Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong.
“They kept referring to the games, ‘Play the game,’ and since I had been working on a project called “Animalympics,” the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games,” the director said. “Then I thought, ‘Well, our warrior should be in a gladiatorial game setting.’ From there the whole thing started to snowball.” It seems only fitting, then, that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created. —David Konow —Tron’s World: The Dawn Of Tron (Tom’s Hardware Guide)
Pong was certainly an early video game, but it was not “the first video game ever created.” Tennis for Two was made in 1958, some 14 years before Pong.
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Tron was one of the movies we looked at for the very beginning of my "Video Gaming" course this past January. My wife and I liked it in part because we're also fans of Babylon 5, and Tron features Bruce Boxleitner (Capt. Sheridan).
I was one of the hard-core Tron fan base, though I don't recall having seen the movie more than once. The audio was out in the theater for the first six or seven minutes, so I had not idea what the plot was all about until I watched it again a few months ago.
I do remember coding light-cycle games on our Atari 800. Good fun.
I recently rented the 20th Anv. Edition of Tron. I was amazed by both the beauty of the hand painted film cells, and the accuracy of the description of what's going on inside a computer. My kids just thought is was cheesy.