From the big screen to the small screen

The film industry has always been driven, in large part, by the immense amount of revenue generated by merchandising in the wake of a blockbuster release. From t-shirts and movie posters to the latest Happy Meal toys, there is no realm of our modern consumer culture that has escaped unmolested by the Hollywood machine. Perhaps no commercial sector has exploited the merchandising of major movie studios more successfully than the world of video gaming. Whether it's the newest Disney cartoon characters or a grizzled action hero, it seems that every new release coincides with an identical appearance on game store shelves. While no one could dispute the mutual benefits of the likely pairing of video games and movies, this summer two brothers may have forever changed the way this partnership is viewed.

With the release of the first film in the Matrix trilogy in 1999, Andy and Larry Wachowski put their names on the map as two of Hollywood's most innovative film makers. Their use of technology in creating the sci-fi world of The Matrix garnered them countless awards and praise. Nearly four years worth of speculation and talk ended earlier this year with the opening of The Matrix: Reloaded, a film which by the beginning of July had grossed over two hundred-seventy million dollars.

Accompanying the movie's release was the release of the first Matrix video game: Enter the Matrix. The game, also directed by the Wachowski brothers, may at first glance seem like just another piece in the Matrix merchandising monster, but even a perfunctory glance reveals it to be so much more.

In their desire to please not only average gamers but also the growing hoards of hardcore Matrix fans, the Wachowskis spared no expense in creating Enter the Matrix. Indeed the game stars two of the film's supporting cast members, Ghost and Niobe (actors Anthony Wong and Jada Pinkett Smith), and includes several short movie clips shot solely for the game. The key element though, that takes Enter the Matrix above and beyond the realm of prosaic video game spin-offs, is the manner in which the game and film interact in a symbiosis. Other movie-to-video game titles are happy to simply retell the story, allowing the gamer to play as the hero or heroine. The Wachowskis, however, have created a game in which you are able to actively participate in the plot of the film, but from the perspective of the aforementioned side-characters. Enter the Matrix doesn't retell The Matrix: Reloaded; instead it recreates the world of the film and allows game players to interact with the characters, helping them in two unique stories, depending on which character you chose to play.

What the Wachowskis have done with this revolutionary approach to merchandising is to change the way that we can think about the line between film and video games. In the case of Enter the Matrix, there are bits of the story that can only be found in the game, snippets of information that no fan of the series could live without. This move raises the station of the video game spin-off from a mere aside to a text in and of itself worthy of analysis and interpretation. Only time will tell if the Wachowskis' idea will set a new standard or simply exist--alone--as a marker of where we could have gone.