In Bally Midway’s 1982 arcade game Tron, the motorcycle minigame is called Light Cycles.
In Light Cycles, the player steers a brightly colored motorcycle through an arena while leaving a solid trail behind. The objective is to make an opponent crash into a wall, the arena boundary, or one of the trails. The simple rules produce a strategic contest involving timing, enclosure, and forcing the opponent into a shrinking safe area.
The minigame is based on the light-cycle sequences in Disney’s 1982 film Tron, where vehicles race inside a computer-generated arena. The arcade game divides its action into four film-inspired scenes: tanks, grid bugs, light cycles, and the MCP cone.
Light Cycles is sometimes confused with the entire Tron arcade game. It is only one of the game’s separate minigames, but it became the best-known part because its trail-based competition is immediately understandable and influenced later games such as the Snake-style genre.