Back in May, it was confirmed by Disney Interactive that remakes of the TRON Arcade game and Discs of TRON would eventually appear on XBOX Live Arcade for the 360. The games were to be released "in celebration" of TRON's 25th Anniversary. Yet here we are in October, and they still haven't been released. Way to miss the point, Disney.

So when are they going to be released? In July, I discovered a page on the MSN Games site that listed both TRON Arcade game and Discs of TRON as having a September 30th release date, which has come and gone. Since then, I've learned that Live Arcade games are only released on Wednesdays. And since the 30th was a Sunday — that, plus the fact that the 30th was the last day of Q3 2007 — leads me to believe that the date was simply a placeholder in absence of concrete information.

Various gaming sites and even the Disney Interactive site itself, have listed the release dates variously as Summer 2007, Q3 2007, and now finally "TBA". On Major Nelson's site (he's a member of the XBOX Marketing team at Microsoft), it shows that this Wednesday's (as of this writing) Live Arcade release is neither of the TRON games. So apparently, the date from the MSN Games wasn't even good as a rough indicator of when we could expect the games. So basically, at this point, we have no real idea as to when the games will be released.

Perhaps there's a slim chance the releases are being held up, due to the fact that Microsoft is preparing a version of Live for Windows that will bring it up to par with what XBOX users expect from the service. At the moment, Live can only be used in Windows games that are Live-enabled (Shadowrun and Halo 2). Microsoft is planning to break Live out of the games and make it a separate application that can be run at any time, independently. They also plan to bring a version of the service to Windows XP, rather than keeping it Vista-exclusive as originally intended. The improved Games for Windows Live is supposed to make its appearance in November. Maybe Disney Interactive is preparing Windows versions of the games as well, and will release both 360 and Windows versions simultaneously? Who knows.