Someone recently mentioned to me that a new TRON-movie was coming up. Today, I found out a little more about that:

I was googling around with the keywords traceon and tron (which are both originally computer commands, the latter being the abbreviation of the former), and more or less coincidentally stumbled upon Tron Sector, a site dedicated to the old movie and everything related to it. They have a news entry from July 24, 2008 about TR2N, which seems to have had its first trailer shown at Comic-Con 2008. That's when I remembered that someone had mentioned this to me just recently.

I've watched this trailer (it was a very low quality bootleg video from the conference), and it looked pretty cool. I'm not exactly sure (it was very low quality), but it looked as if they even had jumps in there. A feature that to my knowledge is currently unique to TRaceON.

To be honest, at the moment I don't really know what to think about this. Obviously, this could generate a big wave of interest in anything that is in any way related to the movie, and JC's Unity Multiplayer TRaceON obviously is inspired by the original movie (in fact - that movie supported my interest in creating computer games a very long time ago). So a sequel could generate interest in my game, which is very nice.

On the other hand, I think that TRaceON should be able to stand on its own very well. In fact, while I originally had quite a few references to the movie in my game, I removed those because while I obviously like the original game concept inherited from Snake, I'm not that interested in piggy-backing onto the popularity of ideas that others had.  One funny thing is that I played Snake even before I saw the movie (and since the version of that game that I played was written in basic, and I did some modifications to that code to change the gameplay a little bit, this was in fact my very first game programming experience, some 25 years ago!)

The idea behind TRaceON is really to create something unique - even though I'm obviously assembling this to a certain degree from things that already exist.

So I guess I should simply rather carefully consider the potential consequences a sudden wave of interest generated by a sequel of the movie might have. It could mean I just have to make sure I'm having enough servers for the tens of thousands of people all wanting to play TRaceON; but I also see it in the context that I've just talked to a very close friend of mine yesterday, who has been suffering rather severely (and completely innocently) from just one single lawyer that has gone seriously insane with his greed, but knows very well how to play that ugly game successfully.

Unfortunately, this world is currently not in its Golden Age - so it's sometimes kind of dangerous to walk through the world naively...

On that little quest I then was on, I also stumbled upon something else. This might be kind of a spoiler, so you might decide not to read on unless you've seen all levels of TRaceON already. That's about was I thought was a really unique idea. But I had to find out that others already had that idea and even implemented it. To avoid people having their experience in TRaceON spoiled, I'll use a somewhat cryptic language - but you can look for yourself through this link (you'll need to scroll down quite a bit). This is basically a level based on another very old game with a maze, a couple of ghosts and this funny little yellow man eating white pills. Well, there is one level like that in TRaceON, too ;-)