Enter the Matrix is a 2003 action-adventure video game developed by Shiny Entertainment and published by Infogrames under the Atari brand name.
[4] Enter the Matrix gives players control of two of the supporting characters from Reloaded and Revolutions, Ghost (Anthony Wong) and Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith), members of the same group of rebels as Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo, the protagonists of the series.
A hacking system allows players to enter codes, which can unlock special skills, weapons and secrets, such as a 2-player versus mode.
[5] The story begins with Niobe, captain of the Logos, and Ghost, her first mate, retrieving a package left in the Matrix by the crew of the recently destroyed rebel ship Osiris.
After being pursued by Agents, Ghost and Niobe escape from the Matrix with the package, which turns out to be a message to the human city Zion, warning them that the machines are approaching with an army of at least 250,000 Sentinels.
After this mission is completed, the Oracle, a program that often gives the humans advice, requests that the player character come and speak to her.
The Merovingian acquired the deletion codes for the Oracle's external "shell", and in exchange, he gave Rama-Kandra's daughter, Sati, her freedom, despite her lack of purpose in the machine world.
[8] Due to financial difficulties, Interplay sold Shiny to Infogrames in April 2002 for $47 million, with the Matrix license transferring over.
[9] At E3 2002, the title for the game was officially announced as Enter the Matrix, and would be released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube and Microsoft Windows simultaneously.
[11] Overall, Enter the Matrix took two and a half years to produce on a budget of $20 million, not including marketing expenses or the cost of the extra hour of movie footage.
[14][15] A promotional CD release of the soundtrack accompanied the video game, with compositions by Erik Lundborg in the style of Don Davis, who composed the music for the films.
Within a week of release, Atari announced that the game had sold 1 million units for all four platforms in North America and Europe combined.
Steven Poole, in his column in Edge, described the PS2 version of Enter the Matrix as "Max Payne with celebrity scriptwriters", and said that the films' fluid fight choreography could not be matched by the game's control system, and that the game's centred view, while practical, was not as interesting as the "kinetic montage" of camera angles used in the movies' action scenes.
He also expressed other concerns: The most worrying new precedent that Enter the Matrix sets, though, with its massively hyped synergy and narrative overlap with Reloaded, is that it seems the film itself has been deliberately made to suffer, to donate some of its lifeblood so that its vampiric brood can feed on it.
In Reloaded, Niobe and her crew go to blow up the nuclear power plant, a feat of security bypassing which would presumably require something like a lobby scene squared.
It's as though James Cameron had cut footage out of Aliens so that it could be rendered in blocky 2D graphics in the 1987 Spectrum/C64 tie-in game released by Electric Dreams — which remains, actually, a superior film-to-game conversion.
They also praised the GameCube version, specifically: "A big 'thank you' to Atari and Shiny for making sure that Nintendo's little cube didn't get shafted.
Maxim gave it a score of eight out of ten and said it was "by no means a weak attempt to cash in on a franchise...Gamers not only get tons of extra movie action but also get to run, kick, and shoot in a fully realized Matrix universe.
"[44] The Cincinnati Enquirer gave it three-and-a-half stars out of five and said that the game "isn't a perfect slice of interactive entertainment, but it does provide at least a dozen hours of action-packed fun and serves as a clever vehicle to expand on the events in The Matrix Reloaded.
"[43] The Village Voice, however, gave it six out of ten and stated: "Nerds may activate two-player mode using the DOS-throwback 'hacking gameplay element.'