July 31, 2009 will forever be remembered as the day the machines won.

Or, more likely, a handful of people will lament it as the day The Matrix Online went dark, bringing an end the the nearly five-year-old online world spawned from the alternately beloved and decried-as-stoner-pabulum film series.

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This is where I’d normally memorialize the MMO with a list of my own fond memories from the world, but there really aren’t any. The game itself wasn’t all that bad, but the inept handling of the property by original owner Warner Bros. and latter-day owner Sony Online Entertainment are a textbook example of how not to run an online world.

It’s baffling to think that The Matrix, a property whose basic tenets of a world in which humans are unknowingly jacked into a virtual reality directly mirror the entire concept of an MMO, didn’t succeed. Everything needed for an awesome online world is there in the films, down to the videogame-esque combat and ability to acquire new skills through perfunctory achievements. The Wachowski brother and sister already went to the trouble of inventing everything the game needed, all MxO’s developers had to do was connect the dots and charge a monthly fee.

Instead, what gamers got was a melange of The Matrix and generalized MMO ideals designed by corporate suits whose names may as well have been Charles Bland and Richard Milquetoast. MMO fans opted to explore the more innovative, cleverly designed World of Warcraft, and now The Matrix Online is defunct, never again to host an epic gunfight or Jesus/Aslan/Groucho Marx metaphor.

11 replies on “Neo Is Dead”

  1. PROOFREAD.

    (no, seriously… this is embarrassing. at least proofread your first sentence so people skimming the blog won’t think you’re a moron.)

  2. Also, the “Wachowski brother and sister” line is a pretty fucking douche-y. Perhaps you should respect people as they are, not pull out the implied “hurr hurr hurr, transvestites!” crap.

  3. well back in 2014 we used to call the Wachowski’s all kinds of nomes, but I’d like to thank we evolved as a society since than…

  4. For a second I thought maybe the game shut down 10 years ago, but I looked it up elsewhere. He really just wrote 1999 instead of 2009.

  5. July 31, 1999…. and this is news NOW? Der, write more clearly. If you’re going to write “news” don’t assume readers are in the know. I assume the date is a reference to something I know nothing about, right?

  6. Ok, I fully cop to dropping the ball with the “1999” thing, but you’re really going to get miffed that I took a dig at the “Larry’s now Lana rumor?” Aside from The Matrix it’s the most notably thing he’s been involved with.

  7. I’ll readily admit that the whole “huh, huh, huh… trannies” thing will prolly go over well with your average matrix fanboy, but what you wrote looks a lot more like more of the same than “a dig at” a debunked rumor.

  8. Come on, folks. It’s a blog. For a free paper. About a video game. If you want the fucking New York Times, go to the fucking New York Times.

  9. Our trolls are some sort of hybrid of angst ridden 16 year olds, sex starved 21 year olds, and giant fucking douchebags.

    I was wondering when this day would come. I played the game for a while. I loved it. The community was as tight if not tighter than the Everquest 1 community.

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