Tron 2.0



TRON 2.0 is a video game developed by Monolith Productions and released in 2003.

It is a sequel to the 1982 movie Tron; the player takes the role of Jethro "Jet" Bradley, son of the film's characters Alan and Lora. Jet is swiftly summoned into the digital world of Encom's computer network to protect it, his father, and the secrets of the digitizer technology from both a mysteriously powerful virus corrupting everything in its path and a group of Corrupt Corporate Executives from the company Future Control Industries ("fCon") staging a hostile takeover.

Not to be confused with Tron: Legacy, the 2010 movie sequel to TRON. Particularly since the two sequels are mutually exclusive, and Word of God makes the film the official continuity.

TRON 2.0 provides examples of:
""I'm auto-saving every 30 seconds. I suggest you do the same.""
 * Action Girl: Mercury
 * Advancing Wall of Doom: The
 * A God Am I: Thorne.
 * AI Is a Crapshoot: Averted strangely enough, considering it was such a big theme in the movies. Most of the Programs are there to do their jobs. It's the invading humans that cause problems.
 * Alternate Continuity: From Tron: Legacy, as the two feature different and incompatible accounts of how the digitizer technology was developed in the decades since the events of TRON. There is also a character who is dead in one and still alive in the other.
 * There are some pretty shocking similarities, though, such as Kevin Flynn vanishing under mysterious circumstances (per the Ghost in the Machine spin-off comic) and Tron himself going MIA. Probably the most shocking one is that the plot of the game actually involves something called the "Tron Legacy Code", though nothing like it appears in the film sequel.
 * Not to mention the leads in each canon are the sons of the original Tron's leads, who meet a female program who's been influenced or sent to help
 * Ancient Keeper: I-No, Tower Guardian of the old Encom mainframe. Terribly friendly sort, too.
 * Bar Brawl: Jet and Ma3a head to the Progress Bar to get the Legacy code compiled and contact "Guest." Just when it's looking like everything's going to turn out ok, "Guest", and Thorne crashes the party with a horde of Z-Lots.
 * Body Horror:
 * Brain Uploading: straddles the lines of Brain Uploading, Virtual Ghost, and Interface with a Familiar Face.
 * Call a Hit Point a Smeerp: They aren't keys, they're permissions.
 * Celebrity Voice Actor:
 * Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Mercury.
 * Bruce Boxleitner reprises his role as Alan.
 * Canon Discontinuity: Disney declared the events of TRON 2.0 not canon when Tron: Legacy was released.
 * Check Point Starvation: The game only autosaves at the start of a level, no matter how large said level is. Worse, you cannot save during the lightcycle matches at all.
 * On the other hand, if you have installed the patch, you can simply skip the lightcycle matches, and you can manually save at any time (except during lightcycle matches, of course).
 * Clear My Name: Jet is mistaken for the cause of the viral corruption by Encom's chief security program, the Kernel, and a Stern Chase ensues for the first few acts of the game.
 * Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Every faction gets its own colour, the red and blue of the original film being supplemented with green for infected, viral programs and sectors, gold for really ancient systems, and purple for the Big Bad.
 * Come with Me If You Want to Live: Mercury blasts her way out of the lightcycle arena and orders Jet to follow her. At that point, Jet only knows her as an opponent and current champion of the Game Grid.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In lightcycle races, computer-controlled opponents manage to pull off turns that are obviously impossible for human reaction to repeat. May or may not cross into Fridge Brilliance if you realize that they have the in-game advantage of not being human over the player.
 * Contemplate Our Navels: Byte as the
 * Cool Bike: TRON 2.0 has its own updated version of the lightcycles (designed by Syd Mead).
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive : If you thought Dillinger from the first film was bad, the F-Con crew are worse.
 * It is hinted that fCon's CEO is actually Dillinger.
 * The Corruption: Thorne becomes a living version of this, infecting other Programs to turn them into insane Z-lots. Jet is able to use weapons originating from the corruption without suffering ill effect. Fridge Brilliance when you realize he's an uncorrupted User, and not subject to the usual system guidelines.
 * Cutscene Incompetence: Early on, Jet managed to plow through several waves of security units. But when a cutscene takes him directly to the Kernel's office, he surrenders without a fight
 * Cutscene Power to the Max: In-game, Mercury barely helps out, but when Jet's freed Ma3a and they're about to escape, she is shown fending off about five Z-lots in melee combat in a You Shall Not Pass moment.
 * Deadly Disc: One of your weapons is an identity disc.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Byte.
 * Dying as Yourself: ; he even helps out the good guys with some information before he goes.
 * Escort Mission: Through the last quarter of the game, you're escoring  through F-Con's network. Not as bad as the ProtectionMissions because he has the good sense to duck or otherwise take cover when discs start flying.
 * Explosive Overclocking: Literally done. This is the TRON universe, after all. Jet overclocks an old Encom mainframe to upload Ma3a to it, getting her out of immediate danger. Unfortunately, the overclocking tears the old system apart, forcing him and Ma3a to retreat to the open Internet.
 * Exposition Fairy: Byte and Ma3a take turns on this one.
 * Face Heel Turn:
 * Floating Platforms
 * Follow the Leader: While it's certainly an original game, it uses many of the same gameplay elements as Half Life.
 * The Glasses Come Off: Jet wears glasses in the analog world. They vanish once he hits Cyberspace..
 * Going Down with the Ship
 * Or "server" in the case of.
 * Discussed then averted with  when they decide to.
 * Gratuitous French: Eva Popoff.
 * Grid Inventory: Jet has a varying amount of space available in each level to load power-up programs. Alpha-grade programs take up four times as much space as the gold versions of the same power-up -- and if all you have are one-slot inventory spaces available, you're in trouble.
 * Hoist by His Own Petard: The trio of bad guys wanted to digitize humans to infiltrate all corners of cyberspace. At the end.
 * Heroic Sacrifice:, though she "gets better"...sort of.
 * Honorary Uncle: The in-game emails reveals that Kevin Flynn is Jet's godfather, and the spin-off comic has Jet talking about "Uncle Kevin's" cyberspace misadventures.
 * Inhuman Resources : Dr. Eva Popoff makes Dillinger look reasonable.
 * Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard: Nice going, F-Con thugs. You lock Alan freaking Bradley in a closet full of spare computer equipment. That can't backfire on you...
 * Lost in Transmission: Oh, Users. For three-quarters of the game, Jet's instructions from "Guest" and Ma3a are incomplete, full of static, cryptic, incorrect, or all of the above.
 * Magnet Hands: You can perform all sorts of acrobatic tricks and still catch your disk without fail!
 * Mini Game: The light cycle races, which also tend to be Nintendo Hard. Later versions of the game allow you to skip the ones in the main game, and there is also a non-story-based light cycle game mode you can play any time.
 * Mythology Gag:
 * One of the techs asks Jet if he could have some of Alan's popcorn, as Roy did with Alan in the original film.
 * One of the guards snarks that he's seen "compound interest Programs fight better," an indirect reference to Crom.
 * Nerds Are Sexy: Even outside of cyberspace, Jet is quite good looking. His dad didn't age so badly, either.
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
 * Jet
 * A very delayed case: The old mainframe is populated with tanks that cannot be deactivated or destroyed, forcing Jet to run the proverbial gauntlet. Flynn left them behind in the system...Nice freakin' going, "Uncle Kevin!"
 * Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: F-Con decides to test their laser by
 * Ninja: fCon's Datawraiths are all-but-literally computer ninja -- digitized hackers able to infiltrate any system, and appear and disappear with virtually no warning to attack the player. In fact, their animations are almost entirely copied from the ninjas in No One Lives Forever 2.
 * Nintendo Hard: Like Metroid Prime, TRON 2.0 can be described as a first person platformer with shooting. Unlike Metroid Prime, the jump distances are hard to control, often landing you in the Bottomless Pit over and over. And you can't fall as far as you can in many other games before hitting the ground becomes instant death.
 * Also, even on Normal mode a group of ICP can kill you in seconds. Combine this with the jumping puzzles and the dodgy disk mechanic and you really should just turn on God Mode and enjoy the Scenery Porn. The jumping puzzles will still kill you more than most other game's enemies.
 * This is without even mentioning that there is no autosave. No joke, you have to rely on the quicksave function a LOT. Yes, this is lampshaded by one character, but he refers to it as "autosaving". Further inexcusable considering that one of Monolith's previous FPS titles, Alien Vs Predator 2 actually DID use an autosave function.
 * No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: In this continuity, it took 20 years to fully recreate the digitizer technology because only the MCP knew how to make the corrections needed to allow humans to enter the Grid intact.
 * Emails suggest, however, that the developers were unaware of this fact and that they did not know that the digitizing laser only worked because the MCP was tweaking the incoming data.
 * No OSHA Compliance: Every level has bottomless pits. None of them have railings.
 * Oh Crap: Jet when he receives the warning from "Guest" not to  as it's happening.
 * Only Known by Their Nickname:
 * "Jet" is short for "Jethro." We only see this in the in-game email.
 * Subversion with Mercury's User. She only knows him as "Guest." Turns out,
 * Powers as Programs: The only thing always available are the "basics": the disc, the rod, the ball, and the mesh. All their other iterations (they have two additional versions each) are loaded as programs in Jet's "memory allocation" on the server he's on, along with the additional powers, such as increasing jump height, silent running, and so on. Virus-type enemies can infect programs to reverse their effects (the silent running program makes Jet's footsteps louder, for example), and all programs have an alpha, beta, and gold level. Alpha is the least effective (or the most costly in terms of energy) and takes up the most space in memory (four contiguous blocks), beta is more effective (or less costly) and takes up two blocks, and gold is the most effective (or least costly) and only takes up one block. While there are beta versions of programs that can be found while exploring, you can only get gold versions by "feeding" the program to a code optimizer. Of which there are a limited number, and which can only be used once each.
 * Protection Mission: Two of them, both guarding Ma3a. The first one is where she needs to be protected from hostile security programs while she tries to override the server's security. The second is a Bar Brawl where Thorne and his Z-Lots try to kill her and you have to fend them off long enough for her to compile some code.
 * Punny Name: I-No. Justified as he is an information retrieval Program.
 * The leader of all the security programs is, of course, their Kernel.
 * Recursive Canon: The TRON arcade game from the 1980s appears; the explanation is that Kevin Flynn created a game based on his adventures in the film, which was later published by Encom. The same explanation was recycled for Tron: Legacy.
 * Recycled Script: For that matter, don't make a drinking game out of how many plot points of this game got recycled for Legacy. (See Alternate Continuity)
 * RPG Elements: Before they were widely popular. The player can gather points throughout the game that can be used to "upgrade" Jet's basic characteristics (life meter, energy meter, etc.).
 * Save Scumming: Lampshaded by an NPC:

"I-No: EN12-82, top of the line mainframe. Capable of 16 bit processing, full monochromatic display support, and a local storage of 128MB! I challenge you to find a more robust system!"
 * Scenery Porn: Watching the TRON universe is one thing; interacting with it is another thing altogether.
 * Sexy Backless Outfit: Mercury, and the game spends much of her time showing it off.
 * Shout-Out:
 * TRON 2.0 has several little references to the first film, such as the popcorn machine.
 * Jet is playing the original TRON Arcade game in the opening.
 * There's a Shout Out to Marathon: "Frog blast the vent core!"
 * Among the infected program enemies you can spot ones named Durandal and Rampancy.
 * When  is sent to the system, he looks like he's borrowed   clothing -- and looks rather ridiculous in it.
 * When Jet is traveling through the old mainframe, the "Reindeer Flotilla" password from the film activates a batallion of tanks.
 * Sickly Green Glow: The corruption.
 * Stat-O-Vision: The "Profiler" subroutine.
 * Stealth Pun: Oh my GOD, they're everywhere. Covering all of them would require an entire page. Let's start with the names of some programs.
 * Ordinary NPCs are given ordinary names, such as "Brian.exe". The security programs, Intrusion Countermeasure Programs, are given names like "svchost.exe" and "spoolsv.exe". There are enemies called "Resource Hogs" which are given distorted names of real programs such as "reelplayer.exe", "inlook.exe", "screensaver.exe" and "exploder.exe". Virus programs called "Z-Lots" who are spawned by "Rector Scripts" also exist.
 * ICPs run after you with identity disks alight shouting such gems as, "Freeze, Program!", "You can't hide from me--I know all the shortcuts", "Quit running!", and "Stop executing escape routine!".
 * There's an ICP who laments the approaching reformat because he lost all his updates the last time it happened. His buddy replies, "You'd lose your header if it wasn't compiled on."
 * And finally, your weapons and sub-routines are named normally enough, but they couldn't help but sneak in a subroutine called "Megahurtz" that increases weapon damage and name your sniper rifle the "LOL".
 * Story Breadcrumbs: The in-game emails and video archives Jet finds tell most of the story of what happened between the events of the film and the events of the game, or what's going on in the analog world while Jet's fighting through Cyberspace.
 * Swiss Army Weapon: Four of them! The Disc, Rod, Mesh and Ball primitives each have several different forms, on top of the use of the Rod for lightcycles;
 * Disc: Disc Primitive (Standard Disc), Sequencer Disc, Cluster Disc, X-Box only Charger Disc
 * Rod: Rod Primitive PRod (Dual Shock Batons), Suffusion Rod, LOL
 * Mesh: Mesh Primitive Blaster, Energy Claw, Prankster Bit, X-Box only Blast Cannon
 * Ball: Ball Primitive Grenade, Ball Launcher, Drunken Dims, Ball Storm
 * Take That: The names of the Resource Hog type enemies include many thinly-veiled references to real-world applications, such as image_shop.exe, morton_disk_scan.exe and netscope.exe.
 * Technology Marches On. The in-play graphics of the game TRON 2.0 were better than the mainframe-rendered graphics of the original movie.
 * In game example: the Recognizers have become outdated and have been retro-fitted into transport tugs.
 * The old program I-No in the ENCOM mainframe brags about the machine's specs that modern handheld console would be embarrassed to have.


 * You'd be surprised at the antiquated equipment still in use in many places. As recently as a decade ago, at least one Texas university was running its entire student information system on an IBM 3270 mainframe with only 16 MB of system memory, using Windows XP with terminal emulation software in place of the original monochrome 'dumb terminals'. No idea if they're still using it or if they've replaced it with something else by now.
 * Technology Porn: Not quite at the level of the movies, but still enough to make the nerds Squee.
 * Terrible Trio: Crown (the sociopath), Popoff (the psychotic), and Baza (the coward)
 * Totally Radical: The DJ, naturally. Daft Punk, he's not.
 * Trapped in Another World: Just like the films, no protagonist takes their first trip into Cyberspace willingly.
 * The Unfought:
 * Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Kill any civilian program or ally, and your game immediately ends with "This Program has performed an illegal operation."
 * The Virus: Thorne, the original Big Bad;
 * "Well Done, Son" Guy: It's heavily implied that Lora's death put a huge wedge between Jet and Alan. Alan even grumbles during the game's intro that Jet is "as bad as Flynn." It's obvious that they do love one another, but there's not a lot of understanding on the part of either party.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?: What about the mysterious leader of fCon? The developers once said that it would have been Dillinger, the human villain of the original movie (supported by an email where the CEO claims he "lost this company once before").

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