well, where to even start? it was 20 years ago when my friends and i first saw the original TRON film. my parents rented it on VHS for my birthday party back home in england. the TV sat at one end of the table and about 8 kids sat around the other end, which was otherwise covered in food, streamers and wrapping paper.
we all adored it, but more importantly a seed had been sewn and over the years i found myself playing TRON games on all manner of gaming systems. the first time was on my best friend’s ZX spectrum 48k+ back in the late 80s (seen above) and the latest, years later, when we stumbled across an original TRON arcade machine living out the end of its days at barcade in brooklyn.
now as for daft punk … it was about 4 years ago that we finally sat down to watch the interstellar 5555 animated film in its entirety. i was taken-a-back at the quite brilliant and moving concept behind it. consequently i swiftly purchased their second film electroma, and it was even better. ordinary house DJs these guys were not. requiring further validation for my new found obsession i called my friends the protomen (with whom i shared a great love of concept-based music) and consulted them on the matter. pretty soon my entire line of thinking on what daft punk was about had done a massive U-turn. then, as if waiting for my undivided attention, it was announced that they were going to score the new TRON film.
…
tronsoundtrack.com
so there it is. a small testament to years of love for that great old movie, and to the incredible potential of the new one and its soundtrack.
all the site does right now, formerly speaking, is register your interest in the forthcoming soundtrack release. however in order to satisfy the fans out there of the original film, daft punk or both, we packed it with as many tricks and secrets as we could. we also made it work on ipads and ipods as well as it would on any desktop. this involved giving a suitable nod to the generation of internet users that would have grown up with the original film. i.e. we threw ASCII art imagery in the source code, built out all the site animations using .gifs, and included another element … but since no one has worked that out yet we’re not about to spoil the fun here.
the look and feel is of course taken from both the dusty desktop computer in the second TRON LEGACY trailer and the sites some of you will have seen when playing the flynn lives ARG. that is of course with the exception of the boom / ripple animation, which was adapted from a piece of code that mr. doob (of arcade fire video / harmony fame) wrote. all we did beyond that was build it all out using HTML5 and javascript rather than video or flash. we did this so that you can move the windows on the site with your fingertip on a touchscreen, as well as with a mouse. a touch that again we felt true to the world of TRON.
what’s to come after this? well even we don’t know right now. such is the mystery of these things. in the meantime we wish to extend our thanks of course to topspin and disney for helping us be a part of all this, and hope that we’ve done enough for now to satisfy even the most rabid fans out there.
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