TRON Video Game Tournament of 1982

For the release of the film TRON, Disney held a video game tournament for the arcade game and we got a glimpse of the excitement that e-sports would bring to gaming decades later.

Reviews for TRON might have been mixed when it hit theaters in the summer of 1982. While some might complain about its plot or length, it was hard to deny the technical virtuosity of the film. Moreover, this film was making a statement. We were all entering the age of the computer, and video games were going to be at the forefront of our interaction with them moving forward. To punctuate this point, they released a series of tie-in video games, including an arcade game that was a masterpiece of graphics, sound, and gameplay.

The potential of the arcade game allowed Disney, who made the film, to do something that no other film had done up until that point—use the video game as marketing for the film. To do that, they held a National Video Game Tournament that drew thousands of entries and became the most successful video game competition of its time, giving us a glimpse of the e-sports craze decades before that word would come into common use.

The TRON arcade game was designed by Bill Adams, with music composed by Earl Vickers. The game was released for the competition in June of 1982, just a few weeks before the film’s release. It would get a wider release in arcades later that summer and would become a massive success, eventually selling over 10,000 arcade cabinets and gobbling up countless quarters.

Players of TRON are thrust onto the game grid just like in the film. Each game starts on a sub-game selection screen with four choices. Once you choose the game you want to play, you use a combination of an eight-way joystick, a trigger button, and a rotary dial to score points and beat the challenge you chose. Once you are victorious, you move on to choose another sub-game. If you clear all four, the difficulty increases, and you continue to choose.

The four sub-games, in order of greatness, are:

1. Light Cycles

2. I/O Tower

3. MCP Cone

4. Battle Tanks

It was an addicting game, and the sound and visuals were a magnet for anyone entering an arcade in the latter half of 1982. Before TRON, I would usually spread my quarters around during a visit to the arcade, but for a good six months, it was TRON all the time, every time.

With this tremendous game in their pocket, Disney decided to sponsor a national video game tournament. Announced in newspapers and magazines in May of 1982, the first part of the tournament ran from May 24 through June 18 and was sponsored by Bally Midway Manufacturing and the Aladdin’s Castle arcade chain. In arcades they had a very cool TRON cardboard standee with entry forms that has become quite collectible.

Not official, but still cool. They had maybe hundreds of these events across the country.

While Aladdin’s participated, it appears other arcades also hosted the event, which was open to anyone with no purchase required. Although, once you entered an arcade to play some TRON, I imagine a lot of people lingered and enjoyed these location before and after playing.

On June 19, they held an arcade champion round of play at over 400 locations throughout the United States. Winners from that round moved to a regional competition on June 26, which whittled the field down to just sixteen finalists. These gamers were flown to New York City via Eastern Airlines, where the first round of the finals took place at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on July 6 (where they were also staying). After that, they headed over to Madison Square Garden and played in the Felt Forum for the grand finale on July 7.

TRON was new to everyone playing the game, but it turned out people were better at it than expected, with really high scores and very long games. This required Bally Midway to alter the game and make it more difficult. For a while, if you were playing TRON at an Aladdin’s Castle, you might have been playing on an older chip that seemed to be an easier version of the game. Even with the new chip, to help speed up play, they adjusted the game so that later competitors entered at higher levels as they progressed in the tournament.

Reading old newspapers, it appears that many arcades held unaffiliated competitions with local prizes. In the official competition, I can’t find mention of smaller prizes during early rounds, but a win in the final competition could get you a Commodore computer valued at $4,000 and a TRON arcade game priced at $2,500. This was all in addition to travel, hotel, and meals, which were covered for the finalists. Not a bad way to spend the two days leading up to the film’s release, for which they were given a special screening. Two cast members from the film, Cindy Morgan and David Warner, attended the event.

After the competition was announced, it was easy to lose track of what had happened. Luckily, as the year drew to a close, both RePlay and Joystik magazines mentioned it. In the November issue of Joystik, they provided a nice breakdown of the finals. They played at eight arcade machines, all wearing matching TRON blue competition shirts. The machines all had screens on top so that spectators and judges could watch without getting too close to the players. These were some amazing gamers with hours of play logged.

Since this was a media event, they tried to bring in some more star power and held a small celebrity tournament that included baseball greats Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, as well as Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie, among others. For this competition, Disney donated $2,000 to the charity of their choice. In the end, actor Doug McKeon beat Hank Aaron, with the proceeds going to the American Cancer Society.

After the celebrity event, it was time for the three finalists to take to the game grid on the last day. The competitors were Richard Ross of Jacksonville, FL, Sterling Ouchi of Torrance, CA, and Scott Katkin of East Greenwich, RI. To say Richard Ross ran away with it would be an understatement. The final score tally was a three-game score, and Ross was over a million points ahead of Katkin, the second-place finisher. Here is the full list of all competitors, along with their ages and total scores as published in Joystik:

1. Richard Ross (29) - 3,958,901

2. Scott Katkin (19) - 2,731,770

3. Sterling Ouchi (18) - 1,158,085

4. James E. Hatley (17) - 835,196

5. Tim Collum (19) - 604,187

6. Scott MacDonald(17) - 535,197

7. Walt Marchard (33) - 400,174

8. Matthew John Collins (15) - 343,604

9. Rick Storer (20) - 333,433

10. Steve Baker (23) - 237,905

11. Matt Gordon (13) - 231,506

12. Robert Withers Morgan (21) - 212,705

13. Allen Waits (15) - 190,364

14. Scott W. Starkey (23) - 190,183

15. Mike Simmons (17) - 173,517

16. Al Cooper (27) - 145,065

In early 1983, Ross was asked to share his strategy for playing the game in Joystik magazine. It’s only a couple of pages long, but this illustrated guide is a great way to improve your game at all levels of play.

The numbers on this tournament were impressive. In just its first five days, over 120,000 people had entered the tournament. On the machines located in 400 arcades, over a quarter of a million games were logged. In total, they estimated that 7.5 billion points were scored in that first week alone.

Video games had been around for a while when the TRON Video Game Tournament took place. They had even tried to have competitions before, with one featuring Centipede becoming an infamous failure. But this one worked for many reasons. It was well run, with a budget backed by Disney and a nationwide infrastructure of arcades that could handle the number of entrants. The way they treated the players also changed, with competitors being treated like the winners they were, not having to get themselves to the finals on their own dime. It was about a video game, but it also got a dose of Hollywood glamour. In the end, the winner had to not only be skilled but have the endurance to play the game for hours. It was a glimpse of what we would eventually call e-sports and one worth remembering.