Continuing on with my spotlight on great, free games out there for people to play, I give you Armagetron Advanced.

Tron was a keystone movie in my life as a kid.  Even seeing it 20 years later, it astounded me what the creators of that movie were able to pull off with the limited hardware of the time.

Now, it’s 27 years later, and there’s more power in the laptop I’m using to write this blog post than there was in all of the world in 1982.  That’s just a wild guess on my part, but probably accurate.

So what does a Tron geek do to get his fix?  He plays …

Armagetron Advanced

Undoubtedly, the lightcycle sequence in the movie made a lasting impression on a generation of programmers.  The results speak for themselves:

Lightcycles with the Moviepack graphics

Standard graphics

Sumo Mode!

Aside from just the regular play of beating your friends or the AI with your quick reflexes, there’s also Capture-The-Flag mode, as well as Sumo and Fortress.  You’ll have to play it to fully appreciate the amount of time and love that went into this awesome, free online multiplayer game.

Armagetron Advanced is fully free, open source, and works on Windows, OS X, Linux, and BSD.  Dedicated servers for LAN play can also be downloaded and run on the same operating systems.