As an avid gamer, I too read the articles here at Generation: Gamerz.  While reading the Xbox release article on Wednesday, I saw one of my favorite games: Tron.  Tron was one of the first video games that was created as part of the marketing scheme for a movie “You’ve seen the movie, now play the game”. 

There were two arcade games made using this license.  The first, was Tron in 1982, and the second was Discs of Tron in 1983.  Tron has 4 different sub-games that you have to beat to move on to the next level: the MCP cone, Light Cycles, Tanks and Grid bugs, which was added at the last minute.  Originally, Discs of Tron was supposed to be part of Tron, but the programming was not complete yet and so Discs was later released as a separate game.

I have been collecting arcade games for about fifteen years, and at the peak of my hobby I had approximately ten cabinets. I collected an array of titles, from Road Blasters to Vindicators, Rough Rangers to Operation Thunderbolt.

I would buy most of my original videogames directly from local arcades.  It seems that even in the arcade business, “everything is for sale”.  I would go to arcades so often that I knew the operators on a first-name basis.  We would often talk about which games were for sale and such.  One day I was talking to the owner of a particular arcade, when he told me that they were selling Discs of Tron for $250.00.

(To understand the magnitude of this revelation, you must first understand that one of my all time favorite videogames was Discs of Tron.  This gameplay was similar to the movie: two players would throw a “disc” at each other trying to knock their opponent off a platform.)

Needless to say, when I heard this, I knew that I had to have it.  The Discs of Tron game that I bought was the “environmental unit”. This meant that the game had an early rudimentary surround sound and a sub woofer as well.  I mean how cool is that!  To have surround sound in a videogame in the 1980’s was incredible.  The only problem with an environmental unit is that it was over 6 foot tall (2 meters) and weighed in at 365 lbs (165 Kg).  So, I went out to the farm and got one of the utility trailers that we used to move farm machinery and promised three friends a beer party and hours of fun if they helped me move the game.

It was the middle of summer, and here we were, four guys carrying this massive video game across a hot parking lot, sweating like pigs and cursing constantly about the weight of the game. We finally got it loaded on the trailer we headed toward the farm with our newly acquired bounty when we ran into another problem: the game acted like a sail on a boat and started moving the vehicle all over the road.  Driving proved difficult, but a short time later, we arrived safely at the farm.

We unloaded the game and carried it to the workshop, opened all the doors and windows, cracked opened some beer, and played Discs until 2:00AM when the beer and our energy finally ran out.

That was nearly 22 years ago.  These days, my Discs of Tron is still at the farm in a garage, and I still play it every couple of months.

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