coupleofdays:

astercontrol:

Who is your User, Program?

Screenshot: MCP interrogating Clu1. Make it easy on yourself. Who's your User?ALT


Well… there’s no way to make this easy, really.


Several different perspectives on that complex question, “Who is your User?"… as directed toward the MCP himself.

Tron Wiki screenshot: The Master Control Program (or MCP is the main antagonist in TRON. The MCP was a rogue computer program, created by Walter Gibbs and vastly improved by Ed Dillinger, that ruled over the world inside ENCOM's mainframe computer system. During the rule of the MCP, many programs were enslaved and pitted against the program's henchmen, led by Commander Sark. Master Control Program Biographical information User Walter Gibbs (formerly) 00 - DillingerALT


On the Tron Wiki, both Gibbs and Dillinger are listed.

Looking for evidence of these claims in onscreen canon of the ‘82 movie, there’s clear support for Dillinger:


screenshot: Dillinger at his desk, speaking to MCP, saying WAIT A MINUTE, I WROTE YOU!ALT


I may be missing something, but I don’t see any explicit claim of Walter Gibbs as the MCP’s User…

…although he IS explicitly stated to be the founder of ENCOM, so it seems likely he would have been involved in writing the MCP when it was a chess program.

(His own program, Dumont, at least confirms he was there at the time.)

Screenshot. Dumont speaking to Sark: Old enough to remember the MCP when it was a chess program.ALT

(Interestingly, right after Dumont says he’s "old enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program,” his next words are “He started small, and he’ll end small.” Someday I’ll have to analyze in more depth these alternating he/it pronouns for MCP. Perhaps “it” was the pronoun used back in the Chess Days?)

The prologue of the Tron: Betrayal comic offers another perspective on MCP’s creation, but this is narrated by a version of Dumont who…. seems to have vastly distorted memories of what actually happened:

panels from the prologue of Tron: Betrayal, narrated by Dumont. FLYNN WAS UNLIKE THE OTHER USERS. HE WAS AND IS A CREATOR. HE MADE ORDER FROM THE CHAOS OF ONES AND ZEROES. HIS FINEST CREATION, THE MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM, REBELLED AND TRIED TO DESTROY HIM. THE MCP BROUGHT FLYNN TO THE GRID.ALT

“FLYNN WAS UNLIKE THE OTHER USERS. HE WAS, AND IS, A CREATOR. HE MADE ORDER FROM THE CHAOS OF ONES AND ZEROES.”

…um. I think you transposed the words “chaos” and “order” there, program.

“HIS FINEST CREATION, THE MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM, REBELLED AND TRIED TO DESTROY HIM. THE MCP BROUGHT FLYNN TO THE GRID.”

…setting aside the confusion of what exactly “The Grid” refers to here… even IF Kevin Flynn created the MCP, I cannot imagine anyone calling it his “finest” creation.

(Even by Flynn’s own evaluation, at the time of the '82 movie, his infiltrator program Clu1 was “the best program ever written.” Sorry, MCP, that sweet little User’s boy is better'n you.)

Screenshot. MCP interrogating Clu1: SUIT YOURSELF. Clu has a weirdly anticipatory smile at this moment, considering he's about to be tortured to death.ALT

But anyway.

The Tron Wiki acknowledges that Dumont’s narration here is incorrect:

screenshot from Tron Wiki: In the prologue for TRON: Betrayal, Dumont says that MCP was Kevin Flynn's finest creation. This is false, because MCP was created as a chess program by Dumont's user, Walter Gibbs, and was later upgraded and modified by Ed Dillinger, although Flynn did have chess matches with the program in its early stages. ALT


But we do, at least, know that Flynn interacted in some capacity with the MCP when it was a chess program:

Screenshot. Flynn speaking to MCP: Remember the time we used to spend playing chess together?ALT


Could he have worked on beta-testing and/or debugging the chess functions?

If not the original programmer, he may at least have been involved in development of the MCP, in some capacity.


But now let’s look at the MCP’s own viewpoint on its origin.

When Dillinger says “I wrote you!” this is how MCP responds:

screenshot: MCP replies, I've gotten 2,415 times smarter since then. ALT

He doesn’t contradict Dillinger’s claim to have written him, but he dismisses it as unimportant, in light of how far he’s come since Dillinger did any of that writing.

Then, when Sark makes a similar admonishment:

Screenshot: Sark says, A User even wrote you!ALT
Screenshot: MCP replies: No one User wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.ALT


This time, the MCP does contradict him, claiming he doesn’t have one singular User. Rather, he considers himself a collaborative project so vast that any individual contributor is unimportant.

So, even if Dillinger and Gibbs– and maybe Flynn– were all involved in developing him… from his own hubris-soaked perspective, none of it even matters.

MCP briefly taking humanoid form before he was destroyedALT

Is this the face of his original User?
Who cares.
He started small and he ended small.

The old man we see just before the MCP finally disappears is actually played by Barnard Hughes, which suggests to me that the MCP was indeed originally created by Gibbs. It would definitely be in character if Dillinger then stole and “improved” the program, claiming that it was his own creation. Dillinger’s additions might explain that while the “face” of the MCP is played by Hughes, the voice is done by David Warner. So even in the real life, the MCP is a collaborative effort!

This would also suggest that Dumont and the MCP might be something akin to “brothers”, which might give some interesting layers to Dumont’s comments about his sibling.

I have toyed with the idea of writing a prequel fanfic about “The Rise of the MCP”, about an initially humanoid and friendly “Master Chess Program” that is slowly corrputed into a kind of digital vampire, sucking up functions from other Programs. There would probably be some scary body horror scenes where he begins to mutate into the towering red cone we all know and love. The big thing that’s holding me back from writing it is that I know very little about chess, so I feel like I would have to do some major research to make sure that the MCP’s dialogue (not to mention his thinking process) is sufficently chess-infused.