Please DotEmu, make a modern Discs of Tron game…

I certainly don’t intend to write something every couple of months begging DotEmu to make or update some old videogame, but this may turn into a semi-regular feature where I beg some developer to do such a thing, it just has to be the right developer and I’ll explain why DotEmu is a good fit for this further on down.

I’ve made it pretty clear that while I feel Tron is a pretty influential movie, it’s not a particularly good one. There are some neat ideas and some mind-blowing effects for the time but it’s a pretty dull movie and more importantly for Disney specifically it was a pretty big failure.

However, Disney seems determined to keep the IP alive through various video games, TV series, and attempted movie follow-ups though you could say the results have been mixed as a whole. The area where Tron most often succeeds though is video games which given the premise of the franchise is pretty fitting.

One of the best examples of this is one of the earliest attempts. Tron certainly offers a lot of ideas that can be made into different games. Some of the games borne of this try to incorporate several of them, but in at least one case one idea was taken and just executed really well and that was Discs of Tron from 1983.

It’s a pretty simple idea really, you and an opponent fling deadly discs at each other in increasingly complex arenas. But good execution is another matter. I can’t claim I’ve played the original 1983 arcade game honestly. Maybe I tried it somewhere sometime but given my opinion of Tron as a movie franchise, I doubt I had much interest.

However, I did find the Xbox 360 Arcade release was still available on the store for a mere $5, and since the goal of this project is to own as many Disney games as possible it was an easy decision to try it out. I wasn’t expecting much, maybe play it for 10 minutes and it’d be like a lot of ports of games over 30 years old, terrible. Like really with a handful of exceptions most of those really early games have just aged terribly and are barely playable anymore.

So imagine my surprise when I spent a good couple of hours playing Discs of Tron and had a tremendous time. It’s not a super deep game, the options for play are pretty limited and anyone still playing online today is an expert so newcomers like myself are just going to get brutally murdered trying to play online, but the basic gameplay is very tight, it controls really well and just feels good and fun to play. For $5, Discs of Tron is an amazing game.

So if Disney is determined to keep Tron alive as a property, a new game would be a better way to go than a movie or series, and a new updated version of Discs of Tron would be a really cool way to get people excited about the IP, the competitive nature of the game could spawn a whole community around it if done properly. Now, who has recently done a game where you face off against an opponent and throw discs at them?

Granted, you throw the discs into goals, not at your opponent, but the basic idea is there, and a lot of what makes Windjammers such a fun game could easily be incorporated into a new Discs of Tron game. More variety to the levels, power-ups, a little more maneuverability. It’s just all right there!

So I’m not saying this is something I want as badly as a new Simpsons arcade game, but if Disney wants to keep Tron alive as a franchise (and there is that new ride coming to Disney World based on the one in Shanghai Disney so clearly there is plenty of interest in keeping it alive), a new Discs of Tron game would be a really good way to do it, and DotEmu seems like the best developer for the job.

That’s all for today, but I should certainly be back next weekend at the latest with something new, so see ya real soon!