01 / THEN
An arcade game from the early interactive web
The recovered 1999 page identifies the original applet by a different name and logo, inspired by a grid-racing sequence from an early-80s movie. This rebuild keeps the original gameplay and recovered interface artwork, but is retitled Wire Runner with a new logo of its own, since the source game's original name and wordmark were that film's licensed branding. The full original name is preserved, unmodified, in the project archive for the historical record.
Modern browsers no longer run Java applets. This edition recreates the playable experience with standard browser technology while keeping the historical record separate.
The five game classes inside the recovered tron.jar were statically decompiled to reconstruct the exact rules — grid movement with wraparound edges, the jump mechanic, and the level-by-level robot AI — rather than guessed at. One likely original bug was found and fixed rather than reproduced: a scoring-table indexing error that would have crashed the applet before it could ever show its own "You Won the Game!" ending. See the preservation record for details.