THE MATRIX offline

At 12:01 AM on Saturday, The Matrix Online MMORPG officially shut down forever. Based on the blockbuster Matrix movie franchise, the game went online in 2005 and followed the events after the final film in the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions. The game's creators had a little fun in the days before the end, as remaining players found the "reality" of the Matrix becoming increasingly unstable, with a decompiling sky, flocks of avenging angels and other signs of the digital apocalypse.

The Matrix is 10 years old this year (I know, I can hardly believe it either,) and the termination of the Matrix online game is a sign of how far the franchise has fallen in recent years. When the Matrix movies were coming out, the Wachowski brothers produced a flood of spin-off material, video games and comic books and anime DVDs and more besides. Their last major Matrix product was the online game; they devised its overall plot, and the events of The Matrix Online were supposed to be "canon." (In other words, everything that happened in the game really "happened" in the Matrix franchise.)

The game offered fans the chance to live out their fantasies inside the Matrix... But they also had to watch their favorite Matrix characters die. Not far into the life of The Matrix Online, Morpheus was killed by an assassin. Then Trinity was resurrected as a kind of digital ghost, and she suffered horribly in that state before she was finally put to rest. The Oracle was also killed, although her death was apparently faked. Neo's fate was unknown, although his essence apparently survived in some form and was broken up into fragments, and those fragments were used to create a squad of rather sinister neo-Neos. There were a lot of complicated plots afoot, and the game ended with many things left unresolved. Did Morpheus fake his own death? What was the final fate of Neo?

I quite like the Matrix series (yes, even the sequels,) but I can understand why fans turned against it. The original movie was tightly plotted; it introduced us to a complicated but consistent world and told a story with a satisfying resolution. The sequels were sprawling and weird and messy; I enjoyed their craziness, but if you were hoping for the sharp storytelling of the original Matrix, you were going to sorely disappointed. In the original Matrix, the Wachowskis invited us to follow them down the rabbit hole. In the sequels, we discovered that the rabbit hole went a lot deeper than we thought, and found ourselves in a seemingly endless narrative freefall.

Now, with the closure of The Matrix Online, it seems the entire Matrix saga has finally hit bottom.


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