WHERE ARE THEY NOW? |
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The video gamestar Tron was sure he had finally hit the Big Time when his eponymously titled film was released by Disney Corp. in
1982. With his renowned ability are VR combat and his chiseled good looks, Tron was sure Disney would offer him a lifetime contract.
Therefore, the movie's floppy performance at the box office came as a particularly devastating blow to his ego subprogram. The
Disney studios soon decided that their product base should remain cartoon animation, so Tron was screen tested for the roles of
Creeper in Black Cauldron, Ariel in Little Mermaid and Lumiere in Beauty And The Beast. However, his digitalized personality didn't
translate well to this incompatible format and his off-key singing certainly didn't help. With his film career virtually over, Tron tried surfing the burgeoning Internet for job opportunities. He gladly accepted the position of Chief of Viral Defense for Sun Microsystems but quickly realized that his skills were already obsolescent against the new generation of binary weapons wielded by amateur hackers. Tron was fired by Sun when he was caught attempting to plagiarize some of Microsoft's newest security coding. This was only the beginning of Tron's downfall, however. While aimlessly cruising the Net one day in 1987, he accidently inserted himself into the programming of a video arcade game in Louisville, Kentucky. The rudimentary opponents he encountered here were no match for his martial prowess. He offered no quarter and none was given. For twelve straight hours, he ruthlessly dispatched thousands of grisly assailants in such games as Terminator, Golden Axe, Time Crisis and Tekken. By the end of his virtual bloodbath, Tron's eviolence habit had become irresistible. He was finally apprehended by police at 4:00 a.m. while savagely assaulting Mario III in a seedy PlayStation in Des Moines. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Tron agreed to enroll in EA's Binary Steps program. For three weeks, he seemed to make genuine, if glitchy, progress towards recovery. Then one day, he suddenly and mysteriously derezzed from the halfway site. Tron was last seen seven years ago in Miami, standing alongside the Information Superhighway with a sign proclaiming: WILL WORK FOR MILLIAMPS. |