Hard Wares: Minimalist Tron Poster

This poster is freaking fantastic.  It has a great feel to it.  I was thinking that this is the way Disney should have gone with the promotion of their groundbreaking CGI video game movie from 1982.  Be mysterious with it, low key... instead of the "computerized Fantasia" they pushed.  Although, thinking about it, the poster feels a bit too 70's, a vibe that would probably have given the public the idea that the movie was dated even before release:

Still though, a great poster, designed by Mark Welser.  You can pick up a print over at Etsy.

For more information on Disney's seminal Tron, consult your local Dot Eaters article.

Tron's Legacy Continues

Coming through the I/O Tower is word that Tron: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to Disney's groundbreaking 1982 movie Tron, is itself getting a follow-up.

Legacy created a lot of buzz during its release two years ago, managed to pull in over US$400 million dollars world-wide, and spun-off an animated series titled Tron: Uprising, which airs on the Disney XD television network.  It's little wonder that Disney wants to continue plumbing the Tron universe.  Legacy director Joseph Kosinski has been tapped for the sequel, with Jesse Wigutow in negotiations to write the script.

I liked Legacy when it came out in theatres.  I saw it in 3D, and the movie was shot with 3D equipment as opposed to converted to the format after the fact, and it looked spectacular.  In addition, the story was a bit more fleshed out than the original.  Here's hoping Tron 3.0 continues the upward cycle.

For more information on Tron and other video game movies that mattered, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

via The Hollywood Reporter

Two New Gallery Additions

Submitted for approval, two new video game ad images for the gallery. One isn't exactly an ad, but an homage to Space Invaders and the impact it had on society in the form of a Mad Magazine cover. The video games related article inside imagines games based on real life, such as "The Maddening 'Subway Rush Hour' Game where you try to stuff as many people as you can into a NYC subway train, and "The Nauseating 'Big City Doggie-Do' Game", where you try to cross the street without stepping into a pile. Yeech!

The second entry is a colourful ad for two TRON video games for the Atari 2600. Both TRON Deadly Discs and Adventures of TRON were released for the system by Mattel through their M Network label, which the company used to publish games on platforms outside of their own Intellivision console.  For more info on the TRON movie and the games licensed from it, consult your local Dot Eaters article here.

Here's handy links to the two images:

The Visual Cortex: Covering TRON

Today this surfaces in the Cortex: a scan of the July, 1982 cover of Electronic Games magazine.

EG was the premiere video game magazine of its time.  I remember strolling into the drug store with my mom and spotting the second issue of EG on the rack in 1981.  It bothered me forever more that I missed that first issue.  EG was published from 1981 to 1985, the year its name was changed to Computer Entertainment in order weather the big video game crash and focus more on the burgeoning computer game market.  EG helped form video game journalism, and its influence lives on through the myriad of print and online coverage of the scene that exist today.

The feature story here is, of course, the release of Disney's video game extravaganza TRON, which promised to transport the audience into the inner-world of these new fangled computer boxes.  The hype for TRON was pretty intense, and helped seal the fate of the movie as a curious social artifact when ticket sales were considerably less than expected.  The movie itself is fun, but muddled and disjointed.  You can read the history of it, and two other seminal video game films from the early 80's, in my TDE article here.

EG was also the reason I stubbornly always called them "videogames", before Google's search algorithm convinced me the combined term never caught on, and would punish me in search rankings if I used it.

Without further ado, the July, 1982 cover of EG: