'Tron: Legacy' Director Explains the Tron World

An anonymous reader writes "We only had to wait 28 years for the second installment of 'Tron' — the sequel, 'Tron: Legacy,' comes out on Friday. It is expected to have less awesomely bad '80s graphics and more awesomely awesome millennial CGI. In advance of the opening, Discover has an interview with director Joe Kosinski in which he talks about reinventing the light cycle, and explains that the Tron world resembles the Galapagos Islands, where everything evolved in isolation."

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[raddan]

Huh. Here I am thinking that the story is inspired (anthropomorphizing a computer's internal conflicts and merging them with the real world conflict... well before The Matrix did the same thing) and that the graphics are pretty cool given that most of them were not CGI. The frisbee-battle and the guy-jumps-into-MCP thing at the end are still visually unique to me. Good thing I have it on DVD so I don't have to listen when other people tell me what is "awesomely bad". It would be sufficient to say that Tron was a contributing factor in my decision to become a computer scientist :^)

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[mcgrew]

With the exception of the Space Shuttle, pretty much everything born of the 80s is "awesomely bad."

Bullshit. Counting from 1978 to 1992

• PCs
• Cell phones
• CDs
• Affordable VCRs
• Affordable microwave ovens
• Infrared TV remotes
• Continuation of good hard rock (which pretty much died in the '90s and is practically nonexistent today)
• Budweiser frogs
• My daughters!
• Star Trek II
• Widespread use of airbags
• ABS
• Die Hard
• The Terminator
• Total Recall
• etc.

Granted, there was a whole lot of bad stuff in the '80s, like Reagan, the War On (some) drugs (which launched a snowstorm of cocaine use, since it was really just a war on pot), the Challenger explosion, etc, but it was a hell of a lot better decade than the one now ending.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[TheRaven64]

MCP (which did stand for Master Control Program) was the operating system on Burroughs Large Systems machines, from the B5000 onwards. It was released in 1961, so predated TRON by some time. It was the first OS to support multiple CPUs, the first OS to be written in a high-level language, and the first commercial OS to support virtual memory.