TRON 25th Anniversary Articles And More
Since I last searched the web for articles or pages mentioning the 25th Anniversary of TRON, a number of them have popped up. Out of them all though, only two are significant.
The first article has snippets of a new interview done with Steven Lisberger, for a book that's coming out.
The second is an interview with John Knoll at the site Computerworld, about CGI during the last 25 years in general, and TRON specifically. Knoll did not have anything to do with TRON as far as I'm aware, but he is the Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) which certainly makes him qualified to speak about the subject.
While searching for any other significant 25th Anniversary stories, I did happen to stumble on to a couple of others that I found interesting. They don't have anything to do with the 25th Anniversary, but they are about TRON and I thought were worth sharing.
One of the articles is about the TRON remake rumor that circulated a couple of years ago. The author puts into words what I believe most TRON fans were thinking. "God no, not a remake. Please Disney, don't screw up TRON!"
The other one compares TRON to William Gibson's Neuromancer. I hadn't really given this notion much thought over the years, particularly since I haven't read Neuromancer and because TRON was released before the novel was published. But I can see how the two could be compared directly.
What was particularly interesting to me, is that in reading the article, it suddenly became obvious that: while Neromancer couldn't have influenced TRON, Neuromancer could have influenced TRON 2.0. And there is definitely some evidence to prove this. In early concept art for the game, the DataWraiths were called NetRunners. And it was by reading this article, that I realized Neuromancer and the series of Gibson novels that followed, had originally coined the name NetRunner. I'm guessing though, that Disney and Monolith dropped the NetRunner name, to avoid any potential legal action by Gibson or his publisher.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has both read William Gibson's novels and played TRON 2.0, if you think there are any more similarities between the two.
Props go out to TRON-Sector member Sketch, who originally found the two 25th Anniversary article links.
The first article has snippets of a new interview done with Steven Lisberger, for a book that's coming out.
The second is an interview with John Knoll at the site Computerworld, about CGI during the last 25 years in general, and TRON specifically. Knoll did not have anything to do with TRON as far as I'm aware, but he is the Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) which certainly makes him qualified to speak about the subject.
While searching for any other significant 25th Anniversary stories, I did happen to stumble on to a couple of others that I found interesting. They don't have anything to do with the 25th Anniversary, but they are about TRON and I thought were worth sharing.
One of the articles is about the TRON remake rumor that circulated a couple of years ago. The author puts into words what I believe most TRON fans were thinking. "God no, not a remake. Please Disney, don't screw up TRON!"
The other one compares TRON to William Gibson's Neuromancer. I hadn't really given this notion much thought over the years, particularly since I haven't read Neuromancer and because TRON was released before the novel was published. But I can see how the two could be compared directly.
What was particularly interesting to me, is that in reading the article, it suddenly became obvious that: while Neromancer couldn't have influenced TRON, Neuromancer could have influenced TRON 2.0. And there is definitely some evidence to prove this. In early concept art for the game, the DataWraiths were called NetRunners. And it was by reading this article, that I realized Neuromancer and the series of Gibson novels that followed, had originally coined the name NetRunner. I'm guessing though, that Disney and Monolith dropped the NetRunner name, to avoid any potential legal action by Gibson or his publisher.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has both read William Gibson's novels and played TRON 2.0, if you think there are any more similarities between the two.
Props go out to TRON-Sector member Sketch, who originally found the two 25th Anniversary article links.
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I have to say that i'm a great fan of Gibson as well as i am about Tron, as his type of writing is very special and while he writes about futuristing things it is still believable. In some sort of you can already say that he pointed out to some things that were already become reality. So sience fiction as its best, like Tron is. Another author of that kind to be mentioned is Bruce Sterling.
"Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy,
a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl."
"Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind's extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix"
In fact, I don't believe he ever used the term "the Net". Gibson wasn't really a technical person, and the Internet wasn't commonly called the Net back then. In fact, Gibson used the terms "matrix" or "cyberspace" for his futuristic Internet:
"A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void... "
Right. I did say that "Neuromancer and the series of Gibson novels that followed" coined the term NetRunner.
But I guess I didn't make myself clear enough, and focused too much on Neuromancer. I lumped the rest of his novels under the "Neuromancer" description, because it was that first novel which started the whole cyberpunk movement. My bad. I should have mentioned Idoru specifically.
Anyway, getting to my point - This is just something minor, probably totally irrelevant, but isn't it just as possible for Tron (the original) to have influenced Neuromancer? This probably has nothing to do with it if so, but when I was looking up Neuromancer on Wikipedia, I noticed the character on the (listed as 1984 release) cover image looks very much like the MCP. Is it just me? Or am I just a goofy Tron fangirl?