Tron Solar Sailer

Tron Solar SailerThe Game: In the third and final game of the trilogy of Intellivision games based on the movie Tron, you’re piloting the solar sailer vehicle stolen by Tron and Yori about 2/3 of the way through the movie. You ride the light beams through the digital realm, avoiding deadly (but dumb) grid bugs and pursuing Recognizers. You can fire weapons at both of the above, but doing this and keeping yourself on a clear path is the real challenge. (Mattel, 1982)

Memories: Of any of the Tron games Mattel manufactured for its own Intellivision platform or the Atari 2600, Solar Sailer is probably the one which is most closely related to a scene in the movie. It may also be the hardest.

Tron Solar SailerOddly, Solar Sailer reuses Tron Maze-a-Tron‘s strange “catch the ones and zeros” gag in the tunnel sequences of the game. I don’t remember seeing anyone catch any binary code in the movie!

The coolest feature of Solar Sailer? Given the limitations of creating sound for home 2 quartersvideo game platforms at the time, it made a very good attempt to recreate – with polyphony, no less! – Wendy Carlos’ score from the movie. Though the arcade game ultimately wins the award for most faithfully reproducing the music of Tron, this game demonstrated the Intellivision’s music capability quite well.

Tron Solar Sailer

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