The world warps, and time slows. Niobe leaps, arms pumping, trenchcoat flowing behind her. The sound of ravenous dogs, snarling and biting, comes up from below, joined by a slash of strings as the music peaks accordingly. Niobe’s impossible jump covers just enough distance to make it to solid ground again. Time and pumping beats flow back in an instant, and she’s back to running over rooftops. It’s the kind of sublime moment where the high level cinematic ambitions of Enter the Matrix look worth it. But it’s also only something I got to after discovering and memorising the gap to jump over through trial and error, because the level was too dark to see what I was doing. That’s Enter the Matrix in a nutshell.
Enter the Matrix is not a video game adaptation of a movie. It’s not even a game inspired by a movie telling a separate new story in its world. It’s a game developed alongside The Matrix Reloaded which tells a side-story that criss-crosses with that of the movie. It was written and directed by The Matrix series directors the Wachowskis themselves, who also picked out developer Shiny on the basis of their fondness for their game MDK from 1997.
The Matrix, with its story of hacking into a computer simulation world and fantastical action sequences, was already perfectly placed for a game adaptation, but I doubt that would have been enough for Enter the Matrix to top the charts for six weeks (two more than The Matrix Reloaded was top of box office listings) without the extra selling point of its unusual elevation to a near-equal of the new movie.
It even has an hour of new filmed material. I don’t know if Jada Pinkett-Smith (Niobe) and Anthony Wong (Ghost) would ultimately have preferred to have more of their characters’ heroic stories shown in the movie, but their compensation was star roles in Enter the Matrix (and a part in increasing the range of representation in mainstream video games). The tie-up between the two gives a unique weight to the game story, and while the story is not exactly revelatory, it’s all a long way from the letterbox video in the game version of Terminator 2.
The Matrix’s slow-motion action sequences were such a good fit for games, of course, that they’d already been adapted well before Enter the Matrix. Its main focus mechanic, pressing L1 and using up a meter to slow the world down and give you an advantage in fights as well as those elongated jumps, is bullet time by another name. One writer for Edge, Steven Poole, called Enter the Matrix “Max Payne with celebrity scriptwriters”. That both underplays the extent to which any kind of skill and/or humility in Max Payne’s writing might have made it a less awful experience, and overplays the extent to which Enter the Matrix is mechanically functional as a video game.
The input of the Wachowskis gave Enter the Matrix a unique impetus, but they had rather a lot to do alongside it. Looking at 2003 release dates, they took on writing and directing two new movies, doing the same for an interlinked game, and producing and writing half of an animated anthology. Video game development is tricky enough at the best of times without a hard release date deadline and directors with that level of distraction.
Enter the Matrix often feels like a game made with a lot of input from outside of the usual. In the action levels that make up most of it, there is one constant arrow on screen telling you where to go, and complexity is really pared down to make it about running, running some more and the slow-motion fighting and shooting action. It’s as much State of Emergency as state of the art, and the action can’t be choreographed to anything like the level of the films, but through the first level there is a very nice sense of flow, at least in between each of the frequent loading screens.
Reach the second level, though, and the gameplay completely changes to driving in the dark. You have to reach a bridge, evading police cars with one character driving and the other firing guns at the cars, which is difficult enough already from the in-car view. Then the bridge is blocked, with six red lights across the top, and it’s not at all apparent what to do. One light turns green, but it doesn’t mean that lane has opened. A message briefly flashes up on screen saying ‘SURVIVE FOR 2 MINUTES’, which doesn’t clear things up completely, but the idea is to drive away for two minutes, come back when the lights have all turned green, and drive across.
The message is black on a nearly transparent green-tinged background. The roads, in the dark, are mostly black. The inside of the car is black. From the outside view, the car looks black. It took several attempts before I even noticed that there was a message, and without consulting walkthroughs I doubt I would have got past that point. The lighting issues carried over to the action levels afterwards. A colour scheme of dark green and black is a key part of The Matrix’s visual identity and a reference back to computers, but it doesn’t mean that trying to make a whole game using only those colours is a good idea. Perhaps with a little more time, Shiny might have added enough tweaks and assistance to ameliorate that issue, but they didn’t get that time.
The quality of film material included in Enter the Matrix may have been a world away from Terminator 2, but the game was less so. Release date issues, playability sacrificed for hewing to the movie aesthetic, and the lack of confidence to stick with one genre were all familiar problems. Enter the Matrix offered new approaches to movie tie-in games, but the ultimate result remained all too close to the old-school of Ocean cash-ins.
[Enter the Matrix went on to spend six successive weeks at the top of the UK chart. Click through to the second page to see what was #1 in other charts at the time]