It’s been 30 years since writer/director Steven Lisberger first started working on bringing his vision of TRON  to the big screen. The film ushered in a new generation of computer animation, which allowed audiences to be transported into cyberspace and experience video game battles within the mainframe. TRON was the first movie to have a hit video game tie-in at the arcade, which seamlessly connected the film universe with the real world’s burgeoning video game industry.

One of the people who were both influenced by TRON and active in cyberspace was architect-turned-commercial director Joe Kosinski, who ended up working with Lisberger to bring TRON: Legacy to the big screen. Now Walt Disney Pictures  is bringing TRON: Legacy to the big screen, using the latest computer graphics technology to introduce a new wave of video game battles on the Grid. And Disney Interactive Studios  has enlisted Propaganda Games  to develop the TRON: Evolution game, which tells the story of what’s been going on within the TRON mythology over the past three decades.

Matt Ployhar

Recently, I was featured in a prominent publication in an article about PC gaming. What I’m reminded of is how easy it is to be taken out of context -- for right or wrong.

The article was well-written and I stand by most of what I’m quoted as saying. A few things, however, were lost in translation. It’s easy to forget that the people listening to me may not also share my viewpoints, convictions, experiences or vantage point, and therefore, it’s all too easy to be misinterpreted.

Whether you’re developing a new game or have an existing game that you want to port to the netbook platform, it’s important to know how to optimize it. The netbook market is growing steadily and creating new opportunities for game developers on this mobile platform. According to a 2009 report from the NPD Group, nearly 40 million netbooks have shipped so far, and around 139 million are projected to be shipped by 2013.

The best way to show you how to optimize your game for netbooks is to describe what we did when creating a demo for Fireflies. It’s a great example of the easy optimizations and quick performance gains you can achieve when developing games for this fast-growing market.

The perennial goal of creative professionals working on animation and special effects for motion pictures and television -- as well as computer-aided design (CAD) professionals -- is to deliver top-notch work on time and under budget.

While production times might be expected to decrease in direct proportion to available processing power, the ambitions of creative professionals are outpacing Moore’s law, which says that transistor density will double approximately every two years. Evermore complex rendering algorithms deliver increasing levels of visual subtlety and devour advances in processing power as quickly as they become available.

Matt Ployhar

By Matt Ployhar

In my last blog, I talked about some of the biggest factors impacting the gaming ecosystems today. In part one, I discussed the impacts of mobile form factors; this time, I’ll discuss the biggest implications occurring in the formats and business models.

So, in no particular order, here are some of the biggest format and business-model evolutions I see taking place in the video game industry.

Interactive entertainment’s answer to art-house films is indie game development. Titles like Minecraft , Recettear  and World of Goo  have captured a legion of forward-thinking fans’ and bedroom coders’ imaginations alike. But despite consistently raising the bar for innovation and creativity, life left of the keyboard isn’t all fun and games. Dave Gilbert, founder of indie adventure-game studio Wadjet Eye Games  (The Blackwell Legacy , Puzzle Bots ), explains the indie life to Scott Steinberg.

With the advent of multiprocessor computers, game programming has become a lot more complicated. Given a 3 GHz quad core and a fast video card, Ghostbusters will be able to keep all four cores 100-percent utilized in heavy action. During the development of that game, which is based upon the movie franchise, we were able to accomplish this feat.

Mandy Mock

Do you know what the opportunities are in PC gaming? They’re probably better than you think. The PC gaming market is much bigger than consoles, both in installed base and in money made.

Sound hard to believe? Between how fast changes are happening in game models and distribution mechanisms, and the fact that industry reports only give a piece of the whole picture, it’s hard to get a really good feel for what’s happening in PC gaming. And yet, knowing things like how many gaming PCs are out there, how much revenue PC games generate, what the most popular gaming styles are, etc., is critical to deciding what kind of game to build, how to generate revenue from it and how to distribute it.

By Stu Horvath

Innovation takes many forms within the gaming space, often beginning with insight and inspiration from a single person, be they a game developer, an engineer, a sociologist or anything else within the industry. That’s why we’re tracking down these thought leaders to give you a sneak peek of the digital arts future through their eyes.

In this installment, we sit down with Kyle Orland, a games journalist who writes for Gamasutra. Orland gives his thoughts on the impact journalism will have on the future of gaming and the relationship between the two.