“No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” So the character Morpheus says in Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s 1999 film The Matrix, and for a few years in the mid-2000s, fans got to do just that. A massively multiplayer RPG based on The Matrix was as strange and revolutionary as you might imagine, and despite its short life, the 2005 game remains one of the most fascinating MMORPGs ever made.
The Matrix Online launched on March 22, 2005, and while it would shut down just over four years later, it’s an integral part of the universe of the Matrix mythos. More than just a film series, The Matrix was conceived as a multimedia project spanning live-action and animated films, comic books, and video games. Plenty of films have had video game tie-ins before and after The Matrix, but The Matrix Online goes further, establishing itself as a canonical sequel to the films.
