Tron 2.0 - Environment

Environment

The game, like the film, is set "inside" a computer and cheerfully uses and abuses computing conventions: players will find themselves in the flaming red environment of a firewall and the minimalistic white one of a PDA, battle viruses while fleeing a format, and wield a sniper rifle known as the LOL, additionally amplifying the damage with a skill called Megahurtz.

Programs in the systems also bear various names - ordinary programs have ordinary first names such as Frank_381 or Brian.exe, ICP programs have names resembling system tools such as servwatch.exe or sssys.dll, viruses have garbled names such as HA-HA-HA-0X0->??? or 0XFFOOXXOR (one of them is called Durandal, while another is (Ra*mpa^ncy), two obvious references to Marathon), resource hogs are named after parodies of popular software such as reelplyr.exe, netscope.exe or ImageShop5.0.exe, major viruses have script names such as viral_launcher.pyc and viral_pickup.pl, and Datawraiths, being in essence digitized humans, feature email addresses such as AndyG@fcon.net or GeoffK@fcon.net.

The leveling / experience point is represented as software versioning, and skills are subroutines Jet must earn. Depending on the environment, the player can only arm itself with a given amount that fits in the available memory. If attacked by viruses, subroutines can get fragmented or infected, and cannot be used before Jet defragments or disinfects them. If Jet encounters a program unknown to him, he can port it to his own system. Communication between programs is done via IO ports.

Jet can also find and read e-mail messages in certain systems, which partly reveal the game's background story, but also provide insight into the relationship between Alan and his son.