Contrary to what you might read elsewhere, the greatest video game of all time is TRON. Based on the movie, I spent hours playing this game over the years and never grew tired of it.

In fact,if I ever win the lottery, one of the first things I would buy is a full size version of it.

The game was divided into four parts. You had:

1. THE LIGHT CYCLES - Much like the movie, you drove a light cycle, trying to cut off the other cycles. In the first level, there was only one. That was pretty easy to defeat (just draw a backwards question mark around it). As the levels advanced, it got increasingly difficult. I'll be honest, I always had trouble with multiple cycles and got stuck on this.

2. THE TANKS - In this section, you drove a tank. You controlled the tank with the joystick and the turret at the top with a dial. In the first level, you battled one tank. As the levels increased, there were more than one.

3. THE SPIDERS - One of the two character sections where you fought off mechanical spiders, that reproduced as the time went on. You had to make it into the center section before the timer expired.

4. THE MCP CONE - Also as a character, you had to play a sort of breakout game, where you had to shoot out the blocks in the cone and make it through it. This was always my favorite section, as I was usually able to clear it and get a bonus for getting all the blocks.

Here is a YouTube video of someone playing the game:



Throughout the game, the music from the film was heard. Even in the days of early video games, with the low tech sound, it still sounded great.

As the film ended, if you didn't have a high score, you would get the notice on screen "Player one, your score is not in the top 100 scores".

The game was arguably more popular than the film. I continued to see it in arcades throughout the 80's. There was a hotel on I-95 in North Carolina where we would often stop on the way to and from Florida. The best thing about it, they had a TRON in the game room.

A few years ago, a PC video game of TRON was released, TRON 2.0. Sadly, it wasn't as good as the original game.

So, while others played Pac Man, or Donkey Kong, or Dragon's Lair, I was the one always at Tron.