TRON: Catalyst Reminded Me How Frustrating It Is Being a TRON Fan

In the black skies above Vertical Slice, the programs tell me they race lightcycles over rooftops. There’s not a lot of freedom to be found in the Arq Grid these days. Cycles and cycles ago, Flynn spun up a new server for ISOs to live outside the ravages for his perfection-fixated, auto-doppleganger CLU 2. Then he got trapped in his own grid by a program built of ideals he held onto too tightly then abandoned, and the Arq Grid was left to its own devices.
I’m sure it was really nice for a time. But rather than a clean and rigidly administered system, the ISOs were messy. They sat around for computer-centuries being “bio-digital jazz, man” and eventually there was a war followed by even more factionalism. In the countless computational cycles that ran their course, Core arose, doggedly dedicated to strict control, an authoritarian regime built on digital eugenics, hierarchical function, and the colors orange and red. Of course, with every stranglehold regime, there’s going to be a resistance, and with the programs of the Arq Grid this manifested in a group of mostly Outlands-dwelling survivor-rogues doing their best to thwart Core and “reset” the system. But a lot of what they do seems to be “live an impossibly hard life off-grid.” Then there’s Automata, magenta and weird—Programs who believe in Programs and not the Users. They say they reject the structures of the user, but aside from being weirdo, annoying-to-kill digital warlocks, I’m not entirely buying it.
And then there’s everyone else. All the unaligned programs of Vertical Slice and other locales of the Arq Grid. Regular programs just trying to get by in the shadowy gaps of Core’s regime. Programs like Exo. A new hero for a new grid, Exo is about to have a really bad night learning about all this history and more.
TRON: Catalyst sucked me in with a clip that lasted only seconds. A swift-running young program edged in blue-white neon runs up an incredible double-helix stairway. Really, it’s a vertical slice of the Hudson Yard suicide-magnet monstrosity known as “Vessel.” But unlike that testament to bad taste and worse sense, this structure was beautiful, an isometric playground edged in pale light. I wanted so badly to work the small bones and musculature of my carpometacarpal in a smooth circuitous motion as this dashing figure ascended the heights of this structure. It was enough to make me forget how mad I was with TRON since 2010’s hatefully uncreative TRON: Legacy. I’m a sucker for a good stairway.
That was months ago. And now, 13-ish hours later, I can safely say that I was right. It’s a really satisfying fucking stairway. Yeah, I’m a sucker for staircases. But if I’m honest with myself, I’ve been a fucking mark for TRON since way back.
Around Mile Post 14 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina there was a mall. A proper one. Enclosed. Not a string of storefronts or those weird open-air things you find today. An indoor mall. A bastion to the American will to dominate and control, to enforce rigidity to the flow of temperature and humidity with technological systems. It was cool, and well lit, an oasis from the 98% humidity 90*F days of a coastal Carolina summer.
Now unfortunately, but expectedly, they undid all of that and turned it into one of those hideous non-descript suburban plaza superstructures. But before then, inside, tucked away next to a Radio Shack was a dark, cavernous space. The exaggerated blackness of a room illuminated just by the glow of CRTs and pre-Govee edge-lighting. At the time, it was the only real arcade a proper urbanite child of the ‘80s would recognize in the whole of the Outer Banks (even if it was suspiciously non-smoking). Outside in bold rounded letters, illuminated from within and glowing faintly blue, three words welcomed all: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY.
I don’t even think I’d watched the movie the first time I was given a little plastic stepstool so I could see over the edge of the controls and wrapped a tiny brown hand over the radial puck and took hold of the translucent blue control stick. When my dad showed me the movie, I was only more hooked, somewhere between the secret life of programs, the religious purges of a juiced-up chess program, and Bruce Boxleitner’s popcorn. But for years and years, I kept coming back to GAMES PEOPLE PLAY, and that lonely TRON cabinet tucked away behind the newer, flashier games at the front. If you asked me, I would nod and unequivocally say that TRON was my shit, even if I had maybe only watched it a handful of times between 1987 and 2009.