Interview: Tron Legacy screenwriters on gaming and the 'DNA of Tron'

"I think gaming is in the DNA of Tron," says screenwriter Eddy Kitsis. "When the original came out in 1982, it really introduced the concept of a video game and it just blew my mind, because you play video games in the arcade and you're like,'Wow, what would happen behind the screen?'" Jeff Bridges' character Kevin Flynn was a gamer himself, Tron creator Steven Lisberger was inspired by early video games, and the images we remember of the first Tron aren't necessarily of the complicated metaphor of the Master Control Program and ENCOM's intra-company battle. They're of light cycles and disc fighting and the games.

"Gaming is a gateway drug, and I mean that in the best sense," says Kitsis' writing partner Adam Horowitz (the two wrote the screenplay to Tron Legacy, after writing on Lost nearly since the beginning). "That's how I got excited about computers and technology and storytelling." Gaming was intrinsic to the first Tron, but when director Joseph Kosinski was finally given the go-ahead by Disney to make a sequel, he says he "had to evolve the classic games forward."

And so Tron Legacy plays much closer to its characters, and farther away from the game metaphor. The games are there (in new forms), but the real gaming experience to be found in the new world of Tron, almost twenty years after its release, is -- go figure -- in the video game itself.

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Interview: Tron Legacy screenwriters on gaming and the 'DNA of Tron' originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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