Tron Maze-A-Tron (1982) watch online HD

After spending a lot of time playing Tron: Deadly Disks, I expected another great game for my Intellivision. I was sorely disappointed.

It was a frustrating game. First of all, the screen immediately starts scrolling to the left or right when you start to play. If the edge of the screen caught up with you, it would make a loud sound and reset you to a random location in the "maze".

Second of all, the environment. It's supposed to be some sort of circuit board, with a few interactive items. One, if entered, would reverse the screen's scroll direction. Another would cause a giant image of your character to flash on the screen, accompanied by a fluttering sound effect, while the maze scrolled by at 10 times the normal pace, and would then deposit you in a random location. This was called a "transporter" I believe. Of course, since there was little way of knowing which direction the transporter was going to send you or exactly where it was going to deposit you...I'm not exactly sure why this was thought useful or interesting, except that it as a sporadically available panic button.

Your character's only means of defense were his "shields", activated by pressing and holding one of the four buttons on the side of the controller. An aura of color would spring up around your character, ostensibly protecting him from any harm. The color of the aura denoted how much shield charge you had remaining. Charging it up required you to locate and yet another environmental object Where they got that in the movie, I have no clue.

As far as antagonists (other than the left or right side of your screen, which your shields offered no protection from) there was only one---"recognizers". If you haven't seen the movie, think of a Japanese arch. That's pretty much what they look like. Of course, computer game technology limited the recognizers in Maze-A-Tron to bright red inverted U shapes. They would periodically appear from the top or bottom edge of the screen and approach you, passing through all the roadblocking objects you had to scramble so quickly around to avoid the oncoming edge of your screen. If you fired up your shield just as they came near you, they would turn blue and permanently freeze in place (don't ask, I don't know that, either).

The object of the game was rather elusive, as well. There were actually two parts---the maze, where you'd invariably spend at least 95% of the game, and a first-person perspective facing the Master Control Program. To get to the second part, you had to locate this long double row of what I assume were computer chips, each of which had two binary digits on them that randomly shifted between 0 and 1. You had to walk into each chip and "jam" the 0s and 1s into a specific pattern (not easy to do, considering there were about 10 "chips" total and the screen scroll is bearing down on you). Succeeding in that, you'd be transported to face the MCP.

And that's where the game REALLY lost me. I only succeeded in reaching that point once or twice. What you were looking at is this big evil face (which was pretty impressive for a platform game in 1982). At either side of the face is a continual string of numbers scrolling from bottom to top. You had to aim a set of crosshairs and "shoot" the numbers to change the color of the number. Again, there was some sort of specific combination you were going for, though I was never entirely sure what the combination was or what would happen if you did it. I know in the instruction manual it detailed something called "popping the stack" when it was explaining which numbers to shoot. I never succeeded in whatever it was--the eyes of the MCP periodically shoot bolts at you, requiring to use the shields you charged up in the maze part of the game...if you failed to shield yourself or ran out of shield energy, the shots would return you to the maze and you'd have to start all over again.

Lastly, the music. Lord, the music. I know home video gaming systems were largely limited to high-pitched computerized versions of "teddy bear picnic" in that day and age, but this game had the most mind-numbing repetitive tune, interspersed with what I assume some programmer thought were environmental noises, though no computer I've ever owned has made noises like that game did. And thank God for that, too.

I got the distinct feeling that someone came up with an idea for a maze game and someone else said "make it a computer maze, throw in a couple Tron-like objects, slap the Tron label on it, and sell it". Regardless, the game was confusing, and that's saying a lot for a game in an era of games that didn't require more than a joystick with a single Fire button. I'm not even sure there was an ending to this game. I'd love to hear about it if there was, though I'm sure it's as underwhelming as the game was.

**Update: Nope, found out there was no ending to this game (which was not uncommon for that era).