The Matrix

Overview

The franchise largely focuses around a hacker named Neo who is contacted by a mysterious woman named Trinity who directs him to a man named Morpheus. Morpheus explains that reality as Neo knows it is a lie and offers him a blue pill and a red pill; the red pill will free him from his world and show him the disturbing reality of the world, while the blue pill will erase any memory of a different reality and keep him blissfully unaware of reality. Neo takes the red pill and wakes up aboard a futuristic ship belonging to Morpheus some time around the year three-thousand.

Morpheus explains to Neo that near the beginning of the twenty-first century the human race came under threat from a group of sentient machines, in response humanity burned the Earth's atmosphere, cutting off the machines' solar power source. In response the machines had to find a new power source and so they starting imprisoning humanity in stasis and using their body heat, combined with a form of fusion to create energy. While trapped inside their pods the humans' brains are connected to computers where a virtual world exists known as the matrix.

The movies chronicle Morpheus and his crew's efforts to free humanity from the matrix, Neo's fulfilment of his supposed destiny, the love between Neo and Trinity and the struggle between Neo and Agent Smith, a program bent on amassing power and escaping the matrix.

Video Games

Enter the Matrix, the first Matrix game was released on the same day as The Matrix Reloaded and was an action-adventure game that retold the Matrix trilogy from the point of view of various side characters. In early 2005 The Matrix Online was released, an MMORPG in which players played as a character inside the matrix working for one of three factions, however the game was shut down on July 31st 2009 due to lack of players. The most recent Matrix game was The Matrix: Path of Neo, a second matrix action-adventure title retelling the Matrix trilogy from Neo's point of view.

In World of Warcraft the item 'Crude Eating Utensils' contains the text "There is no spoon" in its description, a reference to a famous line from The Matrix. The iconic code graphics from The Matrix can also be found in content from the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In Warcraft III the cheat code "There is no spoon" gives characters unlimited mana. In Fallout 3 the Tranquility Lane mission features the concept of a virtual world in which people are imprisoned, much like the matrix.