In 1982, before laptops and DVDs, before multi-gigabyte hard drives and the World Wide Web, there came the silver screen computer world of Tron. Tron tells the story of Kevin Flynn, a brilliant young video game programmer for ENCOM, who discovers that Ed Dillinger, in an effort to boost his own career, has stolen Flynn’s programs and claimed them as his own. In his diligent efforts to find evidence regarding his stolen games, Dillinger’s Master Control Program, the MCP, tries to stop Flynn and blasts him into an electronic computerized world. Aided by Tron, which is actually a security program written by Alan Bradley, they try to destroy the MCP, escape and return to the “real” world. Tron created quite a buzz by being the first film to extensively use computer-generated images and to completely generate a three-dimensional world on the big screen. Later in 1982, guests aboard the Disneyland People Mover attraction heard the pre-recorded spiel interrupted with the words, “Warning! You have invaded the electronic realm of the Master Computer Program. Prepare for the game grid of Tron!” As their vehicle progressed along the track and into a tunnel, they would soon be surrounded by projections of racing “light cycles” within the cyber computer-generated world of Tron.
