Tron: Catalyst interview – ‘Disney doesn’t want stuff that’s bland’ --[Reported by Umva mag]

A new story-driven action game set in Disney’s Tron universe has been revealed, as GameCentral speaks to indie creator Mike Bithell.

The world of Tron looks set for a big comeback in 2025, with the release of Tron: Ares, a sequel to 2010 film Tron: Legacy, and now a new video game, by the creator of Thomas Was Alone and John Wick Hex.

Developed by Bithell Games and published by Devolver Digital’s new label Big Fan Games, Tron: Catalyst is a story driven isometric action game for the PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.

We got to see it, but not play it, at Gamescom in August and have had to keep quiet about it ever since, but we also got to talk to director Mike Bithell about not just the game itself, but movie adaptations in general, and the general state of the video games industry today.

Tron: Catalyst shares the same Arq Grid setting as Bithell’s 2023 title Tron: Identity, but this time with new protagonist Exo.

Identity was basically a visual novel but Catalyst is a top-down action adventure where you battle on foot or while riding around on a light cycle. There’s a strong role-playing element but the main gameplay gimmick is the ability to play around with time, something like Groundhog Day.

The idea is that whenever progress is blocked you can go off and complete a mission elsewhere that alters the game world in some way (getting an access code for a checkpoint, is the first example we were shown) then you reset the grid and continue as if what you changed had always been present.

It’s an interesting idea, that we’re curious to see in full, but there’s also a strong action element to the game, with ranged and melee combat using the iconic Tron disc and the ability to upgrade Exo with new abilities.

Tron: Catalyst features new hand-drawn art and original music from composer Dan Le Sac (one half of hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip), with the full game set to launch at some point in 2025.

As well as the previous Tron game, Bithell made 2019’s John Wick Hex, which also involved him rubbing shoulders with Hollywood bigwigs. Although, as we joked with him, it often feels like we’re the only ones that enjoyed the game, which we found to be one of the best strategy titles of recent years.

Whether we’ll be as enamoured with Tron: Catalyst we’re not sure, but we’re always interested to hear what Bithell has to say and to see how he’s navigating the volatile video game world as an admirably inventive indie developer.

GC: I see you’re already on the Red Bull already [this is a relatively early morning meeting].

MB: Oh, that’s just Gamescom for you. [laughs]

GC: The game looks very interesting, absolutely not what you’d except of a modern movie tie-in, but how did this come about? Why didn’t Disney want something blander and easier to sell?

MB: I think Disney doesn’t want stuff that’s bland. Sincerely and genuinely – and this sounds like a stock answer, and in many ways it is – I think Disney wants interesting stuff. On a meta level Disney are all about storytelling and they very much care about telling good stories. They know that their business is built on telling stories and sharing great stories.

But I think, as well, Tron has that spirit of innovation, that original movie was from an ad agency who figured out how to do an interesting visual effect and pitched a movie to Disney. Tron was, for most of its production, an independent movie. They made it in a very independent way.

You look at Legacy and, again, it was pioneering a new technology [de-aging via CGI, we assume – GC] that we now take for granted and spawned a lot of what superhero movies use every day, but a lot of, again, innovation.

I think that’s always been a part of it, both in the technology but also in what they’re trying to do creatively and storytelling-wise. So, I think Disney, in my opinion, wisely look at something like Tron and go, ‘We could do the obvious thing here, we could do that, or we could try and find a team who love Tron and want to do something interesting with it.’ And I think, for me, finding that balance of interesting but also delivers what players might want from a Tron game, that’s the thing I’m trying to bring to it.

I definitely don’t want to just make something that feels cliché or obvious, because I’ve got limited time to make games, and I don’t want to waste it making something I’m not proud of. But I think finding ways to live in our fantasy… when I come out of a movie I wanna go there, I wanna do the cool things I saw in that movie and that’s what we’re trying to do here for Tron.

It’s been fun, that collaboration, that’s the reason I feel comfortable saying everything I’ve just said there. It’s not lip service because I then had the relationship of three years, where we have actually collaborated on this stuff, where they are throwing in thoughts. Where I’m meeting the filmmakers, the people associated with the franchise…

I’ve had nice conversations with people that’ve been working on the world of Tron for 40-odd years. That’s thrilling to me, that’s not just a licensed game. That’s actually a collaboration, creatively.

GC: Do you have any insight into Disney’s general attitude towards video games? It’s something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, as they’ve always seemed strangely unenthusiastic and hands-off, right from the very early days. Even now they seem to act like they think it’s just a fad, even though I’m sure they don’t.

MB: I don’t read them that way, no. I think for me, looking recently – and obviously I’ve only worked with these people for a few years – my interpretation of what they’re doing is I see a humility to it. I see them knowing that they don’t make games internally and then looking for people who think they can work with to make interesting stuff. So, if you look – and again, these are only the opinions of Mike Bithell [shouts into microphone] These are only the opinions of Mike Bithell!

Both: [laughs]

MB: I look across what they’re doing with Star Wars, with Marvel, with us… with Alien – look at all the Alien games that have come out in the last few years [this was before the announcement of Alien Isolation 2 – GC]. These are creative, interesting, utilisations of the IP they have.

And I think the way they’re doing that is they’re finding the right people for the right franchises and, I don’t know, maybe that’s harder to do with internal development. If you’re Disney and you’ve got a story, a world, a franchise and IP, wouldn’t you want to be able to go, ‘Who is the game developer in the world who would be most interesting?’ I want Arkane to make a Blade, I want Insomniac to make a Spider-Man game, I’m interested in David Cage’s take on Star Wars.

GC: You almost said that last one without laughing.

Both: [laughs]

MB: If you’re Disney though, what an amazing thing to be able to go and find those people and I’m glad they wanted me for Tron, you know? That’s exciting.

GC: So as one of the few people that played and enjoyed John Wick Hex…

MB: [laughs]

GC: What have you learnt from working on that game? To me it always seemed like the graphics were a big barrier.

MB: I think we definitely had some problems with bugs and things like that, but I think the big thing that John Wick taught me – and I am very proud of John Wick, it’s a really cool game – I think the lesson I learned on John Wick is I genuinely made it for me. And I learned the lesson that I wanted to make games for myself… and also other fans. [laughs] I think that’d the big lesson I took away from it. I’m very proud of it, I think John Wick was a cool game, I think we are making a game, here, that hopefully delivers what a Tron fan wants.

GC: How have you talked all these film companies into letting you make weird little indie games with their big name IPs?

MB: I dunno, they like me I guess.

GC: [laughs] After Thomas Was Alone, I did not see your career going in that direction – hanging around with the people that make John Wick and Tron.

MB: It’s a good question and one that I’ve thought about… I think what’s interesting is that I look back at my earlier stuff and I think I’ve always had an interest in adaptation. So, if you look at Volume, which was the second game I made after Thomas Was Alone, that was a stealth game. Well, I had made games for other people, that was my second indie game. That was a Robin Hood game, that’s the original IP, right?

GC: Apparently it was – well, you’d know better than me – but I’m sure I read it was basically commissioned by the dying industry, and that’s why they’re always going on about the colours of their outfits.

MB: Yeah, yeah. It came back in the Victorian era…

GC: It’s basically corporate wanted some grassroots advertising.

MB: It was 100% that! [laughs] But that’s the great thing about Robin Hood, that it came back so many times. My favourite was the ITV Robin Hood in the 60s and they introduced the idea of a Moorish character, a character who came back from the Crusades, and the makers of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves didn’t realise that and didn’t realise that the Morgan Freeman character was copywritten by… so there was a whole legal case!

So that’s always been interesting to me, how you take a story or a world and adapt it, especially into games. There’s something to be said for taking an experience and putting it into a game. To me, that was my way into it. Was basically… I love these stories and I’m very selective, I don’t work on stuff I don’t love. But finding those franchises and those worlds that I’m particularly interested in, and I think have an interesting extension that would be possible in games, that massages my brain in a way I like.

I like the challenge of trying to figure that out. And this was one where you look at Tron and you’re like, ‘I wanna make a game where it’s fun to ride a light cycle around and melee combat and ranged combat is an interesting system of overlap.’ And as a game designer your brain starts thinking about whether that would work. How do you make Tron feel as good as it looks in the movies?

GC: That is the big question, but the majority of movie tie-ins never really get there. They’re much better than they used to be, but they still struggle with the stigma of the 90s and 2000s when being a movie game was basically a guarantee of poor quality.

MB: I think a certain percentage of anything is s***.

GC: 90% of everything is c***.

MB: That’s the one! That’s the line. And games are no different. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It can work and not work with the best and worst of intentions. I’ve known things that were made very lazily do incredibly well and I’ve known things that had heart and soul poured into them and they just don’t click. It’s the risk you take in making something.

When you’re a creative you accept that risk. So I dunno, I find adaptations fun. And ultimately that’s what drives me. I can’t speak for anyone else.

GC: I’m not a big comic book fan but I do like the idea of taking silly ideas seriously. Not to the point where you’re using the word ‘grounded’ but just enough where you can have an emotional attachment. I appreciate the cleverness and art in making you care about the absurd.

MB: Absolutely, like people living inside a computer! I think people enjoy that juxtaposition of absurdity and intelligence. That’s part of most stories and most interesting characters. Again, I think it massages the brain in a way that’s interesting.

GC: So how does that process work? How do you start with a blank piece of paper and get a new Tron storyline?

MB: For me, I approach most of my writing with the question of motivation and action. What do we want? What do we do? And what’s the impact of that? And the great thing about sci-fi is you can then player with the layers, so what if there was a society that lived in a vacuum for a couple of thousand years and they started off knowing they were programs in a computer but what if they forget? How will characters feel about that? How would characters feel about their gods, if their gods were absent? This is the stuff that’s kept the writers on Star Trek busy for decades.

GC: [laughs]

MB: I would say that the craft of sci-fi writing, and I’m not sure I’ve always been on the right side of this, is making sure that the thing that comes out the other end of that sci-fi thinking is interesting for anyone but you the writer. It’s the challenge of the sci-fi writer to be interesting as well as interested.

GC: So, when you were talking to me about one of the groups in your game being basically atheists, is that just a plot point or is that meant to be allegorical?

MB: It all comes down to taste – and this is definitely not a value judgement – but I’m more drawn to stories which play with who humans are, rather than trying to describe… I like to set a Rube Goldberg going. It’s more interesting to me, to explore what would be the outcome if programs in this world felt a certain way?

That’s more interesting to me than going, ‘Also, it’s a metaphor for the French Revolution.’ That’s less interesting to me… I guess what’s interesting about history is that history repeats and the reasons it repeats is because it’s good storytelling. Because people follow the things they want…

GC: Because people never change and people never learn.

MB: People are people. It’s like a good joke. We, in our stories, we like the recognition of seeing something we know to be true and we also like a surprise – when something happens that’s not true. Both of those things have value and playing with what those are, that’s the stuff I get nerdy about, rather than, ‘Here’s my idea I want to tell you.’

GC: So, the video games industry in general… are you okay to sort that out in the next 10 minutes?

MB: Yeah, me and you can figure a whole thing out I think. [laughs]

GC: What I can’t get my head around is that everyone knows games get more expensive to make each generation. I knew that when I was 14 so why did Sony and Microsoft seem to find out about it at exactly the same point, halfway through this generation, and then go into a blind panic as if it was the most unpredictable thing ever? They can’t literally have only just realised, but why does it seem like that?

MB: I think it’s a lot of overlapping things. So, I think that while you’re right that games obviously get more expensive, I think the other key thing with games is we’re constantly… there’s a joke I’ve heard amongst devs which is, ‘If you put on a play, you put on a play. If you make a game you have to build the theatre as well.’

The entire machinery of how a game is made and works is being reinvented every few years. So, it is surprisingly difficult, at a meta level, to know how much something is going to cost. Obviously, I know exactly how much everything is going to cost and it’s all going to be fine!

GC: [laughs]

MB: But on a big industry scale, and definitely at a triple-A level, which is beyond my pay grade for sure, those things are not as obvious… You’re right, the general trend is up but it’s very easy to convince yourself, either that things will stay the same or that some new technology will make things cheaper. I think that’s a risk that definitely comes into it.

GC: It also seems to me that they’ve just been putting off addressing the issue and now they can’t anymore.

MB: That could be part of it too.

GC: But it’s not just an academic question. Hundreds of thousands of people’s jobs are riding on this and publishers are acting like incompetent amateurs.

MB: I think as well, the big thing with the pandemic was, and I’m not the first person to point this out, but definitely it changed that structure of people working from home, the impact of how that changed not just how people work together but how people work with tools and software.

We were lucky, in a weird way, because we’ve been remote the whole time. We were helping our team through the personal challenges of the pandemic, but we didn’t have to restructure the way we made stuff in general. I think a lot of companies went through that.

And then, the other thing as well, and I’ll be careful about chastising capitalism too much, but the market told those people, ‘More people want games, more people are buying games than ever. There’s so much money coming in… the line goes up!’ And that’s gonna have an impact.

GC: Why when we talk about AI do we never hear about a CEO being replaced? Executives aren’t creative, they’re making decisions that should be based on sound logic and verifiable data. They should’ve been the first thing to be replaced, not an artist or voice actor. What am I missing here?

MB: I think the only thing you might be missing is what the intent of the machine you’re talking about is. Is the machine you’re talking about designed to keep people employed? Should it be? Yes. Is it?

GC: Well, no. Obviously not. But it is designed to keep a company afloat and the way some of these publishers are carrying on at the moment it feels like they’re aiming for the opposite of that.

MB: This is why I make indie scale games!

Both: [laughs]

GC: Can AI help at all? In theory it seems like it might be able to, but all it seems to be used for is doing low-paid artists out of their jobs.

MB: I’ve not seen a useful use case for AI, ever. Maybe I will one day. I’m not going to be the idiot who says it’s never going to happen. All I’ve seen so far are parlour tricks that work 20% and maybe convince you for half an hour. I’ve not seen anything beyond that, so I’m very sceptical. We don’t use AI for our work at all and I don’t see us starting anytime soon. I like the humans I work with.

GC: Are you still optimistic about the future of the games industry? I must say my faith has been tested this year.

MB: I don’t know about it at all levels of the industry, but I can say in the part of the industry I’m in, I’m very impressed and inspired by what I see younger indies doing, people like Xalavier Nelson. These are people who are making smaller games on a limited budgets, I think that’s really smart. I’ve done it a few times, that’s what our Circular games were, that’s what Thomas Was Alone was. I know the value in limiting your budget!

I do think that is only going to continue to work for the people that are doing it. I don’t know about the scalability of that. I don’t know if you can take the same approach to a big game. There are lots of genres where you need to take your time, I don’t know how applicable that is. But I know I see it working really well for a lot of developers and it’s worked well for us in the past as well. I like to bounce around. I like to do big things, small things, but big things not to the scale of triple-A.

GC: Limiting budgets seems the obvious, quick, solution. But even though the film industry pulls its belt in everyone now and again I just can’t see it happening with games.

MB: It’s a tough ask. I would say one angle into that is potentially shorter dev times. I think shorter dev times are easier than less money. When you look at franchises that go to a yearly release, I think partially that might be part of it.

GC: OK, well at least that’s some kind of hope. Well, thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

MB: Not at all, likewise.

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