Summary
- Monolith Studios, along with two other subsidiaries, have been shut down by Warner Bros. due to slow numbers.
- Tron 2.0 proved games based on movies could be good.
- I won’t lie, though, that lightcycle segment was a bit pants.
As is far too often the case, the numbers haven’t gone up fast enough for Warner Bros.’ executives, and as a result one of its best developers has been chucked on the bonfire. Monolith had a library going back decades, and while it’s not put out anything since the excellent Shadow of War in 2017, it still stings how things have ended for the studio.
Player First Games and WB San Diego have also been closed, but it’s Monolith I want to talk about here. A lot of the conversation following Monolith’s closure has focused on its biggest games. There’s been plenty of love for FEAR, Shadow of Mordor, Condemned, Aliens Vs. Predator, and No One Lives Forever, but there’s one, forgotten game I always think of first: Tron 2.0.
Long before Daft Punk and Olivia Wilde, we had Tron 2.0. Billed as a bona-fide sequel to the 1982 movie, it followed Alan Bradley’s (the creator of Tron) son Jet, as he was dragged into the digital world to put a stop to a conspiracy of cyber criminals, computer viruses, and a corrupted incarnation of Tron.
It is perhaps the most aggressively early noughties game ever made, with Jet being a spiky-haired bad boy and the most advanced piece of technology you venture into being a PDA.
Tron’s Long-Forgotten Sequel
In 2003, almost all movie tie-in games were utter dreck. Rushed-out cash grabs that barely worked, being linked to a movie was often a death knell for games back then. And yet, Tron 2.0 broke the mould and became an underrated masterpiece for Monolith by giving us a heavily story-based adventure based on a cult classic, set up as a canonical sequel long before new films and other such tie-ins.
It combined shooter, RPG, and stealth elements with the abstract, neon-drenched landscapes of Tron to excellent effect – effectively a fully-fledged immersive sim in the genre’s dark years between Deus Ex and its return with Human Revolution in 2011. Full of large maps with multiple angles of approach, the program system also forced you to balance out which upgrades you gave Jet for each situation.
Combat was heavily skill-based, and relied on timing when you threw your identity disc and when you used it to repel enemies. A well-timed shot could take out a program in one hit, or you could equip different “primitives” with distinct abilities to change things up. For example, the rod of a lightcycle worked for stealth kills, balls of virus-laden data, or a hacker’s digitised glove.
The ways in which 2.0 updated Tron’s iconic aesthetic really stuck with me. I’ve never gelled much with Tron Legacy’s take on the game grid, which borrowed more from cyberpunk than the alien digital world of the original, but 2.0 recreated the bizarre and abstract datascape and gave it a subtle update for the Windows XP era. It was still blocky and glowing (and not an inexplicable rainstorm in sight), but with more intricate environments, a greater variety of characters and enemies, and sound design that lived up to Wendy Carlos’ score.
Publishers Kept Sabotaging Monolith
Unfortunately, time is a flat circle, and Monolith was shafted by its publisher shortly after Tron 2.0’s launch. Buena Vista Interactive gave it virtually no marketing and even less post-launch support, with the Xbox port Killer App and a few updates for the multiplayer mode being all we saw. It was a commercial failure and languished on older formats for years, until it was eventually replaced in the overall Tron canon by Legacy in 2010.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Tron 2.0 became widely available on Steam and GOG, and by then it was beginning to struggle on modern systems. If you want to play it now, you’ll need to tinker with the fan-made Killer App mod, but it’s well worth the effort for a game I consider one of the best FPS’ ever made.
It’s unlikely many of the developers who worked on Tron 2.0 were still at Monolith 22 years later, but the parallels between it and Monolith’s 30-year history are morbidly uncanny. Whether it’s Buena Vista or Warner Bros., Monolith’s entire life was defined by making great games, only to have their chances of success bungled by incompetent management and apathetic publishers. If you’re revisiting Monolith’s back catalogue, make sure you don’t pass over Tron 2.0.
Tron 2.0
- Released
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August 26, 2003
- ESRB
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t
- Developer(s)
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Monolith Productions