DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

The last remaining MATRIX ONLINE fans can’t wait for the renaissance

- Luke Winkie

The faint remnants of The Matrix Online still radiate somewhere in the ether. I’m not saying it’s possible to jack in, but… well, do some Googling and you may or may not find a website dedicated to emulating this beloved, doomed MMO long after its funeral. You may or may not uncover a hyperlink that downloads a preserved version of the game client and a crack designed to jailbreak it from Sony’s rigor mortis grasp. You may or may not be asked to fabricate login credentials, and you may or may not watch your computer seize up as it attempts to render assets that have been left to atrophy since 2009. But if you follow the white rabbit far enough – if you take the red pill and slink past the mouldering firewalls like the brave pirates of the Nebuchadnezzar once did – you will eventually find those abandoned greyscale buildings, that queasy smog-stained sky, and a deep, permeating sense of loss. The Matrix Online shambles on, creaky but undeterred.

It will not take long for you to understand that The Matrix Online has grown shrivelled and desiccated in its afterlife. The game was released in 2005, and Sega pulled the plug just four years later. The Matrix Online’s emulation project – the only way to play the game in 2022 – was pieced together by a hacker named Rajko through reams of server code he scraped together as the game entered its hospice period. Rajko has toiled for 12 years as the MMO’s personal curator, and as I write the emulation resembles more of a zombie than a messiah. A huge swathe of content is missing, and will likely never be recovered. The project is not capable of providing combat, quests, character progression, or many of the gameplay elements that a nation of redpills once enjoyed.