A Flawed Attempt To Reinvent Movie Games

A flawed attempt to reinvent movie games.

- Jeremy Peel

Twenty years ago, a new science fiction world was born, as relatable as it was outlandish. The Matrix was a rallying cry for anybody whose internet life had become more real to them than their daytime drudge; a freeing fiction that overlaid our own world like a sheet of graph paper and made sense of its unexplained repetitions and irregularities. As much as it was a nightmare or warning, it was also vicarious fantasy—it was pasty Keanu Reeves, asleep at his PC while Massive Attack plays in his headphones, clinging to the side of a building for dear life, eventually bending reality to his will. On some level, everybody watching wanted that call from Morpheus. To wake up, to know kung fu, to move as they do.

That’s what Enter The Matrix offered. Its title was a mission statement. Rather than mimic scenes from the movies, you could become a part of their story, interwoven with the green strands of its code.

It was born from a time when Hollywood was crowning a new wave of powerful directors, a younger generation to whom the artistry of videogames was self-evident. Peter Jackson recognized a fellow auteur in Michel Ancel and tasked the Beyond Good & Evil designer with adapting King Kong. Guillermo Del Toro was losing himself in Ico, which he declared a masterpiece. And the Wachowskis, suddenly at the head of a multimedia empire, used their position to work with as many of their favorite artists as they could. They commissioned Neil Gaiman to write a comic; in Tokyo, Madhouse and Studio 4°C produced anime. For the interactive counterpart, they went to the developer behind a goofy sci-fi shooter they’d been fond of in the ’90s—MDK.

HOLLYWOOD BOUND

Shiny Entertainment’s games had long been distinguished by their imagination—from the squishy, gross-out cast of Earthworm Jim