Reports have been swirling that The Wachowski sisters, creators of The Matrix series of films, once approached Konami to have decorated Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima make a Matrix game.
The original report, on Time Extension, said the Wachowkis approached Konami after the release of the debut Matrix film in 1999, but were told no by an unspecified executive.
That, however, is news to Hideo Kojima, who clarified on X that he had no idea such a conversation ever took place, if indeed it did. He was busy making Metal Gear Solid 2 at the time, he wrote, but had he known the Wachowskis wanted him to make a Matrix game, perhaps something could have been done.
“I was surprised to see on social media that the Wachowski sisters had ‘offered me a Matrix game project!’ back in 1999,” Kojima wrote. “In all these 26 years, no one ever told me such a conversation had taken place.”
There were plenty of opportunities for such a conversation to take place, it sounds like. “At the time, we were mutual fans and exchanged emails,” Kojima wrote. He met the Wachowskis three separate times when they came to Japan for The Matrix promotional tour, and on one of those occasions the three of them talked for an hour. Nothing was said about a game.
Kojima had conversations with the film’s producer, Joel Silver, too, at The Matrix premiere and party, and again, “there was no mention of an offer,” Kojima wrote. Did such a desire for Kojima to make a Matrix game exist?
Even if it had, it’s uncertain whether Kojima would have had the personal bandwidth to take it on. As he explained: “At that time, I was already extremely busy with MGS2 and probably couldn’t have accepted the offer right away. But if someone had told me,” he added, “maybe there could’ve been a way to make it work.
The Matrix game we got instead was Enter The Matrix in 2003, by Atari and Shiny Entertainment, which turned out to be pants. “The blue pill never looked so tasty,” wrote Tom Bramwell in our 4/10 Enter The Matrix review. The Matrix: Path of Neo followed in 2005, again by Shiny, and was better – Tom this time awarding the game 7/10 in our review. Would Kojima and Konami’s theoretical involvement have steered the series somewhere dramatically different?
There was also the ropy but ambitious The Matrix Online, an MMO, which was terminated four years after opening, but was fascinatingly bestowed with Wachowski-sanctioned responsibility of continuing The Matrix story on, after the film’s conclusion. Most notably, this led to Morpheus’ canonical death. Yes, The Matrix Online killed Morpheus! And I talked to the person responsible for it not so long ago.