Xbox gets TRON 2.0 with Live features
Climax LA is handling the port, and we're nursing the sherry. Ugh.
Monolith's TRON 2.0 will appear on Xbox and Xbox Live this Christmas under the whimsical guise of TRON 2.0: Killer App (see what they did!), Buena Vista Interactive announced last night.
The conversion is being handled by Climax's LA studio, because in the words of Buena Vista's marketing director Bob Picunko, it needed a team that "specialises in creating outstanding Xbox games with incredibly strong Xbox Live, racing and first-person shooter gameplay." Climax of course handled MotoGP and MotoGP 2, a couple of the broadband gaming service's finest titles, and these days can be found beavering away on games like Serious Sam: The Next Encounter. Online versions of both the famous light-cycle sections and first-person shooter antics should be safe in the developer's hands.
As you may recall, in narrative terms TRON 2.0 was very much a sequel to the 1982 film TRON, rather than a "re-imagining" or some such, and although it took on the subject matter with a degree of artistic license, it inherited the film's gorgeous visual style and its foundation of a corrupt machine world where anthropomorphic computer programs slaughter each other in gladiatorial combat for the amusement of users like us. Or so I'm told by former staff writer Martin, who loved it to pieces when he played it on the PC last year.
We'd be extremely surprised if TRON 2.0: Killer App doesn't show up at E3 somewhere. We'd also be extremely surprised if it lives up to its doubtless tongue-in-cheek moniker, despite its obvious quality, but then that's another matter entirely.