An Unsung Innovator - The Matrix: Path of Neo

As everything on this patreon is probably already making clear, I love throwing on games from 10, 20, 30 years ago and just observing them for a couple of hours. To take dim memories and cast them into the light or to experience something I remembered reading about and never playing and just seeing how I feel about it with no prep. I have a strong love of older games both as games for their own sakes and as historical artifacts of how design has evolved over the years. Licensed games are particularly interesting for this purpose, they don't typically have long enough development cycles to allow them to do much other than adapt the license to whatever the dominant paradigm is on the platform. Sometimes this works and makes perfect sense and you get something like Goldeneye or Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity. A rare case where a fairly burgeoning or dominant paradigm melds perfectly with the needs of a license. Sometimes you get Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit, where a trash license is hastily crammed into the currently popular genre producing something that pleases no one. Sometimes though you get The Matrix: Path of Neo, where a fairly interesting use is made of a license that ends up presaging where a currently dominant genre is going.

I want to give this game it's due, in part, because it kind of came out at the worst possible time. Path of Neo is a follow-up to the ambitious but ultimately completely undone by time constraints Enter the Matrix, a game that released at exactly the right time. Enter the Matrix released alongisde the Matrix Reloaded. Excitement for the Wachowski's sequel to The Matrix was at a fever pitch, four years prior the film had completely rewritten how Hollywood action was going to be approached and told a cool cyberpunk story rife with hooks for interpretation some of the meaning of which has only more recently come to be a major part of the conversation. The hype was unreal and the pop-cultural footprint still is utterly inescapable. Enter the Matrix fit into this hype as an almost "third movie" experiment. A story that tied into the sequel films, had footage shot for it during the shooting schedule of those sequel films, and promised to deepen a viewer's understanding of the films. It's a trainwreck, not for lack of trying, but there just wasn't time to make it happen. Perhaps if it had been released later say around the DVD release of the Matrix Revolutions it could have been something special, but there was no hope for it. Buggy and unfinished, sheer hype for the Matrix sequels propelled it faster than a horrible reputation could hold it back and it sold something on the order of 5 million copies.

Then people saw the Matrix sequels, they were not happy. Interest in the IP dropped like a stone, taking years and years to recover. Enter the Matrix as a grand experiment went down in the books as a huge waste of time and effort, its most notable contribution to gaming being its capacity to keep Infogrames (then in the process of shedding that name and rebranding as Atari) one step ahead of an army of creditors. Naturally while interest in the Matrix products tanked, it was hard to tank to unprofitability hard enough to sound like a bad idea to throw some more resources at, and so Shiny, the same company responsible for Enter the Matrix, was able to set about making a... sequel? Really it shares a lot of mechanics but it's also a more by the books film adaptation for the most part. So mechanically it's a successor but storywise it's just another adaptation. In any case Path of Neo found its way out about two and a half years after Enter the Matrix, a full year after the last film in the series for 18 years. It got positive but not amazing reviews, a decent little action game that would give fans of the movies what they had probably wanted in the first place instead of the Wachowski's high minded multimedia project. Play as Neo, do the things he does in the movies.

That's a ton of history I know, I just sort of wanted to set the stage and I like this stuff so that's just how it'll be. Path of Neo is kind of a bellweather for where action games were going, not the hardcore character action games, but the sort of generalist action game. Especially its hand to hand combat system. I've discussed before on here the fascination of this era with how to do "crowd fights" where the player is fighting 4 or more opponents in a 3D space. I went off on a whole thing about how some people tried using the right analog stick and it was a total evolutionary dead end. Path of Neo actually kind of found a solution that would become popular with the Batman Arkham games. For those unfamiliar, those games went as simple as possible, point in direction, hit punch and batman moves forward with an animatino meant to both attack and close distance. In addition Batman there has a counter button for when an enemy is attacking to interrupt them and start his offense. Path of Neo does something similar, point in a direction and hit attack Neo attacks in that direction. Silly as it sounds when I put it that way this was not a common solution likely because  it requires a lot of work on context sensitive interaction. Neo can also counter enemy attacks by attacking at the same time, he'll simply meet their fists though unless he expends focus, a mechanic to allow the player to incorporate the overcrank effects of the films into the fight, this literally slowing down time and allowing Neo to attack faster than the opponent. In essence the skeleton of the simple but satisfying Batman Arkham combat is kinda already here, it's just got a bit more to it.

Aside from the cooling off of the Matrix license though that's probably why it didn't get much attention then, the mechanics were more complicated. On some level they're deeper but the simplicity of the Arkham fights kind of is a core strength for most of the player base, adding in extra layers of grabs and complicated counters and wall runs and an expendable recharging focus meter makes these a bit much to deal with. It also lacks the polish of the Arkham games. The mechanics are important but when they are this simple in actual practice it's heavily about execution. Path of Neo also lacks the very obvious tells that Arkham has, while there are things meant to communicate certain kinds of attacks and moves, the late PS2 era customary filters, DVD Matrix green color grading and lower resolution makes them harder to detect. Simplicity and clarity are what Arkham would add to this system.

That's not to say combat in Path of Neo isn't surprisingly fun for what it is, the PS2 is kind of where the 3D action game was properly figured out and I want to write a bit about that later, but suffice to say this game had all of the flourishes you could reasonably want out of a Matrix game, wall runs flips and rapid fire punch barrages and skillful dodging. Nearly every animation seems to trace from one fight scene or another from the films even as the levels get... liberal in their interpretations. Mechanically this is clearly adjacent to Enter the Matrix, but the extra development time, the one fewer version to release and the familiarity with the hardware shows that they really were on the right track with Enter the Matrix, they just didn't have the circumstances necessary to actually produce the game. It's a game where it's surprisingly smooth and satisfying to swap from melee combos to guns and back again and really captures the atmosphere of a Matrix fight scene even if you'll sometimes see characters bugging out.

The general interest in doing something neat with the license isn't entirely lost either, disloyalties are introduced to the source material in calculated ways. Neo can actually just escape his office building if the player is determined necessitating a much longer level that has you actually running down the whole of the building. Neo's training has additions made to it that stand as homages to things like Enter the Dragon and jidai geki films, fittingly if uncomfortably following on from the films sometimes orientalist treatment of Asian cultures by inserting Keanu Reeves into these roles. I can't speak more intelligently to these issues though. In terms of actual changes though few are more weird, memorable, interesting, and perhaps ultimately ill-advised than the ending. If you have heard anything about this game it's probably about this bit. Before the final confrontaion with Smith, two atari looking representations of the Wachowskis appear and discuss the messianic nature of the finale in the original film The Matrix Revolutions. The two then admit that they don't think this would work as a terribly satisfying finale for a video game and so came up with a new one exclusive to the game. It's... it's something. All the Smith clones come together to form a gigantic Smith who is also made out of cars and buildings. Neo then has a Dragon Ball Z fight with and kills Smith. It's... legitimately kind of equal parts baffling, terrible and incredible. It's so strange, it offers no real closure. It's hard to tell if Lily and Lana are having a laugh at the expense of some combination of the medium, the publisher, the fans, themselves? or just sincerely enjoy the idea of this silly little alternate ending, or both. Utterly surreal in any case. The story as communicated in game is already so disjointed as it attempts to appease WB's desire to advertise the movies without replacing them that the lack of closure means relatively little. If nothing else it feels like the nexus point between a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of the differences between how the movies and games were constructed and just doing something big and dumb for the sake of it, so honestly kind of a precursor to later work like Speed Racer. As dumb as this new conclusion is I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it, it's the Matrix at its most all style no substance.

Yet it all kind of came to nothing, response was decent but based on what I can gather I'd be shocked if it sold a third of what Enter the Matrix did. VGChartz numbers aren't worth much but the site seems to claim 500 thousand units on the PS2 version so nearly a full order of magnitude drop. It's a bit of a shame, it's a hard game to say "oh you should definitely go back and play it, it's a real hidden gem" but it represents an interesting moment in time and plays fairly well. It captures the feel of an interactive Matrix fight scene with shocking regularity and lets the player convince themselves that if they were in control things would've gone different in that grand tradition of video game power fantasy. If you just want to play a big dumb Matrix game, I'd say go for it.