I actually had a tough time choosing what game starting with T to write about because there are so many. However, after some pondering, the game Tron stood out as being retro (given the recent Tron movie remake), multi-genre'd (given movies and video games), and ultimately iconic as a representative of the 1980's and 1980's video games at large, given its enthusiastic reception upon release.
Tron was the quintessential computer nerd's video game. The plot of the video game loosely followed the plot of the Tron movie, during which a hacker was abducted into a computer world and forced to play video games for his survival. The levels of the game all have names tied to computers, most of which are programming languages (albeit mostly dated ones by current standards).
The controls for Tron always stood out as somewhat unique and high tech at the time the game was made, given that you had a joystick with a trigger fire button that you worked in concert with a rotating dial for aiming. The color schemes of the cabinet mimicked the neon blues, etc. of the movie. The game play also got very hard very quickly, as you'd expect an enemy computer to do. In all, the game seemed pretty futuristic for 1982 when it was released. The music and sound effects were great as well.
To this day, Tron still remains a favorite of mine and I make sure to play it when I run across one at expos like California Extreme. Given the control scheme described above, it's hard to emulate such a game; you really need to play the actual game in an actual cabinet to get the full experience.
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