With a new Matrix film on the way, people have clearly had a lot of fun pointing out the story developments from The Matrix Online that might influence the new film, like the fact that in the game Morpheus was killed by an assassin pretty early on. A lot of this has been accompanied with jokes about how the game was meant to be the canonical continuation of the film storylines. But a new interview with the final lone developer on the game, Ben Chamberlain, courtesy of Eurogamer might puncture that belief:
I don’t think we ever worried about whether our game was canon. I don’t think anyone who worked on it ever thought that anything we were doing would be regarded as canonical in the same way that the movies were. That would just have seemed pretty absurd. It was clearly a different thing with different authors, a different audience, purpose, mechanics – everything. No developer had any illusion anything we did would ever be known or taken to heart by the larger public; that’s just not the way game stories were regarded.
Chamberlain recounts the process of working on a project with the particular pedigree of MXO and how it involved getting an early peek at the storylines for the second and third films, the challenges of keeping the game’s story going, and the emotional impact of the game’s final shutdown. It’s a worthwhile interview if you’re curious about this game’s history, although if you’re looking for new details about the upcoming film, well, Chamberlain is just as in the dark as anyone else. But he doesn’t seem to think it will overlap with MXO’s stories.
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