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VANGUARD TALKS | Lam Pok Yin: Looking into our ‘forever-postponed futures’, through the permanent shutdown of the Matrix Online massively multiplayer role-playing game

 

In 2004, Warner Bros. and Sega launched ‘The Matrix Online’ as the official continuation of the storyline from the Matrix film trilogy. Ironically, the cyberpunk franchise which about the struggle and liberation from the an artificially programmed reality, had invited the players to plunge themselves into another one in order to complete the protagonists’ ultimate destiny. The game eventually died a premature death, as their servers were permanently shutdown just four years after its launch, and the world set in 2199 came to an end. It has been more than a decade since then, and a nostalgia for the game has quietly emerged on the internet: not only are there enthusiasts who reviving and transplanting the game to a new game engine, there are also calls for recreating a new version of the game with the better current technology…