Oh, I see I should update here since I watched
last night to commemorate the 30th anniversary. It occurred to me that it's a movie that is very much a product of its time, unlikely to be made today.
The central idea that, on the Grid, programs are forced to engage in these stylized, neon-traced gladiatorial games, reflecting the games played in video arcades, becomes more and more meaningless, not only because video arcades are largely a thing of the past, but also because video games we play now are becoming increasingly realistic. What we see in
is just not what video games look like anymore.
Without 8-bit color palettes and vector graphics to inform them, we would lose essential
aesthetic and visual language we know and love.
I hope that if TR3N comes to fruition, we can update the concepts of the Grid for the 21st century - sleek, fast, decentralized, and networked - but bring forward the glowing, crystalline aesthetic of the original.