All I'm saying is that by putting a quarter (looking as we know them, with an eagle on it) in the new film, the real world as depicted in the film is given a specific place and time (insomuch as that it is "Modern Day America") whereas the first film (from my memory anyway) placed the film in a universe that was seemingly modern day American in the early eighties, but nothbing about it particularly pointed out and said that it was. It was just a reality in which they set the world, kind of the way Amsterdam was unsed in The Matrix. They filmed there, but the film didn't take place in Amsterdam or any other city with a name; it was a generic city. In that film, the city was construct of the machines. But in Tron, the generic city was more of an allegorical construct of the filmmakers who were creating a kind of mythic fable, telling a story that had to begin in what would be known as a real world, but it didn't matter what that real world was save that resembled the one that we lived in hte 80's. Even if it was set in silicon valley was unimportant to the film, because the film worked on another level.
Sorry, but I'm totally not with you. In Tron, it seemed like a normal, everyday major city, to me. I don't feel there was any effort to make it some sort of mythic fable "real world" allegory at all. It didn't feel that way, and in none of the extensive making of documentaries that I've seen have they ever said or even come close to implying that they were going for that.
There were regular, familiar games in Flynn's Arcade, for instance, as well as ads for Atari and Coleco.
And The Matrix was filmed in Australia.