TRON 2.0

This article is written from a Real World perspective.

TRON 2.0
Developer	Monolith Productions
Publisher	Buena Vista Interactive
Game System	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Release Date	2003
Genre	First-person shooter
Number of Players	1 with Multiplayer

TRON 2.0 is a video game developed by Monolith Productions and produced by Buena Vista Interactive.

Bruce Boxleitner reprises his role from TRON as Alan Bradley. Cindy Morgan, who also starred in the original movie, voices a new character Ma3a, although Lora Bradley (now Alan's wife, deceased by the game's timeframe) is mentioned by name. Rebecca Romijn provides the voice of Mercury. A new light cycle design was contributed to the game by Syd Mead. The game explained the TRON arcade game, which appears in-game, and film as based on Kevin Flynn's experiences inside ENCOM in the original film. The game got recently re-released on VALVe's gaming platform, Steam.

Plot

The story is centered around Alan's son Jethro ("Jet") Bradley. In 2003, ENCOM is facing a takeover by a company called Future Control Industries (fCon), after falling on hard times resulting from the destruction of the MCP. After talking with his kidnapped father on the phone, Jet is digitized by Ma3a, Alan's AI computer system, to aid her in combating Thorne, an executive from fCon who was improperly digitized into the computer and is now a corruption spreading like a virus throughout the system. Jet is quickly, and mistakenly, identified as the source of the corruption, and is captured by Kernel, the system's security control program.

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

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

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

Cast

• Jason Cottle as Jethro 'Jet' Bradley
• Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley
• Cindy Morgan as Ma3a
• Ken Boynton as Byte and Help Program and Kernel's Aid
• Rebecca Romijn as Mercury
• Dennis Bateman as I-No and Kernel and FCon CEO
• David Scully as J.D. Thorne and Seth Crown
• Kimberli Colbourne as Eva Popoff and Computer Voice and PDA
• Scott Burns as Esmond Baza
• Henry Dardenne as Z-Lot
• Karen Kay Cody and Mike Madeoy also provide additional voices for the game.

Additional Characters

Mercury

Mercury is a female humanoid computer program, voiced by Rebecca Romijn. She is known within the computer world as a champion light cycle racer but also shows some combat skills during the course of the game.

An emerging romance between Mercury and Jet Bradley during the course of the game is suggested but never realized.

Ma3a

Ma3a is a female computer program voiced by Cindy Morgan. Unlike most other programs in the computer world, Ma3a is shaped like a sphere. When she was originally written by Alan Bradley in the March of 1988, she was known as Ma1a, followed by Ma2a in the June of 1996, and by 2003, Ma3a. Ma3a carries many of Lora Bradley's personality traits and even sounds like her (considering Cindy Morgan also played Lora in TRON). Speculation within ENCOM has led some employees to believe that part of Lora was digitized into Ma3a's code in the midst of the 1994 digitizing accident resulting in Lora's death. In March 2003, Alan Bradley was given the "Digital Pal" award for Ma3a.

Events since release

On the games release BVG had been very slow at release patches and modding tools. And when patches were released, they were plagued with bugs that worsened the already evident bugs in the retail copy. With a lack of support and faulty patches the large group of players that had been accumulated by the demos soon dwindled. The support that was given was either wrong or lacking in detail. Updates like a deathmatch mode for multiplayer was wrongly said to only be compatible with Windows XP. Later on at about November 2004, the killer app game for Xbox was announced, and by then fans of the PC game felt abandoned. In January 2005, the TRON Community Developer Group (or TCDG), consisting of major players and supporters of the game, tried to contact BVG about the situation. They were left waiting for a reply for 4 months, at the end of which they were told that 'circumstances have changed', and that BVG will/could not help. And, as of July 2005, they have removed the previous TRON 2.0 website and replaced it with a page that gives no advice about any patches, editing tools, or any evidence that a TRON 2.0 community exists.

Community

The TRON 2.0 community has remained defiant in keeping the game alive, even with no official support. They have made do with the editing tools provided and produced many excellent maps for all 3 multiplayer modes. Patches have been updated to allow the game to have more than 8 map pack installed on and stay stable. Tools have been made to check servers outside of the game, tools to install/uninstall map packs from the game. Tutorials to allow people to pick up map creating quickly have been published. Unofficial FAQs, current game news blogs, (more predominantly) forums and download sites have all been created. Also, despite its displacement by Tron: Legacy in terms of canon, it is not uncommon to find Tron universe fanfic borrowing characters and concepts from Tron 2.0.