It's been 40 years since the classic sci-fi adventure film Tron hit movie screens around the world. Produced by Donald Kushner and released by Walt Disney Productions, its highly original futuresque concept made history by revolutionizing the use of computer animation in film while introducing audiences to one of the earliest interpretations of a digital metaverse.

Reflecting on the movie's success, Donald Kushner sat down with Cointelegraph reporter Sean Moore to discuss the success of the film, his new nonfungible token project Cryptosaurs and his thoughts on the future of the metaverse.

Cointelegraph: How do current metaverse implementations compare to what you may have envisioned during the creation of the original Tron film?

Donald Kushner: This is exactly what we envisioned — that the personal computer would overtake that of the mainframe computer. Games and intellectual property would become engines of wealth in a global creator community, and we'd see a battle between centralized and decentralized control of intellectual property, between an ownership economy and a creator economy.

But Kushner has also kept himself up-to-date on navigating the next wave of the digital revolution. "My colleague Mike Bonifer and I invested in crypto in 2018 as a learning experiment. It was his idea. Mike is a quantum storyteller who began as the publicist on Tron and wrote the book The Art of Tron."

As told by Kushner, Bonifer believed that films and streaming content could be financed by crypto and "pre-collectible NFTs." So in 2021, Kushner and Bonifer, along with industry veteran John Scheele, came together to form Gumbotron — a Web3 studio dedicated to Metaverse storytelling.

The firm's newest NFT project Cryptosaurs, developed in