TRON: Legacy

Larry Elin spent most of 1981 holed up in his Elmsford, N.Y., office, staring at a boxy, 8-bit computer that crashed almost as often as it worked.

His fellow employees at MAGI Synthavision, a tiny computer graphics firm, regularly stayed overnight to work on the project. If anyone needed a nap, they curled up under their desks. If the computer went down, they all struggled to fix it.

And after 12 months of work, the team finally had something to show for it: a 22-minute sequence in the 1982 cult classic TRON.