It’s A-Maze-Ing (Except Not Really)

When last we checked into the world of Tron in video games it was for the Intellivision it was for the pretty decent little arena battler, Tron: Deadly Discs. That game, while simple in composition, had surprising depth that made it an interesting experience. One would hope that with that skill and care applied to a second Tron game, the programmers could come up with another adventure that lived up to the potential of the world of the film while also making something fun for the Intellivision console.

Sadly, that hope was misplaced. Tron: Maze-A-Tron is, in fairness, a different kind of title from Tron: Deadly Discs. Where that one was kind of stripped down, Berzerk-inspired title, Tron: Maze-A-Tron goes for its own take on the maze-chase formula. That concept was still fairly fresh and new, with Tron: Maze-A-Tron coming out the same year as a seminal title: Pac-Man. Everyone wanted their own maze-chase title to compete, and it’s likely that Tron: Maze-a-Tron was rushed into production to try and capitalize on the sudden success Pac-Man saw. That rush did this game no favors.

In Tron: Maze-A-Tron, you take on the role of your nameless hero (who we assume in Tron from the film) as they’re forced to walk through the Grid, which really looks like a motherboard of a PC. The Grid is set up like a made, with circuits providing the paths that the hero can move around. The stage scrolls, left or right (although the hero can switch that by touching the right chip panel on the board) and the hero has to keep up or get caught at the edge and die. He’s fairly light and speedy, so navigating the maze isn’t so difficult at first.

The goal is to navigate along the maze and collect zero bits from around the stage. Taking these to the central processing area will unlock the path to the central controller (once you have enough zeros), but getting there won’t be so easy. Along with the scrolling maze there’s also the Recognizers, which slowly move around the stage, homing in on the hero. If they touch him, he dies, but he does have a shield he can activate to temporarily deactivate the Recognizers, and there are also special chips he can touch that give him a very short attack that can be used to destroy the flying menaces.

That all sounds like a lot but, really, it’s not. Your hero moves pretty quickly and the hazards around the stages are pretty easy to dismiss early on. The shield is powerful, and there are plenty of places to charge it up so I never felt like I was at risk of losing it or getting killed. The Recognizers are so slow on the early loops that they were never hard to avoid. And even though the stage scrolls and tries to get you caught up, it really wasn’t hard to navigate the stage at all.

Frankly, it was all kind of boring. You wander, sometimes engage with the enemies, and collect zeros over and over on an endlessly looping board until you finally get enough bits to open the way to the boss. It feels like the opposite of thrilling, especially since it loops over and over again and you can easily get used to the stage, the path, and everything you have to do. More speed, more enemies, or more danger in general could have helped to spruce up what feels like a pretty bare and barren experience.

Even getting to the boss doesn’t make everything more lively. The central core is really just a face with two pillars beside it, each scrolling 1s and 0s slowly. Your job is to shoot the numbers, not the face, and avoid the shots the face spits at you. At least, I think that’s the job because I just shot at stuff for a while and then the stage ended and I was back out in the maze, tasked with doing it all again. Either I won or the game was very bad at communicating to me that I’d fucked up, so I’ll choose to think I did a good job.

I’ll be honest, this is one of those games where I feel like coming to it later, especially when I don’t have an instruction booklet to use to understand the nuances of the game, hurts the experience. I want to credit the game for looking as intended, even if the graphics are simplistic. I immediately understood I was on a motherboard and that I had to navigate around it. The shield works well and the maze navigation is easy, but it always felt like I was missing something, some clue that would help this whole experience click together and make it all fun.

That might be me reading into it though because I truly didn’t “get” what the game was trying to have me do. I did it, and I progressed through the game, but even reading wiki articles about the title it’s still unclear if I was doing things as well as the game expected or if I just lucked into somehow making it through the experience. It certainly wasn’t an enjoyable time, but I swear if I just knew a little more, maybe it would all make sense and, somehow, Tron: Maze-A-Tron would actually be a fun game to play.

Or it was really just a rushed out maze-chaser designed to capitalize on Pac-Man and the team behind it didn’t have the time to actually make it good. Frankly, that’s likely the real answer because this game truly doesn’t come together in any meaningful way. The basic mechanics work, I think, but the title is lacking in fun. After my one loop through the experience I quickly tired of the game and set it aside, and I have to think many other kids would have done the same, forgetting this game was even in their pile of carts once they’d done a single pass through the experience.

Tellingly, this game doesn’t even have a proper article on Wikipedia, and just about every old game gets their own article. When it’s so boring, and so unloved, that even the nerds at Wikipedia can’t be bothered to write about it, you know you’ve hit a true level of mediocrity. And that feels fitting because this isn’t a game that inspired joy, or happiness, or even fun. It’s a tired experience that tries to be something better than it is but didn’t have the time, care, or parts to make that happen.

Tron: Maze-A-Tron is just a bad game, consigned to the dustbin of history, and rightly so. This isn’t so bad it’s worth going back just to see how a project could go off the rails. It was just Intellivision bloatware, published by the company that actually owned the console. When even Mattel couldn’t be bothered to make a good game for their flagship console, you know things have gone poorly.