts and bumper stickers to the more esoteric Asteroids chewing gum and " Pac-Man Fever" hit record album. So it was practically inevitable that videogames would infiltrate the movie industry sooner or later.
The first studio to make a major effort to ride the coattails of the videogame revolution, if we overlook the computer horror film Evilspeak, will be Walt Disney Productions. On July 9, the folks who gave the world Fantasia and Snow White will release the first videogame-oriented movie to theaters all across the country. Tron promises to be the most unusual of all the science fiction blockbusters scheduled for release this summer.
The story of Tron concerns a young computer expert named Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) who is the operator/owner of a local video arcade. He is seeking incriminating evidence against his former employer, ENCOM, a large conglomerate run by an unscrupulous exec named Dillinger (David Warner), who stole game programs originally devised by Flynn. TRON is the code name of a security program of ENCOM.
Flynn enlists the aid of some old friends who still work for ENCOM (Bruce Boxleitner, Barnard Hughes, and Cindy Morgan), and together they try to crack ENCOM's MCP (Master Control Program). It is at this point that the real-world activities of the film come to an end. Flynn is blasted by a computer security laser that sends him into an electronic nightmare world: a videogame dimension where the employees of the real-world ENCOM (namely Warner, Boxleitner, and Morgan) are portrayed by their alter-egos in the computer world.
Typifying every electronic gamer's secret dream, Flynn is sentenced to death on the videogame grid — a deadly arena, much like the coin-op videogames in arcades. Tron, the strongest of the electronic warriors (Boxleitner), aids Flynn and together they attempt to defeat the baddies (run by Warner and the MCP) in this voltaic universe.
Michael Bonifer of Disney Studios told Electronic Games that this "electronic world" will be portrayed using a mixture of special photographic effects systems, several of which the company developed exclusively for Tron.
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