The Matrix Game Could Have Been Perfect For Kojima, But He Says He Never Heard About It

The Matrix has had a weird history with games, and as it turns out, even the games that didn’t get made have a strange history behind them. It recently came to light that the Wachowski sisters, directors of The Matrix, once approached Konami to pitch a game based on the movie to Hideo Kojima, but were quickly shot down. As surprising as that might have been for fans of The Matrix, perhaps no one was as surprised as Kojima himself, who says that the offer was never even brought up to him.

Back in 1999, just months after the release of The Matrix, NextGen magazine reported that Kojima and the Wachowski sisters had been meeting about making a game based on the movie, but that nothing ever came of it. Following up on that report, Time Extension recently spoke to Christopher Bergstresser, Konami’s former vice president of licensing, about what exactly happened when the directors approached Konami executives Kazumi Kitaue and Aki Saito.

"The two of them came in with their visual effects guy, and effectively they said to Kojima, ‘We really want you to do the Matrix game. Can you do that?’” Bergstresser told Time Extension. “Aki translated this into Japanese for Mr. Kitaue, and Kitaue just looked at them and told them plainly, ‘No’. We did still get to enjoy The Matrix Japanese premiere and afterparty, though."

However, an anonymous Konami staffer also told Time Extension that Kojima remained interested in the project even after that first meeting.

The day after Time Extension’s report, things got even more complicated. Posting to social media, Kojima himself said that he wasn’t aware of any conversations between the Wachowski sisters and Konami, despite meeting them when they were in Japan to promote the movie.

“In all these 26 years, no one ever told me such a conversation had taken place,” Kojima said. “At the time, we were mutual fans and exchanged emails. The Matrix hadn’t been released in Japan yet, but I had already seen it in theaters in the U.S. and at a preview screening.”

By the time The Matrix was released, Metal Gear Solid had launched the previous year with Kojima at the helm, after games like Metal Gear and Policenauts had already established him as one of the era’s most interesting directors of sci-fi games. It seems only natural that the director of the conspiracy-laden Metal Gear Solid could be a good fit for a game based on The Matrix, which Kojima says he was a fan of. But just because there was mutual interest doesn’t mean the project would have actually happened had the Wachowskis’ offer gotten through to Kojima.

“At that time, I was already extremely busy with Metal Gear Solid 2 and probably couldn’t have accepted the offer right away,” Kojima said. “But if someone had told me, maybe there could’ve been a way to make it work.”

Kojima and other members of Konami famously didn’t see eye-to-eye during the directors’ time at the studio, leading to his departure in 2015. The dense, political stories full of philosophical meandering he made while at Konami certainly could have made him a good fit to direct a Matrix video game (still, the ones we actually got were still pretty fascinating in their own right.) From the start, The Matrix was envisioned as a transmedia series, with stories told across not just the feature films, but also a collection of animated shorts called The Animatrix, as well as video games.

Enter the Matrix and Path of Neo, released in 2003 and 2005 respectively, tied directly into the film trilogy’s story, going as far as to reuse footage from other parts of the series. But neither is quite as interesting as The Matrix Online, a game that blended live performances with pre-scripted events and canonically eliminated one of the series protagonists in a cutscene. It might be too late for a collaboration between Kojima and the Wachowski sisters, who have all moved on to other things by now, but at least The Matrix games we do have are wild enough to live up to the movie that inspired them.