The Game Grid: Unofficial and Non Canonical TRON Games

The release of the new movie TRON: Legacy a sequel to the 1982 movie TRON has brought lots of interest to anything related to TRON. Many video games based on TRON have been made in the last 25 years. Many official TRON games have been made. We will only be looking at the officially released TRON games though in this article. Instead we will be looking at the unofficial games made by fans as well as the games that were made by Disney that feature TRON in some way but are not part of the TRON canon.

The game most often copied and made unofficially is clones of the light cycle game. I recall in the late 90s playing a TRON game on some website in the library in High School that I believe was a flash game. Armegetron Advanced is a poppualr Light Cycles game. These light cycle games may be unofficial but one is even available on Jeff Bridges official website. You can download light cycle clones easily or you can even play them right off the net with no download necessary like I had done years ago in high school. You can also find iPhone apps which feature light cycle clones such as light bike and light bike 2 which allows for jumping of bikes. Finding a light cycle clone should be no big deal. It is amazing that the light cycle game was just one ¼ of the original TRON arcade game but has so many clones. Part of the clone proliferation is probably due to the popularity of the game and its simplicity in gameplay and game making.

Within the Disney official umbrella some games have had TRON elements. In Kingdom Hearts II there is a world known as Space Paranoids and even features the character TRON. Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom had some TRON decorations available. As recently as Epic Micky Disney has used TRON elements in the Tomorrow City level.

A TRON fan would expect a Space Paranoids game like in the film. Originally there was one in development but the video game crash ended it. However two popular versions of Space Paranoids have been made one of which could almost be considered official. The website TRON Sector has a freeware version of Space Paranoids. The other version of Space Paranoids which you could call an official game which Disney had made for Comic Con and has even had in the Disney Parks was made by 42 Entertainment but only 8 arcade cabinets were made but the game is available online.

Besides making so many official games TRON has inspired others to make their own versions of the games of TRON. These games may be unofficial bu they have helped to keep TRON alive and keep interest in the game between the release of the official TRON movies and games.