The Matrix Online Was An MMORPG Too Brilliant To Stay Online

“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.

And what a wild sequel it is. In The Matrix Online, you play as a “Redpill” a person who’s woken up to the truth that the world is a simulation and joined the rebellion against the machines. You’re actually given the choice just after character creation to take a red pill and break free of the simulation or a blue pill and return to your old life, as depicted in the first film. In the game’s first brilliant metatextual twist, choosing the blue pill simply exits the game.

After taking the red pill, players are free to side with the human city of Zion, the antagonistic machines, or the Merovingian, also known as “the horny French man from the Matrix sequels.” While Zion soldiers seek to defeat the machines, the other two factions represent a shaky truce between the two parties, mostly aimed at protecting the Bluepills still plugged into the Matrix and the rogue programs hiding there. The Matrix Online is a heavily story-focused MMORPG, and running missions for these three factions is the main point of the goal. Progress far enough, and you would reach critical story missions, which were added at a regular cadence.

Live Twists & Larger-Than-Life Canon

This focus on story found a much more creative outlet in The Matrix Online’s live events. The game is full of cut-scenes and scripted sequences to tell most of its story, but live events were different. For these events, employees of developer Monolith Productions actually took direct control of various NPCs to act out scenes, briefly turning the game into something resembling live theater performed for the players.

Unlike story missions and cut-scenes, live events weren’t part of the regular story progression of the game. They weren’t built into questlines, meaning that you didn’t need to see them to continue the game, and once an event was over, it wouldn’t be there for future players to experience. That means that you could have missed much of the game’s story, and any individual player could have a vastly different understanding of the game based on what they’d seen. Because of that, The Matrix Online’s community became extremely important to players, with forums and websites chronicling what happened in live events for players who didn’t happen to be logged in at the time.

The fact that everything in The Matrix Online is canon makes its strange storytelling swings even wilder, especially when it comes to the most infamous moment in the game — the death of Morpheus. As one of the key characters in the film trilogy, Morpheus also plays a major role in the game, which culminated in a storyline following his attempts to expose the Matrix’s code to Bluepills en masse. That all leads to a cut-scene where Morpheus is unceremoniously gunned down in an alleyway by a rogue recycling program, which remains the canonical reason for his absence in The Matrix Resurrections.

For all its interesting storytelling ideas, The Matrix Online couldn’t last. As innovative as its narrative was, its gameplay didn’t stack up, and it just couldn’t compete with World of Warcraft, which launched a few months earlier. By June 2009, player numbers had dwindled so much that publisher Sony halted development of new content, and pulled the plug on its servers in August.

In the end, The Matrix Online was just too weird for this world. The notion of a canonical MMORPG sequel to a film series is hard to sell even to devoted fans, and however innovative it was, the experience of actually playing the game left a lot to be desired. Maybe in some ways it’s better that The Matrix Online didn’t survive long enough for the best bits of it to be sanded off or dumbed down, which would have been all but inevitable at some point. Its legacy now lives on in the few who had the chance to take the red pill at the time as a reminder that games have so much more to offer if only you’re willing to throw common sense out the window in the pursuit of something truly unique.