Download it from here
The TRON 2.0 Editing Tools have always been a pain to install, especially for new users. For a long time, I've been wanting to do something about it. So recently I found some time to put together a program that installs the tools for you.

The program installs the Editing Tools, released Prefabs, and some extras like: additional documentation from other Monolith games (some useful info in them that isn't in the TRON 2.0 tools documentation), video tutorials made by me long ago to get you started, WinREZ LT Studio, XN Resource Editor, and some community-made prefabs.

During the installation, the program will extract game assets from TRON 2.0 that you'll need to do any editing. These assets take up about 2.5 GB on your hard drive, and they take a while to extract. Please be patient during the extraction process and WAIT until it's finished. You'll see several windows open and close during this time. Just let the program do its work without interruption.

You can decide whether you want to install WinREZ LT and XN Resource Editor or not, by either going through with their installation or canceling them at the start as each launches. I recommend you install both. But during the installation of WinREZ, choose a Custom install. When you get to choose the components to be installed, I recommend not picking ResEdit. Use XN Resource Editor instead.

Also, if you're using a 64-bit version of Windows, don't install the WinREZ Shell Extensions. They only work on 32-bit versions of Windows. So generally on XP you are fine, but on Vista and 7 you'll need to check to see if you're using a 64-bit version. If WinREZ wants to install to "C:\Program Files (x86)", then you are using a 64-bit version of Windows. If there's no "(x86)", you are using a 32-bit version.


XN Resource Editor is meant for editing the CRES.DLL file, which is where all the text for the game is kept. After you open the CRES.DLL file in XN, click the plus sign "+" beside "String Table" and then the plus beside each number to see a table of text which you can click on. Then you can either edit existing text, or add a new text line.

If you need assistance with editing TRON 2.0, please visit our message forum on the LDSO site.

November 11th, 2011 UPDATE: The TRON 2.0 Editing Tools has been updated to Version 1.1. The new version adds more documentation from another Monolith game, an extra tool and plugin, and some other minor changes.

Today, Disney and Microsoft - together with a team at Vectorform - revealed a newly redesigned site demonstrating what the future of comics and graphic novels will be.

The TRON Legacy Digital Book site features a TRON Legacy interactive comic: with animated, glowing panels that slide, scale, and feature highlights you can click on to reveal intel on characters like Sam Flynn and Rinzler. The site uses the new HTML5 spec and what's known as GPU or hardware acceleration in Internet Exlporer 9 to achieve the level of interactivity, smoothness, and responsiveness you'll experience when visiting the site. Hardware acceleration offloads the work of drawing the screen from your computer's CPU (processor), to the GPU (video card/chip).

The results are highly impressive, and what's even more impressive is that from start to finish the site only took approximately one month to complete. The site was created by first drawing traditional comic panels in Photoshop, then isolating elements so they could be treated with the added effects mentioned earlier. Then the team at Vectorform worked hard to reduce the bandwidth required for all the high resolution imagery, while keeping the quality and performance of the site high.

I was given an opportunity to chat with one of the creative leads at Disney and a senior director on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. During this Q&A, I asked who originated the idea of this new project (Disney), and whether the TRON Legacy filmmakers (Steven Lisberger, Joseph Kosinski, and the rest of the team) were involved in the project in any way (the answer was yes). It seems Disney really wanted to push the boundaries of what could be done with an interactive comic, and remain committed to the TRON franchise for the forseeable future.

If you visit the TRON Legacy Digital Book site, you'll need a browser that supports HTML5. All the latest versions of the most popular browsers now support this new standard, including: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and of course IE9. But the site will be best experienced in Internet Explorer 9, which you can download from Microsoft's site.

The site is also promoting a new TRON Legacy interactive book application for the iPad, that you'll want to check out if you own one. The app presents the complete story presented on the web site in the same interactive format.

Below are a couple of videos: the first demonstrating the site in action, and the second going into the technical details of how the site was created. The second video is quite long, about 15 minutes.

The original TRON is finally arriving on Blu-ray, along with TRON Legacy, on April 5th, 2011.

Yes, I am probably the last person in the world to report this. This has been known across the internet, as far back as January 2011. Sadly, though, I did correctly predict that the original TRON would not show up on Blu-ray in 2009 or 2010. It's been a long wait.

Here are links to the various releases of TRON and TRON Legacy you can purchase on Blu-ray.


The best value is probably the Five Disc set that isn't the Limited Collector's Edition. It includes everything ‒ TRON Legacy in 3-D Bluray, TRON Legacy in 2-D Blu-ray, TRON in Blu-ray, all the extra features ‒ minus the special light-up Light Disc holding case. An unboxing preview from IGN below, has put off a lot of people from buying the expensive Collector's Edition. (Thanks to mikezero on Tron-Sector for the tip.)

With both TRON Legacy and the original TRON arriving on Blu-ray shortly, I thought I'd take a look back at how both TRON Legacy the film and TRON Evolution the game did.


TRON Legacy was still showing in theaters right up until mid-April, 2011. Though in a very limited number of theaters by this point.

During its 17 weeks in release, it earned a total of $400,062,763 ‒ just managing to pass the $400 million mark. Of that total, $172,062,763 was earned domestically (U.S. and Canada) while $228,000,000 was foreign earnings. These earnings figures are sourced from the site Box Office Mojo.

Previously, I predicted that TRON Legacy would be a box office smash. Whether that actually turned out to be the case, is debatable. With a production budget claimed to be $170 million and a marketing campaign rumored at an additional $100 million, for a total cost of approximately $270 million: earning about $400 million couldn't necessarily be considered a smash hit.

Still . . . it's not a flop, either. Though, to be honest, it's the foreign earnings that saved TRON Legacy from being a box office bomb. Earning roughly $170 million in domestic receipts is a poor showing. American audiences weren't really enthused about TRON Legacy, apparently. While international audiences as a whole were more receptive.

So what did I think of TRON Legacy? It was . . . okay.

Coming from something of a TRON fanatic, calling Legacy "okay" is akin to damning it with faint praise. I saw it in IMAX 3-D, and visually there is no question that it was impressive. (Though I still don't like the costumes for the programs in Legacy. They're uninspired and bland without the detailed circuitry patterns from the original costumes. Interesting then, that the preview for the upcoming TRON Uprising animated series seems to have addressed this complaint by adding back some detail. It can be seen starting at the 0:49 mark. Disney actually listening to the fans' feedback? :o )

Rather than type out a long diatribe about what I thought was wrong with Legacy and how it could have been better, I'll just direct you to watch Spoony's rant on TRON Legacy below. It sums up everything that I thought was wrong with the film, far more eloquently than I ever could. I'm not quite as down on the film as Spoony is, though. I at least liked it and thought it was decent. Just not great. Some of the things he took exception with in the story can be explained away, but on the whole he's telling it like it is.

Be warned, though, that the video is a very long rant at almost an hour long. It's also full of SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie yet, and NSFW either due to language. Even if you intend to watch the entire thing, you might want to skip to the 4:09 mark because he doesn't really talk about TRON Legacy until then. If you want the "short version" where Spoony gets to the point ‒ and the part that really stood out for me, the part I wholeheartedly agree with ‒ then skip to the 44:18 mark.

For the TL;DR crowd, suffice to say that Legacy's story was its biggest flaw. "So much wasted potential."



So will there be another TRON sequel? A TRON 3, for lack of a better title? Rumors point to yes.



As I predicted would occur, TRON Evolution did not do very well. In fact, it was a massive bomb across all three platforms (PC, 360, PS3) doing even worse than I ever imagined. As a result, the Disney-owned developer of Evolution, Propaganda Games, was shut down this January.

Even Disney Interactive itself is in a state of disarray, thanks in part to the poor sales of Evolution. At least two executives at DI either resigned or were fired in the last year, alone. If you've been following this site for any length of time: then you know exactly what I've thought of Disney Interactive over the years, and all of this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. It's a sinking ship that won't be rescued any time soon.

So how did TRON Evolution do, exactly? It sold 190,755 copies worldwide on all three platforms (PC, 360, PS3), as of January 2011. This information was sourced from the L.A. Times.

Going back to one of my previous articles, which talked about how well the sales of TRON 2.0 did, we again have to look at expectations in today's marketplace.

Already, in 2003, sales of 100,000 (estimated) for TRON 2.0 on one platform (PC) was considered "okay" but disappointing. Fast forward 7-8 years, where expectations have essentially increased tenfold. Today, sales of 1 million are just "okay" and still disappointing. Meanwhile, Evolution didn't even reach one-fifth of that number across three platforms.

Then factor in the undoubtedly much larger development and marketing budgets for Evolution vs. TRON 2.0, and the fact that Evolution had the massive hype machine that is the film TRON Legacy behind it . . . and you begin to see that, by today's standards, Evolution essentially did even worse than TRON 2.0. Disney must be reeling in shock, especially after touting how they hoped Evolution would be a huge hit.

To put this in even better perspective, let's look at the sales of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. (A game I highly recommend, by the way.) It's a title made by an independent developer, PC only (at this time), with virtually no marketing behind it. Yet it sold the same number of copies as Evolution, if not more. (Yes, I realize it took a little longer at four months versus one month. But still!)

Ouch.

As for what I think of Evolution: my opinion of it hasn't really changed since I predicted what it would be like, based on the trailers and other previews. In fact, it turned out exactly the way I expected. Here's a summary of TRON Evolution written by a game critic that I fully agree with, as stated in this article under the "Unfortunate Disappointments" heading.

Tron Evolution: The Videogame was a far different kind of bad. This was a game that was creatively bankrupt when it came to gameplay. Looking at what Disney Interactive Studios put together is a game that is essentially a mod for a Prince of Persia game. You could put a Prince of Persia skin on this game and you would never know the difference. I love Tron, and the entire franchise. I am one of the few that has probably played Tron 2.0 at least a dozen times, and have enjoyed it each time. It was a fantastic journey and it felt like something associated with the Tron universe. This game ended up being an injustice to the Tron franchise and actually takes away from what is there from the prior games and movies.

- Joe Haygood, Aeropause Games

To sum up, in my view: TRON Legacy was at least decent if not exceptional, but TRON Evolution was a major disappointment.

June 3rd, 2011 UPDATE: I've updated the article due to the fact that TRON Legacy was still in theaters until a couple of weeks after this was first posted, and because Box Office Mojo has continued to adjust the earnings figures over the last couple of months. This article now reflects the current figures as of June 3rd.