One of my favorite memories from childhood revolves around an old Tron arcade cabinet, standing in the front entrance of our local Wal-mart. On trips there, I would stand firmly planted with whatever quarters I could beg, playing until I either ran out of money or my family finished their business in the store. I don't have a memory of the actual store, which tells me there was nothing in that Wal-mart nearly as interesting to me as Tron. For those of you too young to know, the Tron arcade game was actually a collection of games that ranged from light-cycle racing, to tank battles, to shooting spiders as they tried to prevent you from entering a mysterious cone of light... At that point in the late '70s, this game literally pulsed and throbbed with awesomeness. Aside from my to-this-day fascination with Time Pilot, Tron was by far my favorite arcade title.

The older game, based on the first movie, was a great use of the license. This was before we really had any concept of game's based on movies, as a stock item. The genius of the arcade adaptation was that it built on and expanded the movie's narrative, bringing you deeper into exactly the parts of the movie that you found exhilarating. In the intervening years, older gamers especially tend to be wary of licensed games, and the first thing we usually think when hearing a movie-based game announced is, "Hope they don't ruin it..." One of the first things we heard during our hands-on with Tron: Evolution at E3 was that Propaganda Games set out to dispel the notion that licensed games are rubbish. They're from the U.K., so they're allowed to use words like "rubbish." Much like the original game distilled the excitement and wild imagination of the first movie, Tron: Evolution expects a similar reception from today's generation of gamers.

Part of the strategy around making this vision a reality was to be closely involved with the people responsible for the movie. Early meetings around concept and how to translate the movie's key themes into the game were held, and shared resources played a major role in bringing the essence of Tron: Evolution (the film) into life for the game. The two major components to the game that we saw were exploration and battle in a third-person action mode, contrasted with some high-speed racing action. The Propaganda team includes at least one veteran of some acclaimed racing games, so the light-cycle action was predictably fast and nimble. The on-foot sequences were a combination of platforming and fighting action, using a fairly deep system of combos and power moves. There are almost two games here, in the sense that either would be valid as a game based on the movie; Propaganda is building on a fairly grand scale, with just a few months remaining for fine tuning.

Tron: Evolution will support multiplayer, where the mix of racing versus on-foot action will shift. The game for a single player is relatively balanced between the amount of time spent fighting and the time spent straddling a light-cycle. Once you launch the online multiplayer, the game shifts toward a racing focus, with about 80% of the focus placed on the light-cycle gameplay. The game will follow a narrative based on disruption that begins to unravel the world around you, and there were some awesome racing sequences we played where it appeared that the light-cycle was always just a hair's breadth away from destruction. It's safe to say that Tron: Evolution will be a game with some strong bias toward action, but we heard about some character progression and powers you will level up along the way, that add a quasi-RPG quality to the mix. Most exciting to us was the way in which the game's design seems to mirror the clean, modern feeling of Tron.

This is a game we'll be seeing in stores quite soon, considering it will coincide with the launch of the film. There were a number of really good ideas executed in the game, and the adaptation of some familiar themes (Action, Racing) around the world of Tron has us really excited. We'll never get that old arcade cabinet back, but the team behind Tron: Evolution certainly seems committed to bringing that same kind of excitement to a new generation of gamers.