Upon its release in 1999, The Matrix movie became iconic almost overnight. Geeks and nerds the world over rejoiced, seeing a gang of characters whose strength and slick moves were not attributed not to muscle or to superpowers, but to uploading kung fu into their minds.It’s no surprise, then, that The Matrix was extremely influential for game developers. In the early 2000s, gamers couldn’t move (in slow motion) for bullet-time sequences. NPCs everywhere were making sly nods to red and blue pills, spoons, and guns. Lots of guns. Plenty of action scenes drew visual inspiration from the film, and the franchise's themes recurred in plenty of games as well. The Matrix’s influence on gaming still lives on today, as seen in the titles below.
10 Max Payne
The Matrix’s iconic “bullet time” effect has been imitated in a huge number of video games, but none adopted the idea as wholesale as Rockstar and Remedy’s third-person shooter, Max Payne. It’s pretty much the central mechanic to the whole game.
Diving sideways in slow motion while dual-wielding SMGs may have been invented by The Matrix, but it was Max Payne that perfected the art. This is one of the reasons why Remedy is the first choice studio for many Matrix fans to make a game tie-in to The Matrix 4.
9 StarCraft 2: Wings Of Liberty
It’s hard to say for sure, but “Dodge this” is probably the most referenced Matrix line in the video game world. StarCraft 2: Wings Of Liberty is one of three games that use it as the name of an Achievement or Trophy (the other two being Red Dead Redemption and Ratchet: Deadlocked).
In order to get “Dodge This” in StarCraft 2, the player has to complete the Amon’s Fall mission without losing any army units to terrain destruction abilities. This is one of several Matrix references in Blizzard games, so they must be big fans.
8 Mass Effect 3
Autistic people often have a remarkable capacity to accurately recall and quote lines from movies. Some even find it very difficult to communicate without quoting and referencing films. This might go some way to explaining why David Archer, an autistic character in the Mass Effect series, quotes The Matrix in conversation with Shepherd almost 200 years after it was made.
If the player has played Mass Effect 2: Overlord and freed Archer from the Overlord experiments, he can be encountered again at the Grissom Academy in Mass Effect 3. There, he’ll grant the Normandy crew access to the school’s security office, which he says contains “Guns. Lots of guns,” a reference to Neo’s request at the start of his and Trinity’s mission to rescue Morpheus.
7 Mortal Kombat 11
Developers producing games published by the same media empire that produced The Matrix, namely Warner Media, don’t have to make subtle nods to their favorite green-hued, sci-fi-kung-fu blockbuster. They can just go ahead and duplicate whole dialogue exchanges without fear of legal action.
That’s exactly what NetherRealm Studios did in Mortal Kombat 11 in one of the intro sequences that plays when Johnny Cage squares up against his daughter Cassie. She asks if he’s trying to say she can dodge bullets (just as Neo asks Morpheus) and he tells her that when she’s ready, she won’t have to (just as Morpheus replies).
6 Runescape
While some games make sly nods to iconic lines from The Matrix, others pay tribute in much bolder ways. One such game is old school MMORPGRunescape, which features one very familiar animation sequence.
During the Brimhaven Agility Course mini-game, the player will encounter various hazards and obstacles designed to test their agility, one of which is a low stone column that shoots darts. When the player dodges the darts, both the character animation and the camera pan are direct imitations of the scene in The Matrix where Neo dodges bullets in what can only be described as a “limbo dancing” style.
5 Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
At the end of the “Crew Expendable” mission, in which the player must escape a sinking cargo ship by jumping from the deck to a waiting helicopter, there is an explicit Matrix reference. But it can only be seen if the player fails to make the jump.
The whole sequence is pretty cinematic and scripted, so it’s actually quite difficult to mess this jump up. However, for any player that somehow manages to fail, the loading screen that precedes their second attempt will be adorned with the comforting (and ironic, given how easy the jump is) line, “Nobody makes the first jump.”
4 Red Dead Redemption
Many games make pop culture references in the names of their Trophies and Achievements, and The Matrix has more than its fair share of famous lines that work perfectly for this purpose.
In Red Dead Redemption, the player can earn an Achievement/Trophy named after the line Trinity says immediately before popping a bullet in the head of an agent: "Dodge this." The same line is referenced in various other games too, and is also used as a Trophy name in Ratchet: Deadlocked and an Achievement in StarCraft 2: Wings Of Liberty.
3 Cyberpunk 2077
The connections between Cyberpunk 2077 and The Matrix are actually very explicit. The Cyberpunk universe was created by Mike Pondsmith for his 1988 tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2020. Given what obsessive tabletop gamers the Wachowskis were in their teens, it’s highly likely they played it.
Pondsmith himself worked on both The Matrix Online with Monolith Productions, and with CD Projekt Red on Cyberpunk 2077. The Matrix references are numerous, but the most obvious are the casting of Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand, and the scene in which a dealer offers the player a choice between a blue pill and a red pill.
2 Fallout 4
The Fallout series has a lot of general themes in common with The Matrix. The two both feature a post-apocalyptic world, a “chosen one” protagonist uncertain of who he or she really is, and various kinds of “virtual worlds” (within the virtual world of the games themselves, of course).
Fallout 3 features Tranquility Lane, a simulation designed to take vault dwellers back to a time before the apocalypse. And in Fallout 4, there are memory pods, which are similarly Matrix-esque. Bethesda even makes a nod to The Matrix on a Fallout 4 loading screen, accompanying an image of a memory pod with Morpheus’ famous line, “Free your mind.”
1 World Of Warcraft
No one would think that an MMO with a classic fantasy setting would be able to draw influence from a slick, pseudo-philosophical, cyberpunk action movie. However, that would be an incorrect assumption.
There are actually several Matrix references dotted around Azeroth. For example, the guards in Ironforge sometimes say they wish they’d taken the blue potion and not the red potion. Various NPCs in Stormwind will occasionally say “There is no spoon,” which is also a cheat code in Warcraft III: Reign Of Chaos.