Back in 1982, computers meant one of two things in the popular imagination. Either they were room-sized machines used by the military-industrial complex to crunch data on stuff like nuclear wars and stock markets, or they were fridge-sized arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Kraftwerk were singing about home computers, but if you owned one at all, it was probably a Sinclair ZX81, which was only marginally more sophisticated than a calculator.
And yet, that summer, cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years’ hindsight, Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi adventure Tron was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life. As a piece of entertainment, it is admittedly no classic, but thematically, Tron anticipates issues we are still grappling with today: artificial intelligence, digital identity, privacy, personal data, the dominance of big tech. Tron was also the first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself – what was then called “cyberspace” but might now be termed “the metaverse”. Tron’s cyber-world looks quaintly low-res by today’s standards – a minimalist, angular, black-and-neon environment resembling a 1980s nightclub – but its distinctive retro chic is still much cherished and mimicked.
