This winter’s big budget film is Tron Legacy, and as with any major Hollywood release, in the build up to the film’s opening weekend, searches online have reached new peaks.

In the last week searches for ‘tron’ have more than doubled, whereas searches for ‘tron legacy’ increased by 60%.

What’s interesting about the search behaviour of UK Internet audiences around this release is the skew in searches for the Tron soundtrack and for Tron games online. To illustrate this I’ve compared the top 10 Tron search terms in the last 12 weeks with the top 10 Iron Man 2 search terms in the 12 weeks before the film was released in May earlier this year.

For Iron Man 2 the top search term after the name of the film was for the trailer, with ‘iron man games’ the fourth most popular search term, and ‘iron man 2 soundtrack’ the eighth most popular search term. By contrast, ‘tron game’ was the third most popular Tron search term, and ‘daft punk tron’ (referring to the Daft Punk soundtrack) was the fifth most popular search term. A lot of promotion was put into the AC DC soundtrack for Iron Man 2 but consumers were clearly more interested in the film than the music.
With Tron, there were two search variations for the soundtrack within the top 10. Unusually, Daft Punk didn’t feature in the downstream websites to receive traffic from the search term ‘daft punk tron’, with the majority of visits going to YouTube and then to music review sites.

The other compelling data to emerge from the top Tron search terms was the prominence of variations to do with Tron games. The official Tron video game Tron Evolution was the seventh most popular search term, but ahead of that was ‘bm tron’.
The top recipient of traffic from the term ‘bm tron’ was Woodlands Junior School in Kent with 32% of the clicks for that search term. There you can find a simple but infuriatingly addictive flash game which takes the old-school snake game and revitalises it with light cycles.

Looking at the downstream traffic from ‘tron game’ there are an incredible number of variations on the light cycle snake game. One wonders whether games designers are grasping the wrong end of the stick going for ultra-realistic graphics. All gamers really want, it seems, is to avoid crashing into a single green line.
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