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Thread: Why Wasn't TRON Faithfully Ported?

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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Default Why Wasn't TRON Faithfully Ported?

    Is there any reason as to why the TRON arcade game (and its sequel, Discs of TRON) wasn't "faithfully" ported (or straight ported) to such consoles as the Atari 5200 and ColecoVision? All we ever got were hacks:
    Hyperspace for Tomy Tutor (1983)
    TRON Deadly Discs for Mattel Intellivision (1983)

    I wonder if the "faithful" ports to consoles were blocked as Disney held copyright to the TRON trademark, which it still does?

    ~Ben

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    Great Puma (Level 12) Steve W's Avatar
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    Spinners. Game consoles that didn't have spinner knobs or rotational joysticks couldn't reproduce the arcade game, so they had to get inventive. I'm thinking that the creators of the console games didn't license the rights to the arcade version, they only had the rights to make home console games based on the movie. To make a home port of Tron the arcade game, they'd have to license the movie then license the game from the arcade manufacturer. And then the 2600 version, the leading console at the time, could never accurately reproduce the arcade game anyway. So nobody bothered.

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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Steve W View Post
    Spinners. Game consoles that didn't have spinner knobs or rotational joysticks couldn't reproduce the arcade game, so they had to get inventive. I'm thinking that the creators of the console games didn't license the rights to the arcade version, they only had the rights to make home console games based on the movie. To make a home port of Tron the arcade game, they'd have to license the movie then license the game from the arcade manufacturer. And then the 2600 version, the leading console at the time, could never accurately reproduce the arcade game anyway. So nobody bothered.
    Besides the lack of a proper console port of the arcade version of TRON, I'd also like to see a version of TRON with the disc stage (that which provided the basis of the sequel, Discs of TRON) included, all five stages...

    ~Ben

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    Stages were vastly different in their design, and I think you would have need a massive ROM to capture that. That would have been prohibitive. However I think the real reason was that Disney viewed the film as a financial loser, and pouring more money into marketing (games) was not going to happen.
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    Cherry (Level 1)
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
    Stages were vastly different in their design, and I think you would have need a massive ROM to capture that. That would have been prohibitive. However I think the real reason was that Disney viewed the film as a financial loser, and pouring more money into marketing (games) was not going to happen.
    Indeed the film did suffer from the label "box office bomb," so the only real money that made the franchise was the game...

    ~Ben

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    Wouldn't have been the same at home, without the cool ambiance the arcade cab with its lights and joystick. Tron was always one of the coolest looking machines at the arcade. The actual gameplay wasn't that special, and the portion that was, in my experience, the most popular, was the light cycles, and there were games at home similar to that already, like Surround and Snafu.

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