The proof-of-concept footage for TRON Legacy has been online for a while. But it wasn't until Comic Con that the hi-res version of the videos was put online (check it out at Sci Fi Wire here or in a variety of formats and quality levels here). And, of course, the various YouTube videos of a practical version of the light cycle, proudly displayed at a promotional event at a recreated arcade from the original TRON (here's one that cuts to the chase). After all this footage, I am officially psyched, and more so about the light cycle than anything else (frisbees haven't aged as well as supercool virtual motorcycles). So I reinstalled TRON 2.0 and even dug up the notes from an interview I did with Syd Mead, the designer of the light cycle, back in 2003.

After the jump, the creator of the TRON light cycle explains its evolution.

The light cycle in TRON Legacy looks pretty wicked (it was designed by Daniel Simon, whose website has plenty of similarly wicked concept art). If you look closely, you can see how the cycle itself extends from the rider's back. There's no falling off that thing! When the cycles bang into each other in the teaser footage, there's a shattering and tinkling sound, as if they're made of glass. Frail, fierce, and fast.

At cruise speed, the new cycle is relatively compact, akin to the original light cycle in proportion. But when you feel the need for speed, the rider can extend the body for some sort of boost. Or maybe it's just an overdrive. At any rate, it's one of the most bad-ass go-faster driving gimmicks since that little red plunger on the last of the V-8 Interceptors.

The elongated body and speed boost almost recall the super light cycle from TRON 2.0, Monolith's 2003 videogame sequel to the movie. She's a real beaut:

Like the original light cycle, the super light cycle was designed by Syd Mead, a visual designer for movies such as Aliens and Blade Runner. I actually had the good fortune to interview Mr. Mead at his home in Pasadena while I was working on a magazine article in 2003. Here is Mr. Mead on the light cycle design in the 1982 movie:

Originally, I wanted the costumes the guys were wearing to be segmented like a lobster and when they leaned forward and meshed into the bike, their helmets would be the windshields. But the technology wouldn't support that.

Compare this idea to how the newest light cycles extend from the rider's back. In the original TRON, they simply didn't have the graphics power to render a human being. Everything had to consist of relatively simply 3D geometric objects. So the light cycle completely enclosed the rider.

But fast forward 20 years. Mr. Mead is enlisted to work on the TRON 2.0 videogame.

Now they can do things they couldn't do twenty years ago. We have the floating front wheel. We kept the ball wheel and the hole cutout as an homage to the original. I tried to capture the feel of this muscular visceral machine, but make it geometrically simple. The original idea of all the machines in Tron was to make it look like solid three dimensional graphics. That was my style key to myself. So I redesigned the lightcycle, I tried to retain the simple geometry, but a little more organic.

In design training, you learn to design to the core problem. You dissaseemble the problem and find out what are the actual limiting factors. Whatever the limitations are, that's where you solve the problem.

The limitations in a world like Tron nowadays, with computers now able to duplicate reality, you can't tell anymore. The last few episodes of Star Wars, you couldn't tell whether it was real scenery or composited. So the challenge is that if we can do reality absolutely 100% undetectable, how do you know it's still artifical. You have to reintroduce some kind of cue that let's you know it's not reality. That's particularly a challenge in a sci-fi story like this where you're switching between reality reality and duplicate reality. It's a stylistic problem to establish that. You have to introduce something that jars the reality vector of the illusion. The floating front wheel would be part of it, to remind you that this is an electronically created illusion.

This also affected the gameplay of the light cycle races, from the original movie to the various arcade games to the Monolith game.

In the original, I was sitting with [TRON director] Steve [Lisberger] when he said we have to make these things turn, but we can't do a sliding turn, it's got to happen differently because of the limitation of the animation. I said, 'well, why not just make them do right angle hard turns, because it's a weightless world, it's code, it's a game grid and the fact that you're rendering it three dimensionally because you're there, but it's the illusion of the being in the computer world as an information entity, so just make them go snap, like they would on the screen, a perfect right angle.

It turns out that Syd Mead is to blame for those awful sequences in TRON 2.0? Fortunately, the last patch for the game lets you skip the light cycle races once you fail. And even more fortunately, it looks like the light cycles in TRON Legacy will be used in more conventional car chases than squandered on some terrible variation of those old Snake games.